Justin Time Records
1995
Sweet Time
About This Album
Sweet Time, like the albums Open, to Love, Hands On, Tears, and Changing Hands, is an elliptical, mystifying masterpiece that displays Bley's uncanny knack for creating crystalline, gleaming musical structures from the most minimal of means. Take for instance a spontaneous balladic composition such as "Never Again," with its gently dissonant skeletal body that becomes a ghostly study in intervallic extension -- along a row of eight notes and a host of chords built from their rearrangement into a new architecture, equally spare but far from sparse. It's a piece that requires an emotional response to enter initially because so little is apparent to the ear. When, in the middle of the tune, he shifts into droning regal chords and staggering arpeggios that leap into the scalar heavens from the original chords and pitches, the effect is stunning, breathtaking. On the tune "Contrary," Bley constructs two-handed melodic counterpoint. In the top middle register he flows scales and arpeggios together that stagger one another, while in the lower middle register he undoes them by taking the root note of the root chord and reflecting the second, not the current, arpeggio in the right hand.
Track List (try tracks 1,2,4,7,8 and 9)

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