Visionary pianist Paul Bley was known for his innovative trio and solo recordings.Hans Kumpf/The Associated Press
Jazz pianist Paul Bley once confided to a concert promoter: "Young people keep asking me about the best way of making it in the business. I tell them: 'That's simple, just take the bus and go to New York!'" For the restless and innovative jazz man, who played with the likes of Charles Mingus and Ornette Coleman, it was just that simple.
He boarded a New York-bound bus in Montreal one day in 1950, embarking on an international musical career characterized by equal amounts of artistic vision and networking genius. Until his death this month at the age of 83, he led a life that was exceptional, starting with the unusual circumstances of his birth, in Montreal on Nov. 10, 1932. An only child, he was raised by Betty (née Marcovitch) and Joe Bley, and had a beloved French-Canadian nanny named Lucie. He would find out much later in life that Betty was not his biological mother. The boy had been the product of an affair between his father and Lucie.
An early bloomer, Paul started on violin at five before switching to piano at eight. He studied privately before attending the music conservatory in Montreal. In his early teens, he played variety shows, which introduced him to popular music. In 1949, the teenage upstart was thrust into the big shoes of Oscar Peterson, replacing him on the piano bench at the city's swanky Alberta Lounge. Mr. Peterson had been famously plucked out of town by the U.S. impresario Norman Granz and was soon playing Carnegie Hall. Mr. Bley, too, would soon head south and have a fateful encounter with the future of jazz.
Encouraged by his parents – his mother in particular – he made it to the "city so nice they had to name it twice" when he enrolled at the Juilliard School of Music in 1950. For the next three years, he commuted between Montreal and New York. Back home, he co-founded and presided over the Montreal Jazz Workshop, a musicians' co-operative that arranged gigs for out-of-town artists and paired them with local rhythm sections. It was Mr. Bley's first experience of organizing musicians. During this period, he formed invaluable connections with cutting-edge jazz artists, enabling him to snare several top-flight players, the prize catch being alto saxophonist Charlie Parker.
In Mr. Bley's memoir, Stopping Time (Véhicule Press, 1999), he tells the story of chaperoning the bebop master during his 1953 visit to Montreal, at which time Mr. Parker appeared on a TV show, then made a club appearance. Though the tape of the TV show has vanished, its soundtrack was miraculously preserved and released in 1993 with the recording of the live show.
Mr. Bley credits bassist Charles Mingus, however, as the catalyst for his permanent move stateside. As a student conductor at Juilliard, Mr. Bley was hired to direct an orchestra during a recording session of the bassist's music. A month later, Mr. Mingus returned the favour by accompanying him on his first album as a leader (Introducing Paul Bley), with no less than Art Blakey on drums.
Now ensconced in the U.S. scene, the twentysomething Canadian decided to move west, landing in Los Angeles. Accompanying him was his first wife, Carla Bley (née Borg), who would eventually establish herself as a noted jazz composer. In 1957, West Coast cool jazz was at its apogee. Rather than ride the surf, however, Paul Bley, was more interested in finding the next big wave. He would soon experience the musical epiphany of his career.
Mr. Bley found a steady gig at L.A.'s Hillcrest Club and, one night, his drummer, Bill Higgins, asked if two friends – trumpet player Don Cherry and saxophonist Ornette Coleman – could sit in. A risk-taker by nature, the pianist hired the two unknowns sight unseen, he recalled in a 1979 interview. Together these musicians, along with legendary bass player Charlie Haden, rejected the prevailing conventions of their genre and experimented with free jazz.
The shock was immediate and, in Mr. Bley's words, "far more dramatic" than what he was to encounter in the following decade. It was equally dramatic for their audiences, who were accustomed to music that was highly structured, with predetermined chord changes. They did not initially take to the new sound, which featured freely improvised melodic lines. Mr. Bley once recalled that "when you were driving down Washington Boulevard and you looked at the Hillcrest Club, you knew whether the band was on the stand or not. If the street was full of audience in front of the club, the band was playing." Everyone would head back into the club when the band took a break.
