The world's a better place for Carla Bley's life-affirming and personal music than for all the marketing-spun fashionable acts of the past 40 years put together. Bley said: "I'd rather have my 50,000 than a bigger audience that wanted me to do something different to what I do."Īmen to that. Her life-partner and bassist Steve Swallow had told her that there might be only 50,000 people on the planet that really appreciated her music. Pink Floyd's Nick Mason made an album of her songs entitled Fictitious Sports.īley once made a simple point that needs retelling every time someone implies that jazz deserves media-sidelining because only a handful of oddballs like it. She was such a big deal by the late 60s that stars including Cream's Jack Bruce, Miles Davis guitarist John McLaughlin, country singer Linda Ronstadt, trumpeter Don Cherry and countless others were queuing up to collaborate. Following her composing for Paul Bley, vibraphonist Gary Burton (A Genuine Tong Funeral) and Charlie Haden (Liberation Music Orchestra) in the 1960s and 70s, Carla Bley became a jazz star. Her music education was as a nightclub waitress in the New York jazz clubs of the early 1950s, closely followed by marriage to Paul Bley, one of the few pianists adaptable enough to work with free-saxophonist Ornette Coleman. She pretends that none of her ideas are original (the latest album is certainly full of quotes from standard songs, but the frameworks she sets them in squeal, wail and guffaw with her own inimitably unfettered phrasing), and claims that a good many of her melodic ideas come from eavesdropping on that most defiantly unmusical of birds, the chicken. She has also become one of the few women composers, in any area of music, to be accepted as a major creative force around the globe.īut you'd never know that the stately, slow-drawling Californian occupies this exalted position from anything she ever says about herself or her work. She once wrote of herself and her early indie-jazz contemporaries: "We were the weeds, the wildflowers, the ones who had managed to survive without care". ![]() She has played Carnegie Hall, but also helped found artist-run recording and distribution outlets. ![]() She has won Guggenheims, Oscars du Disque De Jazz, Best Composer plaudits from Downbeat, frequent nominations for Grammys (though she's too leftfield to be a Grammy winner). ![]() What it doesn't say (Bley being a great deflector of compliments), is that she's widely accepted as being in the same league for large-scale jazz composition as legends like Jelly Roll Morton, Duke Ellington, Charles Mingus, Gil Evans and George Russell - artists who could intuitively cross composition and improvisation, pop music and art music, and compose with particular favourite improvisers in mind. Designed by her daughter Karen Mantler (who legend has it, used to sleep under the piano as a baby during performances, while her mother's less-than-tranquil band was on tour), the site is that online rarity - a wacky and idiosyncratic window on the lives and guiding stories of others that isn't inconsequential, baffling, or downright cringeworthy.
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