Footloose!

It's hard, listening to Footloose (Bley, Swallow, LaRoca) after nearly twenty years, to understand why there was so very much excitement about Bill Evans when Bley was producing far more interesting and challenging piano trio music, sometimes only a couple of blocks away."

　　The Penguin Guide to Jazz 1992

　　"In the final reckoning, the pianist Paul Bley's influence over the last 50 years of jazz - and it continues - will be enormous. It includes figures as major as Keith Jarrett and Pat Metheny, and endless numbers of musicians who are still learning. Deeply original and aesthetically agressive, Mr. Bley long ago found a way to express his long, elegant, voluminous thoughts in a manner that implies complete autonomy from its given setting but isn't quite free jazz. The music runs on a mixture of deep historical knowledge and its own inviolable principles." by Ben Ratliff,