Comment on this storyComment
Carla Bley, a tirelessly inventive composer, arranger, pianist and bandleader whose work incorporated the 1960s avant-garde and traditional elements of melody and harmony and shaped the sound of jazz for six decades, died Oct. 17 at her home in Willow, NY, near the Catskill Mountains. She was 87.
The cause was complications from brain cancer, said her daughter, composer and jazz musician Karen Mantler.
With her impish humor, zany themes and minimalist approach to doing more with less, Ms. Bley had an instantly recognizable sound, even as she drew on competing styles of swing, bebop, rock and polka, not to mention German cabaret music and Lean but the lyrical style of the composer Erik Satie.
“I know a Carla Bley song immediately when I hear it,” her collaborator Gary Burton, the vibraphonist and composer, once told DownBeat magazine. “It’s direct. It’s not complicated. It is not layer upon layer of subtle interaction. It’s a very strong melody, a very strong harmony, simply structured. Carla wants her music to hit you right in the eye.”
Raised in a strict Protestant household in the Bay Area, Ms. Bley dropped out of school at 15 and said her life was “a mess” until she turned 30 and, with the support of her second husband, Austrian, began to make her mark as a composer Trumpeter Michael Mantler. She was one of the relatively few women to achieve prominence as a jazz composer or instrumentalist, a distinction she said she wanted to use to her advantage: “I wanted to be the only woman,” she told The New York Times in 2016. “ I was happy that I kind of stood out.”
Ms. Bley’s compositions included jazz standards like the wistful “Ida Lupino,” named for the Hollywood actress and filmmaker, as well as monumental pieces like “Escalator Over the Hill,” a jazz opera — she referred to it as a “chronotransduction” — that was her first album as a bandleader.
Released in 1971 as a triple LP (it ran for nearly two hours), Escalator featured a libretto by poet Paul Haines and contributions from dozens of musicians, including saxophonist Gato Barbieri, bassist Charlie Haden, guitarist John McLaughlin, trumpeter Don Cherry and singer Linda Ronstadt and Jack Bruce from the recently disbanded rock band Cream.
With its elaborate orchestration and imaginative lyrics about the guests and staff of a run-down hotel, the composition won jazz awards in Great Britain and France. It also helped Ms. Bley gain greater prominence in the United States, where she received a Guggenheim Fellowship in music composition in 1972 and was honored with the National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master, one of the country’s highest honors for jazz musicians, in 2015 .
Still, her musical interests extended far beyond jazz, leading Ms. Bley to even announce in the late 1960s that she had “renounced” the art form for several years as she moved away from the radical intensity of free jazz to a more playful one adopted a style influenced by the Beatles and saxophonist Albert Ayler, whom she called “mad in the most wonderful way.”
Ms Bley toured with Bruce’s rock band – “It was great; “Lots of limousines and fine wines,” she recalls – and wrote the music for Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason’s 1981 debut album, Fictitious Sports, which featured vocals from former Soft Machine singer Robert Wyatt.
For years she also played piano and wrote and arranged pieces for the Liberation Music Orchestra, a sprawling, politically oriented ensemble founded by Haden. With their 1970 self-titled debut, which drew on folk songs from the Spanish Civil War, the group moved between jazz and world music and continued to perform under Ms. Bley’s direction after Haden’s death in 2014, recording elegies and environmental anthems for the album on. Time/Life.”
“Their major jazz band scores are surpassed only by those of Duke Ellington and the late Charles Mingus for wistful lyricism, explosive jubilation, and other expressions of the human condition in between,” jazz critic Nat Hentoff wrote in a 2001 profile for Wall Street Journal and found that Ms. Bley could write well for both large groups and small combos.
He added: “Her free spirit encourages her soloists to expand their own voices and surprise themselves along with her.” “I never give them instructions,” she says. “I just give them the chord changes.”
Lovella May Borg was born on May 11, 1936 in Oakland, California, an only child. Because she was dissatisfied with her first name, she changed it by taking her father’s middle name, Carl. He was a church organist and piano teacher and gave Mrs. Bley her first music lessons. Her mother, who was also a church organist, contracted rheumatic fever and died when Ms. Bley was about eight years old, in the midst of what Ms. Bley described as a bleak and repressive childhood.
“I was doused by religion, drenched and afraid of going to hell,” she told the Times in 1974. “The only music that moved me back then was church music. I would hear ‘Nearer My God to Thee’ and collapse.”
At age 13, she met vibraphonist Lionel Hampton at the Oakland Civic Auditorium. Ms. Bley was transfixed. Four years later, she and a friend drove across the country to New York to see Miles Davis at Café Bohemia in Greenwich Village. She soon got a job selling cigarettes at the Birdland club, received jazz training, and went to see artists like Count Basie and Thelonious Monk.
Their studies often came at the expense of their clients. Ms. Bley recalled: If someone asked for a pack of Luckies or Camels, she would tell them to wait until the end of the solo – or better yet, until intermission. “I was in church, you know, and they wanted to smoke cigarettes? It didn’t make sense,” she told an interviewer at the National Endowment for the Arts. “So I was, in my own cheeky way, sort of the Keeper of the Challis.”
One client who impressed her was Canadian pianist Paul Bley, a pioneer of free improvisation. They married in 1957 and moved to California, where he encouraged some of her earliest compositions, although Ms. Bley struggled with insecurity and imposter syndrome. “At that point I went to a psychiatrist,” she said, “who suggested electroshock therapy to get rid of the feeling that I was a composer.”
She slowly began to build her confidence, supported by commissions from pianist and composer George Russell and by working with Michael Mantler, whom she later married. Together they founded the Jazz Composer’s Orchestra, an instrument for large-scale avant-garde music with a roster of artists that included Barbieri, Cherry and Cecil Taylor. AllMusic critic Brian Olewnick later called the group’s debut album, Communication (1965), “one of the masterpieces of creative music of the ’60s.”
Ms. Bley went on to write extensive compositions, including “A Genuine Tong Funeral” (1968), which was recorded by Burton and drew on the rugged melodies of Kurt Weill. She also began playing the piano with the encouragement of bassist Steve Swallow, who became her partner for more than three decades. She later formed a trio with Swallow and saxophonist Andy Sheppard and recorded albums such as “Life Goes On” (2020), although Ms. Bley considered herself more of a composer than a performer.
“I would rather write music than perform it,” she said. “I’m at a disadvantage when it comes to improvising because jazz solos are an instant composition and I’m a slow and thoughtful composer. By the time I think of the next note, the chorus could easily be over.”
Ms. Bley’s first two marriages ended in divorce. In 2021, she married Swallow. He and her daughter are her only immediate survivors.
Looking back on her career in a 2016 interview with NPR, Ms. Bley recalled writing her first piece of music at age six, with her father’s guidance that still resonates more than 70 years later.
“He gave me a sheet of music paper and said, ‘You just put points.’ And depending on where you put the points, that’s the note you’ll hear.’ So in the next lesson I showed up with a page full of dots. It was like a starry sky. And he said, “That’s too many points.” So I took most of them away. And I’m still working on taking them away.”