Bound to be something of an event, the release of Paul Bley’s solo piano album Play Blue, Oslo Concert has been confirmed by ECM for 31 March in the UK.

Recorded live at the Oslo Jazz Festival in 2008 material featured includes the Canadian free-jazz piano innovator’s own compositions for the most part, with Sonny Rollins’ ‘Pent-Up House’ (featured on Newk’s 1956 Prestige album Sonny Rollins Plus 4) also added.

Bley’s recording history with ECM goes back curiously to before 1969, the first year of the label, as Paul Bley with Gary Peacock dates as far back as 1964 and Ballads was recorded in 1967. Later albums of his for Manfred Eicher, who has produced Play Blue, include significantly in the context of the new release solo album Open, To Love, the much later Fragments (recorded in 1986), The Paul Bley Quartet made the following year, four 1990s albums (In the Evenings Out There, Time Will Tell, Sankt Gerold, and Not Two, Not One), and most recently Solo In Mondsee, recorded in 2001.

Recently Bley was in the reissue spotlight with October’s release of The Complete Remastered Recordings on Black Saint & Soul Note part of a remastered reissue series begun by the Italian labels’ owners charting 1983-1994.

At 81 Bley remains hugely influential on a range of much younger pianists such as Ethan Iverson, Aaron Parks, Matthew Bourne, and Kit Downes, running, as Ben Ratliff in The New York Times has written, “on a mixture of deep historical knowledge and its own inviolable principles.”

The cover of Play Blue, above