DAVID GREENE, HOST:
All right, any jazz hall of fame should certainly include the man who made this music. It's Paul Bley. He was a Canadian pianist who played an important role in the jazz scenes in New York and Los Angeles from the early 1950s to the present. And just a measure of Bley's talent - well, consider this. Jazz greats Charles Mingus and Art Blakey backed him up on his debut recording. In a career that lasted nearly seven decades, Bley also helped launch the careers of other younger musicians who became far more famous. Paul Bley died Sunday from natural causes at his home in Florida. He was 83 years old. And NPR's Andrew Limbong has this appreciation.
ANDREW LIMBONG, BYLINE: Paul Bley was all about not repeating himself.
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PAUL BLEY: An audience stays awake only so long as you give it new material.
LIMBONG: As he told NPR's Piano Jazz in 1990. By that time, he was an established improviser playing free jazz.
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BLEY: It's free only in the sense that you're not bringing written music to the table. I interpret the word free as the ability to play as far in as necessary every and as far out as possible, depending on what is needed at the moment.
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LIMBONG: This particular moment is from 1958.
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LIMBONG: The group playing with Bley would go on to become the groundbreaking Ornette Coleman Quartet, a group that changed the sound of jazz in the 1960s. But it was Bley who gave Coleman his first shot, just as he did for Pat Metheny and Jaco Pastorious. Paul Bley was born in 1932 in Montreal. He played music as a kid and ended up going to Juilliard in New York. He was known for being at the front of waves in music, pushing its outer boundaries and exploring its inner ones with clarinetist Jimmy Guiffre and bassist Steve Swallow.
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LIMBONG: In the early 1970s, Bley experimented with electronic music.
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LIMBONG: But about 15 years ago, Bley returned to the acoustic piano.
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LIMBONG: His playing was prodding, challenging because, said Bley...
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BLEY: The whole point in making a performance, joining a band is that, at the end of the night, you've found something out you didn't know at the beginning of the night.
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LIMBONG: And that's what Paul Bley was all about. Andrew Limbong, NPR News.