Carla Bley
Contemporary composer, arranger, pianist dies at 87.
Carla Bley was one of the great jazz composers, occupying the same rarefied air as Duke Ellington and Charles Mingus. Like them, she maintained and frequently composed for a large ensemble, tailoring the music and arrangements for musicians with whom she was deeply familiar. Her music was generally perceived as jazz based because of the group of musicians with whom she initially worked, just as Frank Zappa was seen as a rock artist because he started out in the rock band environment.
Bley's first recorded full-scale project was A Genuine Tong Funeral, recorded by The Gary Burton Quartet (Burton, Steve Swallow, Larry Coryell, Roy Haynes) with horns by Steve Lacy, Gato Barbieri, Jimmy Knepper, Mike Mantler, and Howard Johnson. It is a remarkable recording, highly composed with bursts of improvisation from both the quartet and the horn players. Some sections are reminiscent of Mingus, which the presence of Knepper does nothing to dispel. It ends with a fierce free jazz blowing session, "The New National Anthem." Carla Bley kept composing and playing, never looking back.
Married to pianist Paul Bley, who encouraged her to write music, Carla learned by listening, first as a cigarette girl at jazz clubs where she heard and met musicians like Count Basie and Thelonious Monk. "Listeners should not be taken for granted," she told Ethan Iverson in a 2018 interview. " A lot of them hear more than musicians hear, I found. Paul Haines said there’s no player like a listener."
Haines, a poet, was Carla's collaborator for her next two projects, the jazz opera Escalator Over the Hill and her next album, Tropic Appetites. Regarding Escalator Over the Hill, Bley wrote "there was never any question who the instrumentalists would be. At the time everything I wrote was automatically intended to be played by Gato Barbieri, Roswell Rudd, Don Cherry, Charlie Haden, and other long-time friends and accomplices, most of whom were involved with the Jazz Composer’s Orchestra." The record, released in 1970, occupied a space between free jazz, avant garde classical, poetic hippie music happening, and rock opera, and ended up featuring vocal work by Jack Bruce, Linda Ronstadt, and Warhol superstar Viva.
For Tropic Appetites, Bley trimmed her group down to an octet and hired Julie Tibbets, aka Julie Driscoll of Brian Augur's Trinity, to handle the vocals. Haines' lyrics center around his frequent travels around Southeast Asia, where he spent significant time in India and Bali. It's a strong record, with a lot of what made Escalator work, its sound at times reminiscent of Brecht, Ives, or Van Dyke Parks.
Bley leaves behind some of the more avant garde aspects of her work to date on the 1977 release Dinner Music, and I think this is the time to discuss the famous Bley sense of humor. Yes, she uses song titles to express a joke, a commentary, an outrage, a shy observation, an ironic bon mot. But she can also be quite direct. When she titles an album Dinner Music, she literally means that this is music the band might have in its book for a dinner engagement--we get the sound of popping champagne and background silverware and conversation during Bley's piano opening to "Sing Me Softly of the Blues". So of course there's no Gato Barbieri explosion, though things can get energetic, as on the churchy "Ad Infinitum."
Dinner Music adds the rhythm section Stuff, a studio group and a recording band in their own right, to Bley's usual group of musicians and the results are pretty great. This was 1977, the era of Aja and pop music that regularly featured sophisticated instrumental turns from top studio musicians. While rock and pop musicians had never been more influenced by jazz, young jazz musicians at the time had never been more influenced by pop and rock. Carla Bley was interested in music besides jazz, and her varied output demonstrates that she didn't really stop to consider the issue of genre except in terms of how they could be combined and juxtaposed to create a contemporary sound that is both fiercely individualistic and yet somehow familiar. "Dreams So Real," also from Dinner Music, sounds like a soft rock power ballad with gorgeous playing by Roswell Rudd and guitarist Eric Gale, whose playing I have always admired.
