It wasn’t anything to do with her being the first female director. Maybe I felt a bond with her for that reason. “She didn’t have all the sex appeal that a female star should have. “I just saw a few movies she did, and I thought she was sort of stripped and basic,” Bley said. I finally got to ask her about the title. Like many jazzers, I first heard of the film-noir icon Ida Lupino thanks to Bley’s indelible theme. However, while Ahmad Jamal had to use plenty of imagination when rescoring “Poinciana,” Paul Bley just needed to get the paper from his wife and read it down: Bley’s piano score of “Ida Lupino,” with inner voices and canonic echoes, is complete. 1.” Many of Bley’s own pieces from that era have atonal gestures and abstract titles like “Ictus” and “Syndrome.” Ornette Coleman’s “Lonely Woman” is closer to a Mahler dirge than to Duke Ellington Charles Mingus gave a deconstructed blues composition the European-style catalogue number “Folk Forms No. One day Paul Bley came to Carla and said, “I need six tunes by tomorrow night.” There’s an obvious thread of European classical music in early Bley compositions, and this fit perfectly with the sixties jazz avant-garde. The distance and volume between two notes is always perfect.”Īt the end of the decade, her husband, an associate of Charles Mingus, Ornette Coleman, and Sonny Rollins, wanted to play more as a trio pianist but lacked material.
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“I got to hear him more than anyone else, and it was an education.” Basie is still her favorite pianist: “He’s the final arbiter of how to play two notes. “Count Basie was playing at Birdland, Basin Street, and the Jazz Gallery when I was working as a cigarette girl,” she said. I began a little further along, and asked her about Count Basie in the late nineteen-fifties. (Swallow is the house barista and fact checker.)īley’s early development as an independent spirit is well documented in the excellent 2011 book “ Carla Bley,” by Amy C.
When we sat down to talk, Bley proved to be witty and surreal, just like her music. Bley’s upstairs study is stocked with hundreds of her scores and an upright piano, on which she played me her latest opus, a sour ballad a bit in the Monk tradition, with just enough unusual crinkling in the corners to prevent it from being too square. The home offers enough room for two powerful artists and their personal libraries, not to mention striking paintings by Dorothée Mariano and Bill Beckman. Their lawn boasts an old oak tree and a massive chain-link dinosaur made by Steve Heller at Fabulous Furniture, in nearby Boiceville. When I drove up, Bley and Swallow were just coming back from their daily walk through the woodland. But it also felt like it was high time to rent a car, visit a hero, and try to get a few stories on the official record.īley and her partner, the celebrated bassist Steve Swallow (and another living link to the revolutionary years of jazz) live in an upstate compound tucked away near Willow, New York. At eighty-two, Bley is still composing and practicing the piano every day. In the last half decade, many of Bley’s remaining peers from the early years have died: Paul Bley, Charlie Haden, Roswell Rudd, Ornette Coleman, Paul Motian. She’s everything I want from instrumental music.” ‘Utviklingssang’ is perfect, all gorgeous melody and abstraction, no words required. ‘Social Studies’ (also from 1981) thus became the first jazz album I ever bought, opening up a whole world I knew nothing about. It’s a Carla Bley album in all but name: her songs embellished with brilliant and witty arrangements.
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The novelist and musician Wesley Stace has a similar story: “Aged sixteen, and full only of rock and pop music, I came upon Carla Bley by chance through a Pink Floyd solo project, Nick Mason’s ‘Fictitious Sports,’ which I only bought because the vocals were by my favorite singer, Robert Wyatt, once of Soft Machine.
From the first notes onward, I was never quite the same again. The deadly serious yet hilarious “Spangled Banner Minor and Other Patriotic Songs,” from that 1977 recording, celebrates and defaces several nationalistic themes, beginning with the American national anthem recast as Beethoven’s “Appassionata” Sonata.
(The two were married.) My small home-town library also had a copy of “The Carla Bley Band: European Tour 1977,” a superb disk of rowdy horn soloists carousing through instantly memorable Bley compositions and arrangements. I began listening to her in high school when I was enamored with the pianist Paul Bley, whose seminal nineteen-sixties LPs were filled with Carla Bley compositions. Every jazz fan knows the name of Carla Bley, but her relentless productivity and constant reinvention can make it difficult to grasp her contribution to music.
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