For many people, music that is “freely improvised” is about as welcome as a root canal procedure. Not surprising really, since much of what has been labeled that way is self-indulgent and often cacophonous bloviation. In hands of disciplined and connected musicians, however, freely improvised—or as Carol Tristano likes to call it, intuitively improvised—music has the coherence of anything written on paper, with an extra frisson of unpredictability. Exhibit 1: Blue Shift, from the trio In Real Time (Carol Liebowitz, piano; Adam Lane, bass; and Andrew Drury, drums).

In Real Time
Blue Shift (Line Art Records)
A review
In an email exchange with pianist Carol Liebowitz after my first listen to Blue Shift, the new recording from In Real Time (Liebowitz, bassist Adam Lane, drummer Andrew Drury), I had to ask her if there had been any prearranged elements in the recording sessions for the album. Was anyone designated to start a piece? Were there signposts set up in advance? Did any piece have any sort of predetermined shape? Liebowitz’s succinct reply: “The trio has never had any conversations about what we were going to play, or who would start etc.”

I had to ask because the pieces are so coherent that I wanted confirmation that they had been created in real time without any arrangements or advanced consultation, which is the typical process in her recordings. So the smooth transitions and the sometimes astonishing simultaneity that I was hearing, it turns out, were not prearranged. They were magical.

Well, maybe not magical, given the résumés of the three. Liebowitz, whose 2018 release Malita-Malika, with saxophonist Birgitta Flick, was an Editor’s Pick in Downbeat, has performed and recorded with an A-list of colleagues in the U.S. and Europe. Lane, whose 2006 recording New Magical Kingdom was listed in the Penguin Jazz Guide 1001 Best Records Ever Made, heads multiple projects from trios to nonets and has played beside the likes of Richard Tabnik and Tom Waits. Drury performs as a soloist, also leads multiple ensembles, and has played in more than 30 countries and on more than 80 recordings.

Together, they are like fingers on a hand—connected to the same impulse, highly coordinated, yet independent. That becomes immediately obvious in the opening moments of the first track, “Crosstown,” with Lane and Drury setting up a fat and funky march. Nervous and aggravated at first, the track mellows. Liebowitz’s horn honks on the piano and Lane’s arco bass near the end add ravishing touches. “Curve” opens with Lane somehow turning his bass into a harmonica. Where groove dominated “Crosstown,” emanations are the story in “Curve,” with expanding circles from musical pebbles dropped into the flow. A growing tension lets go, and the trio finds a soft landing in a very bluesy outro. Along the way, Drury’s squealing cymbals, Lane’s voicelike bass, and Liebowitz’s characteristically cubist block chords build the conflagration before the resolution. The title track maps out a spare, three-dimensional space in an ultra-slow tempo and elongated motifs. On “Sequoia Moon,” Drury turns his cymbals into vocalists, and the trio starts aggressively kneading the music around 4:35—and they get the piece to rise, in an unpredictable but clearly structured way. The final track, “Passacaglia,” has the most arresting moment of transition on the album. The trio passes through anxious, roiling streets before rolling gently to a complete stop at 4:41. It’s a perfectly reasonable place to end the track, but five or six seconds later, Lane proceeds to solo. He pulls the other two into the flow in a gentle swell of eloquence and rhapsody that leads to the final march. Lovely.

Blue Shift requires your attention if it is to reveal its charms, and it has charms aplenty, carrying the listener through a universe of feeling and thought on the exceptional musicality and collaborative spirit of Liebowitz, Lane, and Drury.

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© 2022 Mel Minter