Along with then husband Michael Mantler, Bley created the WATT record label which was distributed by ECM Records. She later started the New Music Distribution Service, which helped the early careers of artists such as Philip Glass, Laurie Anderson, and Sonic Youth by providing an outlet for publishing their music. This arrangement not only gave Bley control over her music and recordings, but also ensured that her work could be regularly documented and preserved. Gary Burton commented “I have always considered Carla a great example of how to market music. Her work is not so directly in the mainstream, so it took ingenuity and original thinking to find ways to get her music in front of people. She has definitely succeeded as an organizer and businesswoman, bringing her music to a much wider audience than would have happened if she had just waited for the audience to find her work.”
It's almost impossible to overstate the degree to which Carla Bley worked in a milieu that was dominated by men. The music business was a sausage party from the men who owned the labels to the promoters, the A&R men, the club owners, festival operators, producers, engineers, and the musicians themselves. That she succeeded in recording her music in the first place was nothing short of amazing, but to have continued to do that as well as providing work for a core group of musicians, to have successfully managed a recording career and written music as prolifically as she did would put her at the top of the jazz world, with Ellington, Monk, and Mingus, if she were a man. It's simply a fact.
In 1979 Bley worked with Nick Mason, writing the entire album Nick Mason's Fictitious Sports which the Pink Floyd drummer performed with a core group of Bley's musicians plus guitarist Chris Spedding and vocalists Robert Wyatt and Karen Kraft. The music is recognizably Carla Bley, but infused with a rock sensibility, albeit a left field one. The Mason record was held for two years before its release in '81, and in 1980 she released Social Studies, a highlight among her big band recordings.
In the mid-eighties Bley recorded a pair of albums on which she handed off the piano chair and played only some organ and occasional synthesizer. Both Heavy Heart and Night-Glo are mellow albums that, while intelligently assembled and performed by a group of excellent musicians, tend to drift into a kind of sonic wallpaper. She continued in a similar format on 1987's Sextet, though that album contains two classic Bley compositions, "More Brahms" and "Lawns." The records are also evidence of the romantic relationship that had developed between Bley and her longtime bassist Steve Swallow. “That was me and Steve right at the beginning, and we were just falling in love," she has said. "We were infatuated with what they called ‘quiet storm’, music you played late at night, like Marvin Gaye or something.”
The decade ended with two strong albums: Duets, recorded with Swallow, and Fleur Carnivore, a big band recording that returns to some of the high points of her previous large group work. As the nineties got underway Bley and Swallow recorded Go Together, another duet album of their own compositions as well as forming a trio along with Andy Shepherd, the saxophonist who had been part of Bley's bands for several years. The first, Songs With Legs, appeared in 1994. Bley's last group of albums were releases by the trio recorded in 2013 (Trios), 2015 (Adondo el Tiempo), and 2020 (Life Goes On).
Carla Bley and Steve Swallow spent the 2000s touring and playing all across Europe, where they had a much larger and more receptive audience than in the United States. They formed the group The Lost Chords in 2004, adding drummer Billy Drummond to the trio dynamic. In 2007 they teamed with Italian trumpeter/flugelhorn player Paolo Fresu for The Lost Chords Find Paolo Fresu. In 2003 and 2005 Bley composed and recorded politically-inspired protest music on the records Looking For America and the Charlie Haden/Liberation Orchestra album Not In Our Name.
A great deal of Carla Bley's success as a composer and a bandleader was in the way she could combine musicians to create something that was different than any of them might have played in other settings. Just as she sought to combine musical forms and genres, she did the same with musicians and their sounds, and she had a great ear for it and the enthusiasm to make it happen. As she told Iverson: "Take that solo, and put it in a setting where it made a lot of sense and it was really appropriate and could be welcomed by the ear. I could put that guy over there, and I could give that guy kind of a background."
Music that was written to satisfy a creative urge and not as a mere exercise in egotism. That was Carla Bley.
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