by David R. Adler
Gary Peacock shares front-cover billing with Paul Bley on this 1970 session, but drummer Paul Motian is also present on the first five tracks. (Billy Elgart replaces Motian on the remaining three.) There's a curiously straight-ahead, tempo-driven feel to this short and sweet disc, quite unlike the free aesthetic that Bley, Peacock, and Motian put forward when they returned to ECM as a trio on 1999's Not Two, Not One. That's not to say the music is conventional: there are two tunes apiece by Bley, Ornette Coleman, and Annette Peacock and one by Gary Peacock, in addition to the lone standard, Jerome Kern's &Long Ago and Far Away.& (The finale, &Albert's Love Theme& by Annette Peacock, stands out as the most abstract of the bunch.) The brittle, lo-fi sound doesn't detract from the album's historical value.