Nevertheless, this collaboration unlocked a door for Mr. Bley. He had been growing weary of playing tunes whose forms made you go round and round. Mr. Coleman's pieces, in sharp contrast, were jump-off points, allowing players to solo as long as they wanted, regardless of the form. This was revolutionary.
This liberation, as Mr. Bley described it, was the first step. The second was the unshackling of bassists and drummers from timekeeping duties. The free jazz wave of the 1960s brought about this change, where rhythm sections were now playing beside, around or against the beat. From then on, Mr. Bley identified himself with the vanguard of jazz.
Yet, his role in this "change of the century" (the title of an album by Mr. Coleman) went largely unrecognized. When the saxophonist made history in New York in the fall of 1959, Mr. Bley was left behind. In 1961, he would join forces with bassist Steve Swallow in a trio led by reedman Jimmy Giuffre. This short-lived unit had a quiet intensity that failed to attract wide notice. Its pioneering work was vindicated 20 years later, however, when a whole strand of minimalist improvisation blossomed in Europe.
In 1963, Mr. Bley released Footloose, a trio album with bass and drums. The following year, he was involved in the Jazz Composers' Guild, a collective of activist musicians. Mr. Bley would be one of four participants of that short-lived organization to recount those heady times in a Canadian feature documentary titled Imagine the Sound (1980).
In 1969, the keyboardist took another sharp turn by exploring electronic music. With his second wife, singer-keyboardist Annette Peacock, he began showcasing Robert Moog's new invention in his appropriately named Bley-Peacock Synthesizer Show. The marriage was short-lived, but he continued playing and recording Ms. Peacock's compositions.
Early in the 1970s, he took a brief plunge into the record business, creating his I.A.I. label (Improvising Artists Inc.), but gave up on it before the decade's end when relations with his distributors soured.
It was with ECM that Mr. Bley cut his first solo album, Open, to Love (1973). With this record he helped define the aesthetic of the fledgling label, whose spacious, reverberant and deliberate delivery of music was still in its infancy. Other artists took to this new approach and sound, Chick Corea and Keith Jarrett most notably, both of whom benefited greatly from their elder's influence.
Undeterred by the trends of the time, chiefly the brash, electric sound ushered in by Miles Davis, Mr. Bley found his preferred mode of expression in the quieter setting of solo piano, and returned to it constantly, including in his final session in 2008, fittingly produced by Montreal's Justin Time Records. The recording label's producer, Jim West, brought him back to Montreal from the mid-1980s onward, and gave him free rein in the studio. Mr. Bley was always great to work with, according to Mr. West, who appreciated his zany sense of humour and knack for keeping everyone on their toes.
Soft-spoken but never short of words, Paul Bley was a force to be reckoned with. He maintained an aura of mystery and loved being provocative, always with a glint in his eye and a Cheshire Cat smile. But, like the greats, he had demarcated his terrain clearly, steadfastly remaining faithful to his musical vision. His disdain for rehearsal was legendary. For him, art was made in the moment.
"Practice does not make perfect – it makes imperfect, unpolished and dead." he once told a group of students. "If you play the same piece over and over again, it's not even listenable. To me, that means worse."
During his career, he gave an early break to many young musicians – Pat Metheny and Jaco Pastorius among them – and a belated one to that genius of free improvised microtonal music, Joe Maneri. But, unlike other radical thinkers, Paul Bley was never a major target for the critics; in fact, he earned the reputation of being one of the quieter members of the avant-garde. He never felt compelled to tear down walls in the manner of his colleagues Cecil Taylor and Albert Ayler. All in all, he was both a romantic and a jazzer at heart who slipped in a blues lick here, an impressionistic harmony there, occasionally hinting at a standard or playing a tune penned by one of his first two life partners.
Mr. Bley died on Jan. 3 at his home in Stuart, Fla., reportedly of natural causes. He leaves his wife, video artist Carol Goss; their daughters, Vanessa and Angelica; his daughter, Solo, from his partnership with Annette Peacock, and two grandchildren.