Her breakout is one of the most ambitious conceptual jazz works ever written: 1971’s heady and unsettling triple-LP Escalator Over the Hill. Bley’s polyglot sensibilities and contrarian streak resulted in a disparate and often bizarre discography. She was more inspired by Motown and Joe Cocker than John Coltrane and Duke Ellington. “I liked them, but there was also what Max Gordon said about a bunch of guys screaming their heads off: ‘Call the pound.’”Īs much as the jazz of her time, Bley loved its pop music. “In free playing everybody played as loud as they could and as fast as they could and as high as they could,” Bley told Ethan Iverson in 2018. She cut her teeth writing tunes for radically-minded pianist Paul Bley (her husband for a few years) and co-organizing the NYC-based Jazz Composers Guild with avant-gardists like Sun Ra, Ornette Coleman, Milford Graves, and Andrew Cyrille in the early ‘60s, but Bley was always wary of free jazz, on the look out for something slightly different. Today, she ranks as one of the most revered jazz big-band writers of the post-bebop era. Starting out her musical life as a self-described “cigarette girl” at NYC’s Birdland jazz club, Bley-born Lovella May Borg in Oakland in 1938-progressed from being a shy pianist and songwriter-for-hire, to an in-demand composer and arranger, and eventually, to a visionary bandleader. Instead, the composer and pianist worked off of her own stories, following her own fiercely independent muse. Many of her most famous records sound like cues in a spy movie or some darkly comedic thriller. In an alternate universe, Carla Bley could have made a lot of money in film soundtracks.
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