{"id":9667,"date":"2023-11-04T20:12:24","date_gmt":"2023-11-04T20:12:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/infundpros.com\/business\/carla-bley-jazz-composer-and-pianist-1936-2023\/"},"modified":"2023-11-04T20:12:24","modified_gmt":"2023-11-04T20:12:24","slug":"carla-bley-jazz-composer-and-pianist-1936-2023","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/infundpros.com\/?p=9667","title":{"rendered":"Carla Bley, jazz composer and pianist, 1936-2023"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>\n<p>Unlock the Editor\u2019s Digest for free<\/p>\n<p class=\"article__content-sign-up-topic-description\"><span>Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><iframe class=\"article__content-sign-up-iframe close\" scrolling=\"no\" id=\"signUpIframe\" data-prev-url=\"\/register\/in-article-sign-up?ft-content-uuid=bb86becf-a724-4d08-b195-efb325f20940\"><\/iframe><\/div>\n<div id=\"article-body\">\n<p>When Carla Bley was a child in Oakland, California in the early 1940s, her parents, having identified their daughter as a musical prodigy, tried to give her piano lessons. The experiment did not go well.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI bit my mother when she told me I needed to put a sharp in front of the G,\u201d Bley remembered years later. \u201cI didn\u2019t have the patience for lessons, so I developed on my own in an unsupervised way.\u201d <\/p>\n<p>At the age of eight or nine she became obsessed with the French composer Erik Satie, whom she described as her \u201conly influence\u201d at the time. But it wasn\u2019t until almost a decade later that her musical education began in earnest \u2014 although not in a formal pedagogical setting.<\/p>\n<p>She worked as a cigarette girl at several clubs in New York, where she had moved because that was \u201cwhere jazz was a big deal\u201d. At one of them, Birdland in midtown Manhattan, she saw many of that era\u2019s greats: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Stan Getz, Dizzy Gillespie, Charles Mingus and Lester Young.<\/p>\n<p>It was also at Birdland that Bley, who has died at the age of 87, met her first husband, the pianist Paul Bley, whose surname she would keep for the rest of her life. (She changed her first name to Carla on her 21st birthday.)<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI consider Birdland my entire education,\u201d she said. \u201cI was a great listener, long before I was even an adequate musician.\u201d <\/p>\n<p>Bley would go on to establish herself in the 1960s and \u201970s as one of the leading composers in jazz, writing with equal facility and sophistication for both small groups and big bands. The critic Nat Hentoff wrote that her scores for large ensembles \u201care matched only by those of Duke Ellington and Charles Mingus for yearning lyricism, explosive exultation and other expressions of the human condition\u201d.<\/p>\n<p>Lovella May Borg was born in Oakland in May 1936 to Swedish-American parents. Her father Emil was a piano teacher and church organist. But seeing the trumpeter Chet Baker and saxophonist Gerry Mulligan play in a bar in San Francisco in the early 1950s proved a pivotal moment. \u201cThat show was a big deal in my leaving church music behind and going to the music of the devil.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Bley pursued that profane vocation with enthusiasm, dropping out of school at 15 and playing piano in jazz joints around the Bay Area. When she was 17, she hitched a ride to New York and got her first job in a club after lying about her age.<\/p>\n<figure class=\"n-content-image n-content-image--full\"><picture><source media=\"(min-width: 700px)\"  width=\"3964\" height=\"2642\"><\/source><source media=\"(max-width: 490px)\"  width=\"2642\" height=\"2642\"><\/source><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/infundpros.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/11\/https:\/\/d1e00ek4ebabms.cloudfront.net\/production\/40f76923-d686-4993-8bd2-761d9d0dcec7.jpg\" alt=\"Bley plays the piano in 1989. She was noted for her \u2018remarkable and commendable loyalty\u2019 to a core group of collaborators \" data-image-type=\"image\" width=\"3964\" height=\"2642\"><\/picture><figcaption class=\"n-content-picture__caption\"><span>Bley plays the piano in 1989. She was noted for her \u2018remarkable and commendable loyalty\u2019 to a core group of collaborators <\/span><span> <!-- -->\u00a9 Frans Schellekens\/Redferns\/Getty Images<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>In the late 1950s, the Bleys moved back briefly to Los Angeles, where Paul was playing a string of club dates with a quintet comprising saxophonist Ornette Coleman, trumpeter Don Cherry, bassist Charlie Haden and drummer Billy Higgins. Cherry and Haden would go on to become long-term collaborators of hers.<\/p>\n<p>The LA shows were a kind of primal scene for what became known as \u201cfree jazz\u201d. Bley sat beneath her husband\u2019s piano and made primitive recordings of the performances, which included many of her own compositions, as well as Coleman\u2019s.<\/p>\n<p>She was not an uncritical camp follower of the emerging avant-garde in jazz, however. \u201cJust as it was, I thought free jazz needed work,\u201d she said. <\/p>\n<p>After she and her husband moved back to New York, Bley\u2019s reputation as a composer blossomed. Many of the leading jazz artists of the day recorded her compositions \u2014 including George Russell, Gary Burton and Jimmy Giuffre. And in 1960, she also started performing in a duo with the bassist Steve Swallow, whom she would later marry. (She was married three times.)<\/p>\n<p>By the late 1960s, Bley began to focus on arranging for larger groups. Three albums from this period \u2014 Burton\u2019s <em>A Genuine Tong Funeral<\/em> (1967), Haden\u2019s <em>Liberation Music Orchestra<\/em> (1970) and <em>Escalator Over the Hill<\/em> (1971), a jazz opera (or \u201cchronotransduction\u201d) that she wrote with her friend Paul Haines \u2014 cemented her standing with both her peers and the critics.<\/p>\n<p>In the mid-1970s, Bley and her second husband, the trumpeter Michael Mantler, founded WATT Records. She also toured intensively as a performer, leading the Carla Bley Band with Mantler, Swallow, the trombonist Roswell Rudd and drummer D Sharpe.<\/p>\n<p>The English composer Gavin Bryars once noted Bley\u2019s \u201cremarkable and commendable loyalty\u201d to a core group of collaborators. \u201cI\u2019m just a composer,\u201d she told DownBeat magazine in 1984. \u201cI use jazz musicians because they\u2019re smarter, and they can save your ass in a bad situation\u2009.\u2009.\u2009.\u2009I need all the help I can get.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p>Read the full article <a href=\"https:\/\/www.ft.com\/content\/bb86becf-a724-4d08-b195-efb325f20940\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">here<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Unlock the Editor\u2019s Digest for free Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. When Carla&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-9667","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-business"},"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v21.3 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Carla Bley, jazz composer and pianist, 1936-2023 | inFundPros<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Unlock the Editor\u2019s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.When Carla Bley was a child in\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/infundpros.com\/?p=9667\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" 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