Listen to the fourth cut in, “And Then One Day.” It lasts 9 minutes and 03 seconds and is the last song in a four-song suite entitled “Life Goes On.” Steve Swallow’s five-string electric bass guitar starts it with a rhythm riff, Carla Bley’s piano picks up the beat and (hinted at) melody and amplifies it, playing two-step chords in the spaces between Swallow’s bass line. Fifteen seconds in, Andy Sheppard enters on soprano sax and solidifies the melody, playing over the others’ continuing lines. Swallow takes the first solo, Bley’s repetitive chords backing him. Whoever has played bass guitar as elegantly –musically—as Swallow has, for what? Forty, fifty years now? Two and a half minutes in, Sheppard enters again on a counter riff. The beat and mood change at three minutes, slowing down, hinting at minor tones, an intricate cross play of piano and bass guitar, the piano chorded, the bass guitar playing a single note line, merging around 3:40 in a typically lovely Sheppard solo, bass and dancing piano chords behind him. There’s another key change around 4:30, initiated by Bley’s piano, while Shepard continues to solo. Another tempo and melody change at 5:28, Sheppard continuing to lead, but circling back and setting up for the piece’s close. Then back to the head melody, Sheppard in the lead, bass line and piano running parallel. At 6:26, Carla takes over for a typically short, less than a minute long, solo. Sheppard comes back in again. The music slows down, driven by Swallow’s ever slowing bass notes and Bley’s slowly vanishing piano. Short phrased utterances from the sax, piano chords, bass notes spaced out, slower and slower, and all gone.It’s elegant music, like all the other pieces, ten in all, three suites, on this elegant record. Elegant, elegant, elegant.Over the course of three exquisitely musical, eminently listenable albums --Trio (2013), Andando el Tiempo (2015), and now this album –the Bley-Sheppard-Swallow trio has set the standard for intelligent and listenable modern jazz small group music. Of course, they start with a plus –no one writes better or quirkier tunes than Carla Bley. She’s been writing them for more than sixty years now.(George Russell recorded her composition, “Bent Eagle,” on his Stratusphunk album in 1960.) Her music has gone as far out as the dada-free jazz-rock opera, Escalator Over the Hill (1968-1971), and as expansive as her writing for Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra (1969 on), Gary Burton’s A Genuine Tong Funeral (1967) and her own Big and Very Big Bands (1978 on).But as good as all these have been, I believe her signature contribution to music will turn out to be her work as a miniaturist, on these three albums and in her half classical, half-jazz Fancy Chamber Music (1998). Why? Because they showcase her fullness as a song composer. Secondly, because –in the three trio albums—she has come to terms with her own talent as a pianist as well as a composer. She is famously quoted as saying she’s 99% composer and 1% performer. But here that’s not true. Her backing lines are right on the mark, her solo outings, though short, say exactly what they should say. She has become in the comfort of this small group a pianist in her own right as well as a composer. She isn’t just playing composer’s piano a la Gil Evans or Gerry Mulligan. She’s the whole thing. And so is this album.