Trio Logic 18/52: Freedom at a Whisper

The pianoless trio, as Rollins built it, was a loud thing. Way Out West swung hard; the Vanguard sets with Elvin Jones were rhythmically driven, blues-rooted, energized by the collision of three voices in open harmonic space. The argument was about freedom from the chording instrument, but the execution was muscular.

Jimmy Giuffre heard something different in the same structural premise. When he formed a new trio in late 1960 with clarinet, piano, and bass but no drummer, he wasn’t extending Rollins’s approach. He was asking a different question: what happens when you remove not the pianist but the timekeeper?

Fusion and Thesis, recorded in New York in March and August of 1961 for Creed Taylor’s Verve, are the answer. They were commercially invisible, critically ambiguous, and a decade ahead of their time. When Manfred Eicher reissued them on ECM in 1992, the thirty-year gap made the whole project look inevitable. That is precisely the kind of thing you say about records that were right before anyone was ready to hear them.

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By 1961, Giuffre had already crossed the full arc of postwar jazz. He’d written “Four Brothers” for Woody Herman in 1947, helped define the West Coast cool sound at Hermosa Beach in the early 1950s, and made a minor television moment of his earlier drummerless trio with guitarist Jim Hall: “The Train and the River,” performed on CBS’s The Sound of Jazz in 1957. That first trio still swung, folksy and warm, and it sold respectably. Giuffre could have run the formula for a decade.

What broke the formula was Ornette Coleman. Giuffre was on faculty at the Lenox School of Jazz in the summer of 1959 when Coleman arrived as a scholarship student, and hearing him at close range rearranged Giuffre’s sense of what was permissible. His response was not to imitate the Texan’s fire but to pursue its implications at the opposite dynamic. He rebuilt the trio around Paul Bley and 21-year-old Steve Swallow, narrowed himself to clarinet alone, and discarded the two assumptions his earlier groups had kept: a persistent beat, which he now found not just unnecessary but “inhibiting,” and fixed chord sequences, which he called “vertical prisons.” In their place he proposed what he named “slow-motion counterpoint,” three lines developing independently, with what Bley described as each player’s “individual choice of different internal tempi.” No one was assigned the job of keeping time for the others, because time itself had become one of the negotiable materials.