Peter Blegvad - Go Figure (2017)

After 19 years, Go Figure marks the Peter Blegvad Trio's return to the studio, in supernal form and now a quintet with Karen Mantler and Bob Drake. Recorded over 10 days, it was made in the old way, with everybody sitting in the same room playing and working on arrangements, then recording as quickly as possible in real time, to capture the minutiae of nuance and interaction - because that's what bands are for. The sound is personal and the playing elastic, the better to support and underpin Peter's quietly subversive chain of lapidary songs, the crystallised sweat of a master of the form. Peter, John and Chris first met when Henry Cow was touring with Faust, in 1972. Peter was on secondment from his own group Slapphappy, and in the following year Henry Cow and Slapphappy merged, making two LPs before they separated again. When John Greaves left Henry Cow in 1976, he joined Peter in New York where they wrote and recorded Kew.Rhone - using Carla Bley and Mike Mantler's Grog Kill studio - where thy first met Karen, then aged 10. Peter and John have continued to work together, on and off, ever since. After making two solo LPs for the still vaguely experimental Virgin Records, the label decided, for commercial reasons, to relieve themselves of most of their founding artists, so Peter's next LP, Downtime, was made independently by ReR - and the core players wound up being the Peter Blegvad Trio. Bob Drake first became involved during the second trio recording, Just Woke Up, which he mixed and mastered. The third, Hangman's Hill, he also engineered - as well as playing on a couple of tracks. Karen joined the trio in 2002 for a festival in Ferrara; Bob's first stage appearance with the band came ten years later, in 2012, at the RIO festival in Carmaux. ReR has been releasing the Blegvad working group's records for 37 years and this is the fourth so far. They don't come easy. Between times the band irregularly tours.