He had some wild ideas – like starting with ‘Utviklingssang’, which we’d normally play after a few fast numbers, or as an encore.” This was the first time in my life that I’d worked under the direction of a producer and I wanted to know what it was like, and what I could gain from it. He chose each one, and we liked that idea. So in the studio in Lugano, we just started playing one tune after another and recorded the ones that Manfred was interested in. We’ve been playing in the trio format for 20 years now and we have a huge book of music. But the personality of this record is quite serious,” Carla says. “A lot of my albums have a sense of things being about to fall apart. Andy Sheppard has been a regular Bley associate since 1987, appearing on a dozen albums since 1987’s Fleur Carnivore. Bassist Steve Swallow has been playing Carla Bley’s tunes since the early 1960s, and has been a member of all Bley’s touring bands since 1978. There is an elegance to the group sound, rooted in long years of reckoning with the material. On Trios Carla Bley – together with Steve Swallow and Andy Sheppard – revisits some favourite pieces in an album that pays particular attention to her qualities as jazz composer and highly individual pianist and emphasises the strengths of the trio. Although she has been part of the larger ECM story for forty years, and although much of her life’s work – documented on JCOA and WATT – has been distributed through ECM channels, Trios marks only the second time that Carla Bley and producer Manfred Eicher have been in the studio together (the first occasion being the 1982 recording of Charlie Haden’s The Ballad of the Fallen, for which Carla played piano and wrote arrangements). Trios is the first of Carla Bley’s albums to be recorded directly for ECM.
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