Open, To Love — Paul Bley (1972)
One piano, one room in Oslo, and a pianist who found the space between the notes.
By Rafi Mercer
For most of us, a piano is the instrument we've lived with as furniture. It stands against a wall and collects photographs. Someone dusts it on a Sunday. It waits.
What turns it into an instrument is whoever sits on the stool. The keys, the felt and the strings stay the same. Lift the lid for a different person and you get a different instrument.
In 1971 a young German producer called Manfred Eicher brought Chick Corea into the Arne Bendiksen Studio in Oslo and sat him at a Steinway. Later that year he did the same with Keith Jarrett. Those two sessions produced records that taught people what ECM was going to sound like. On 11 September 1972 Paul Bley sat down at the same piano, in the same room.
He wasn't new to this. He was born in Montreal and had recorded a trio session with Charles Mingus and Art Blakey at twenty-one. He'd been in the thick of the New York avant-garde in the sixties, and he'd already played synthesisers on stage. By 1972 Bley had nothing left to prove about speed.
So he slowed down.
What you hear first is how much isn't there. "Closer" opens the record, and its notes don't so much get played as get placed. Each one gets set down and left alone until the room has taken it. Then the decay matters. The tail of a note thins out and fades into the studio, and Bley waits for it to go completely before he moves. Most pianists treat silence as the gap between phrases. For Bley the silence is a phrase.
Eicher and his engineer, Jan Erik Kongshaug, had recorded this piano twice already and believed they knew how it sounded. Bley changed that. They had to rethink where the microphones went, because the way he played was asking for something else. It was the same instrument, and he made it sound like another one.
Then there's whose songs he chose. Of the seven pieces, five were written by two women. "Closer", "Ida Lupino" and "Seven" are Carla Bley's, his former wife. The title track and "Nothing Ever Was, Anyway" are Annette Peacock's, and she came after Carla. Bley's own two pieces, "Started" and "Harlem", take standards apart and reassemble them so the joins are hard to find.
That leaves a man by himself in a studio in Norway, playing the songs of the two women who had shaped his music. He never makes a statement about it. He doesn't need to.
"Ida Lupino" is the clearest example. It's a beautiful melody, and he holds it a little away from himself. He comes back to it, leaves it, and comes back again. The tenderness is real, and so is the restraint. You're never told what to feel. He just leaves you room to feel it.
Side two is where the record opens up, and the title explains why. "Open, To Love" moves at the pace of someone thinking out loud. Bley reaches inside the piano and works the strings directly, so the instrument stops behaving like a piano for a moment and sounds older and rawer. Then he goes back to the keys as if nothing happened. "Nothing Ever Was, Anyway" closes the record, and he lets it fade out instead of finishing it.
Forty-odd minutes.
Seven pieces.
Nothing wasted.
This record has no interest in being background. Play it while you do something else and it just disappears, because so much of the music lives in the quiet. You need a still room, a decent system and some patience. Given those, the decay of each note becomes something you can almost walk around. This is exactly the kind of record listening bars exist for. If the room is quiet enough, the silence comes through as clearly as the notes.
Not everyone heard that at first. Some American reviewers at the time found it too spare and missed the fire of his earlier work. History has disagreed. The record is now regarded as one of the most influential solo piano albums in jazz and as one of the recordings that fixed the sound of ECM. The label put it in its Touchstones series, and in 2025 it came back on vinyl in the Luminessence series, in a gatefold with new notes by Bley's biographer, Greg Buium. Early pressings could sound a bit brittle. The reissue gives the piano back its weight.
Bley died in 2016. He made dozens more records, many of them for ECM, and kept pursuing the same idea: what you leave out matters as much as what you play.
Same piano. Same room. Three records. Only one of them leaves the door open.
Where was Open, To Love recorded?
At the Arne Bendiksen Studio in Oslo on 11 September 1972. Manfred Eicher produced it and Jan Erik Kongshaug engineered it. Chick Corea's Piano Improvisations and Keith Jarrett's Facing You were made on the same Steinway in the same room.
Who wrote the songs on Open, To Love?
Carla Bley wrote three ("Closer", "Ida Lupino", "Seven") and Annette Peacock wrote two ("Open, To Love", "Nothing Ever Was, Anyway"). Paul Bley's own pieces, "Started" and "Harlem", rework jazz standards.
What's the best way to listen to solo piano records like this?
Listen in a quiet room, on a system good enough to carry the decay of each note, and play the whole record in order. Solo piano depends on the silence around the notes, so background noise takes away half the music.
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