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Fearful asymmetry

BILL FRISELL and his 858 Quartet traveled from Gerhard Richter to Charlie Christian and Marvin Gaye.

Bley has had a long association with ECM, and last year she released The Lost Chords Find Paolo Fresu, a meeting of her quartet (including drummer Billy Drummond) with the young Italian trumpet player. The lyricism, the humor, the elusive harmonies, the off-kilter Monkish melodies are all there, and the kind of jazz writing that almost completely obscures the division between composition and improvisation. Sheppard and Fresu seem to be finishing each other’s sentences.

“That’s why I got Paolo,” Bley tells me over the phone from her home near Woodstock, New York. “Because Andy said, ‘I played with this guy and it was magical, we both played the same note.’ He had never experienced that, so I said, ‘I’m going to get Paolo for Andy, then.’ ”

In fact, Bley says there was somewhat less writing for this Lost Chords album than, for instance, on her big-band records, especially on the six-part “Banana Quintet” that takes up the first half of the disc. “I think on that piece there was a lot more improvising than usual, but it wasn’t as though the guys had a better time doing it, because it was all in series of five, and it was quite difficult.” Bley is talking not only about the use of the interval of a fifth throughout the piece (prominent in its wistful, descending opening figures) but also in the asymmetrical five-bar phrases rather than the more typical multiplications of four in standard 32-bar song forms. “It was like speaking in a strange language — for all of us. We didn’t goof off in playing the series of fives at all — we buckled down and really tried hard to feel it. It’s not evident that things are not symmetrical. And that was my hope, to disguise it and make it seem normal — but it’s not.”