The Canadian pianist Paul Bley has been an outsider from the beginning of his 50-year career until the present. He is the prototypical anarchist who doesn't even want to be an anarchist because that is just another dogmatic ideology. Bley's impressive career started in 1953, when he performed with Charlie Parker for Canadian television and recorded his first album, Introducing: Paul Bley, for Charles Mingus' Debut label. In 1958 he hired a number of musicians in Los Angeles to record Live at the Hillcrest Club - later they became the Ornette Coleman Quartet. In the fifties Bley married the composer and big bandleader Carla Borg, who still carries his last name despite their separation. Her compositions, and those of his second wife Annette Peacock, have always remained part of Bley's songbook. He has become more and more of a solo artist. His individual, uninhibited way of playing seems to be an alternative for the ideas of Cecil Taylor and forms a link between Bill Evans and Keith Jarrett.
