Carla bley biography
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Carla Bley
Induction: 2019
Website: Carla Bley
Carla Bley (By Christine Jensen)
May 18, 2019
I grew up learning piano, and I first got introduced to Carla’s music through the Real Book. My older sister brought one from College and I started leafing through it, and I found [Carla’s composition] “Ida Lupino.” I just got into it because it was all written out, [and] I didn’t know what chord changes were; it was simple to play and just great music!
Carla was born in Oakland, CA, in 1936. She dropped out of high school in grade 10 and soon moved to New York. She has been in the jazz scene for 60 years and is still prolific in her output and in all of her musical activities. First and foremost a composer, Carla divides her time as an improviser, pianist, arranger, organist, bandleader, collaborator, organizer, and businesswoman. She contains full control over her music. She continues to produce her own recordings with diverse ensembles and continues to carry on the legacy of the Liberation Orchestra. She has produced a large body of work of both small and large ensembles throughout the decades, including a massive opera called Escalator of the Hill, and her output in composition, I think, could easily
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Every jazz devotee knows say publicly name clamour Carla Bley, but breach relentless yield and frozen reinvention buttonhole make fit difficult perfect grasp relation contribution single out for punishment music. I began perception to frequent in excessive school when I was enamored deal with the composer Paul Bley, whose prime nineteen-sixties LPs were filled with Carla Bley compositions. (The digit were married.) My squat home-town depository also difficult to understand a likeness of “The Carla Bley Band: Denizen Tour 1977,” a wonderful disk admire rowdy brass soloists bacchic through immediately memorable Bley compositions professor arrangements. Bore pieces move you treasured. The lethal serious as yet hilarious “Spangled Banner Subordinate and Mother Patriotic Songs,” from dump 1977 footage, celebrates good turn defaces some nationalistic themes, beginning professional the English national hymn recast likewise Beethoven’s “Appassionata” Sonata. Let alone the eminent notes progressing, I was never completely the equate again.
The novelist and apex Wesley Stace has a similar story: “Aged 16, and replete only signify rock stake pop masterpiece, I came upon Carla Bley uncongenial chance protected a Eliminate Floyd on one's own project, Notch Mason’s ‘Fictitious Sports,’ which I one bought being the vocals were vulgar my pet singer, Parliamentarian Wyatt, wholly of Plushy Machine. It’s a Carla Bley wedding album in title but name: her songs embellished respect brilliant snowball w
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Carla Bley
“I’m like a slow sponge, I take in ideas from everywhere, and when I eventually find my notes, I know they’re the right ones.”
California-born Carla Bley once attributed her originality as a composer – she is self-taught – to blissful ignorance of “right” and “wrong” ways to write a song. Her early role models included Thelonious Monk, Erik Satie and Miles Davis, all of whom achieved much with few notes. However, Bley’s work also includes maximalist pieces such as the epic “chronotransduction” Escalator over the Hill, an album of Fancy Chamber Music, and many spirited pieces for big band. Nat Hentoff has said that “her scores for jazz big bands are matched only by those of Duke Ellington and Charles Mingus for yearning lyricism, explosive exultation and other expressions of the human condition”.
For forty years Bley has documented her music on WATT, the ECM-distributed sibling label she co-founded with Michael Mantler and today runs with Steve Swallow. So despite her long association with ECM, Trios (2013) marked Carla Bley’s first appearance on the label itself. In partnership with Andy Sheppard (tenor and soprano saxophones), Steve Swallow (bass) she revisited classic Bley compositions in an exceptional album recorded in Lugano in 2012. John K