Bill Bruford - (2000) B.L.U.E Night

Bill Bruford is known to most of the visitors to this page. He's a longtime member of King Crimson, and has been a member of the influential groups Yes and U.K. When not out with Crimson, Bill tours and records with his own group: Earthworks. Bill recently started his own web site.
On Blue Nights you hear Bill at his wildest, and most expressive. The CD starts, as did the live shows, with Bill playing alone on stage. There are a few drum solos, a few improvised pieces where he shines, and a couple of Bill's compositions from the earlier BLUE CD.

Tony Levin, (who's site, of course, you're looking at), plays all his basses on this cd: the Chapman Stick, NS Electric Upright, and the Music Man bass (with funk fingers.) There's some featured Stick playing, a bowed bass solo intro, and some featured wierdness from the Funk Fingers with ring modulation(!)

David Torn, well known for his own albums and sound tracks, plays guitars - but that doesn't describe much of the unique element he brings to this music. Unearthly loops, electric oud, bouzouki... things like that give you a better idea of how he sounds in the group.
Also here is one of David's better known compositions: Three Minutes of Pure Entertainment, from his classic Cloud About Mercury CD. That CD had Bruford and Levin on it, which led to the group doing 3 Minutes as an encore piece. (It lasts closer to 9 minutes now!)

Chris Botti on trumpet provides the lead voice for the group. His own releases, on the Verve Forcast label, are more jazz oriented than the playing with BLUE.
Here, Chris gets pretty wild, with the other players, but at many times pulls things together with a great melodic sense, and sparse playing.
Some of the tracks feature duo introductions with Chris and guitar, which weren't on the studio cd, but developed as the pieces were played live.

The group's origins can be traced to David Torn's album Cloud About Mercury (1987) which featured the above-listed musicians, except with Mark Isham playing trumpet. Enjoying their musical chemistry, the performers kept in touch, and formed B.L.U.E. in the mid-1990s.

The band had very unusual sound with elements of blues, rock and ambient music. Bruford and Levin were both longtime members of King Crimson, so it's unsurprising that B.L.U.E. sometimes had a "Crimsonesque" quality.
B.L.U.E. Nights is an album recorded live in Japan and the USA during 1998 and released in 2000.

CD #1

1. Piercing Glances – 7:50
2. Etude Revisited – 5:28
3. A Palace of Pearls – 5:59
4. Original Sin – 8:13
5. Dentures of The Gods – 6:26
6. Deeper Blue – 6:31
7. Cobalt Canyons – 7:29

CD #2

1. Fin De Siecle – 5:48
2. Picnic on Vesuvius – 9:29
3. Cerulean Sea – 7:04
4. Bent Tagasim / Torn Drumbass – 5:42
5. Cracking the Midnight Glass – 6:53
6. Presidents Day – 6:46
7. 3 Minutes of Pure Entertainment – 11:03
8. Outer Blue – 6:06