The story of Carla Bley’s life unfolds like a Carla Bley composition: It by no means goes the place you’d count on, however it finally coheres in a satisfying, singular method. Bley died on Tuesday at age 87, ending her run as maybe the best residing composer, because the bandleader Darcy James Argue just lately described her.
The American composer, keyboardist, and arranger began her profession within the Fifties as a teenage cigarette woman, promoting smokes to patrons at New York jazz golf equipment. The job and its title each give a way of how way back this was, and the way inhospitable the setting might need been for a younger, non-singing feminine musician in what stays a really male milieu. She met and commenced a relationship with the avant-garde pianist Paul Bley, who inspired her to place her childhood musical coaching to work by composing. Later, she was the key weapon of Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra, an bold melding of progressive political and musical impulses. She performed with Jack Bruce of Cream and Nick Mason of Pink Floyd however by no means misplaced any of her jazz cred, or her edge. In 2015, she was named a Nationwide Endowment for the Arts Jazz Grasp, a designation awarded to the best jazz musicians, and he or she led the most effective small jazz bands of the early twenty first century.
The basis of this versatility was Bley’s voice as a composer. She wrote tunes that shouldn’t actually be hummable—they’re simply too bizarre, and the jags and misdirections are too sharp—however that also by some means operate as earworms. They’re constructed of the identical stuff as the entire different nice jazz requirements: stable sufficient to keep up their integrity, however plastic sufficient to work in almost any setting. Think about her music “Vashkar.” The first recording was in 1963, by Paul Bley’s conventional piano-bass-drums trio. In 1969, the Tony Williams Lifetime recorded a model soaked in acid, each lysergic and hydrochloric; a number of years later, Jaco Pastorius, Pat Metheny, Paul Bley, and Bruce Ditmas refashioned it into woozy, Grateful Lifeless–like fusion. And in 2020, the Polish pianist Marcin Wasilewski discovered new floor to cowl as he returned the tune to its acoustic roots.
You may hint the identical odyssey for a lot of of Bley’s different items. What apart from “Ida Lupino” unites Pastorius with the guitarist Mary Halvorson, one in every of at the moment’s most cutting-edge musicians? (That one in every of Bley’s best-known songs pays tribute to a distinguished feminine pioneer within the arts is not any accident.) The place would the bebop stalwart Artwork Farmer, the fusion nice John McLaughlin, and the progressive vibraphonist Gary Burton discover widespread floor aside from “Sing Me Softly of the Blues”? Her work as a keyboardist reveals an identical versatility. YouTube options movies of a 1975 British TV efficiency by a band that features Bruce, Bley, Mick Taylor (just lately departed from the Rolling Stones), and Bruce Gary (not but the drummer for the Knack—sure, the “My Sharona” band). It was an unconventional grouping, however it labored, with Bley’s harmonic textures and solos pushing the rock-based gamers out of straightforward paths.
One essential factor of this success was Bley’s sense of play and humor. The report of hers to which I discover myself most frequently drawn is 1977’s Dinner Music, which inexplicably pairs the avant-garde horn gamers Michael Mantler and Roswell Rudd with Stuff, a band composed of prime studio musicians. It was one other unconventional but profitable experiment: The disco-funk rhythm part helps the weirder touches of the music go down simply, if not fairly so simply because the album’s title mockingly suggests.
Bley might be simply as inventive in arranging different individuals’s music. Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra, from 1969, features a 21-minute medley of songs from the Spanish Civil Struggle. It feels like military-band music, like Charles Ives, like a storybook fantasy of Iberia, like a requiem. The report concludes with a chaotic full-band breakdown, adopted by a lovely and symphonic “We Shall Overcome,” every observe completely positioned.
Whilst a revered elder, Bley typically expressed daring opinions. Her 2018 interview with the pianist and author Ethan Iverson is a delight, not just for her insights into her personal work and her historic recollections, but in addition for her piquant rejections of obtained knowledge. “I by no means favored Duke Ellington,” she informed Iverson—an announcement that’s one thing like a classical musician professing to hate Mozart. “I believed he was stealing music from Billy Strayhorn, mainly. However other than that, I didn’t like his model of taking part in or speaking to individuals.”
Nor did Bley’s music lose any of its energy as she aged. On February 14, 2020, she launched a report with the bassist Steve Swallow, her longtime companion, and the saxophonist Andy Sheppard that was, for my cash, the most effective jazz launch of the yr. The music retains a mellow temper, however Bley’s compositions present an irresistible ahead pull even with out drums. They’re soothing however by no means reductive or keen to recede into the background. When, a month later, the world shut down due to the coronavirus pandemic, I discovered the music—and the promise of its title, Life Goes On—a necessary consolation.