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Overview
Best known for her jazz opera "Escalator over the Hill," her role in the Free Jazz movement of the 1960s, and her collaborations with artists such as Jack Bruce, Don Cherry, Robert Wyatt, and Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason, Bley has successfully maneuvered the field of jazz from highly accessible, tradition-based contexts to commercially unviable, avant-garde works. Beal details the staggering variety in Bley's work as well as her use of parody, quotations, and contradictions, examining the vocabulary Bley has developed throughout her career and highlighting the compositional and cultural significance of her experimentalism.
Beal also points to Bley's professional and managerial work as a pioneer in the development of artist-owned record labels, the cofounder and manager of WATT Records, and the cofounder of New Music Distribution Service. Showing her to be not just an artist but an activist who has maintained musical independence and professional control amid the profit-driven, corporation-dominated world of commercial jazz, Beal's straightforward discussion of Bley's life and career will stimulate deeper examinations of her work.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780252036361 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Illinois Press |
| Publication date: | 10/25/2011 |
| Series: | American Composers |
| Edition description: | 1st Edition |
| Pages: | 128 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.20(w) x 8.70(h) x 0.60(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Carla Bley
By Amy C. Beal
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
Copyright © 2011 Board of Trustees of the University of IllinoisAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-252-07818-7
Chapter One
Walking Woman Oakland, New York, Los Angeles, New York I always did whatever interested me. I probably would have compromised myself, but no one ever asked me to. —Carla Bley
LIKE MANY SUCCESSFUL AUTODIDACTS, Carla Bley frequently talks about the virtues of ignorance, the creative instincts that come from finding out things for oneself, both from necessity and by accident. Born Lovella May Borg in Oakland, California, on May 11, 1936, to Christian fundamentalist parents of Swedish descent, she received limited piano training from her father, Emil Borg (1899-1990). She had no formal music education beyond lessons from beginning and intermediate piano method books. This relative underexposure to classical technique allowed her to develop an idiosyncratic musical language. Blessed with perfect pitch, she enjoyed music as a child and claims to have played her first recital, with her fists, at age three. She was exposed to classical music at home, as well as church music (ubiquitous Protestant church hymns, such as "Rock of Ages," "Nearer My God to Thee," and "Power in the Blood of the Lamb") at the nondenominational Havenscourt Colonial Church, where her father worked as the organist and choirmaster. The church music in particular is deeply ingrained in her compositional psychology, as it was, for example, in the music of the American composer Charles Ives.
As a youngster Bley listened repeatedly to a recording she made from a radio broadcast of the French composer Erik Satie's neoclassical ballet music Parade (1917). She was exposed to the standard piano repertory—Beethoven, Chopin, Grieg, Rachmaninov—through the lessons her father gave at home. She recalls her father using hymns to teach her how to play variations in different styles. Not surprisingly, as she recounts in any number of interviews, one of her earliest childhood compositions from this period was a set of variations on the tune "Onward Christian Soldiers." The variations, set by Bley as a waltz, a march, a polka, a dirge, and so on, foreshadowed her preference for these vernacular musical idioms in her later, more complex compositions. She also developed an ongoing interest in variation forms, a particularly important American vehicle for the musical practice of "signifying"—quoting, commenting, and expanding on preexisting material in personalized, rhetorical ways—which is central to the aesthetics of jazz.
Overall, Bley's early musical training was fragmentary and unusual. Her parents' roles in this training, inadvertently perhaps, led to a great deal of independence for the young musician. "My music lessons continued until I was about seven. My father was exasperated by my lack of discipline and let my mother have a try at teaching me. Once, during a clash of wills, I bit her on the arm. They both gave up on me then, and I developed in my own unsupervised way."
Bley's mother, Arline Anderson (1907–44), died when Bley was eight years old. Although tragic, the event seems to have nevertheless brought relief and solace to the young girl, who had endured many years of Arline's illness. A naturally independent child, she enjoyed a relatively unfettered childhood in the Foothill district of East Oakland. She continued composing: aside from composing the "Onward Christian Soldiers" variations, she remembers writing "some horrible cowboy song and the beginning of an opera set in the South Seas," which was perhaps a set of songs she began when she was about nine called Over the Hill. She also played the piano at religious events and in local music competitions (though not all that successfully) and later accompanied rehearsals at a dance studio. As a teenager she turned her interest to roller skating. She felt that skating was another way of expressing musical ideas, and she particularly enjoyed the live organ accompaniment for her routines. She competed in the California state championship and placed seventh in the freestyle category. This activity occupied her almost completely for about three years, during which time she graduated from Frick Middle School. After leaving the church around age fourteen, she dropped out of Castlemont High School, her attendance having dwindled to almost nothing. She had no further formal education. Bley unsuccessfully applied for a clerical job at a local Montgomery Ward (her typing was highly accurate but far too slow, she recalls) and then worked briefly in a music store selling sheet music. She also hung out and played music for entertainment in Berkeley cellar bars near campus. Somewhat oddly, given her geographical location, she remembers playing Ivy League college songs, including "The Bulldog Up at Yale Has No Tail" and "The Whiffenpoof Song."
Bley had little connection to the world of jazz at this time, though the San Francisco Bay Area hosted a number of lively clubs—the Purple Onion, the Black Hawk, and the hungry i, to name just a few. At a popular Oakland venue called the Burma Club, she heard (but claims not to have particularly responded to) several players who toured through the area. Dave Brubeck's quartet played frequently at the Burma Club and the Black Hawk during the 1950s. At some point she also heard Lionel Hampton's orchestra (the "Flying Home Band," she called it) play at an Oakland auditorium, and she has sometimes recalled this as the first jazz she heard. Bley's relatively late exposure to jazz and a lack of deliberately chosen models might be considered another contributing factor in her early development of a personal style. At age seventeen Bley took a job playing lounge piano in a Monterey nightclub called the Black Orchid. Enlisted men from nearby Fort Ord would surround her at the circular bar. Bley had limited improvising skills with only a modest repertoire, mostly of Tin Pan Alley tunes. She improvised only when she "played a mistake and had to recover": "I took a few jobs as a solo pianist in bars. I played a lot of beautiful standards, but my style was unspontaneous. The arrangements were figured out, note for note, in advance. Customers didn't like it much." Her particular relationship to improvisation, and her acceptance of "mistakes," has remained central to her creativity and to her approach toward performance. She told a Down Beat magazine critic in 1978: "I like to make mistakes, it makes me think up ways to correct them."
Around this time Bley met and became romantically involved with a folksinger named Randy Sparks, who later formed the New Christy Minstrels. Her involvement with Sparks was probably her first significant collaborative musical relationship. She worked as his accompanist and wrote harmonic arrangements for his original melodies, and they frequently performed together at places such as the Purple Onion and the hungry i. Bley recalls: "He told me I should learn to play like Marian McPartland. Who was that? I didn't know much about jazz. I had been to a Lionel Hampton concert, and a friend had taken me to see Gerry Mulligan and Chet Baker at a nightclub, but I didn't understand what improvising was. That seemed like quite an obstacle."
Sparks eventually traveled to San Diego to enlist in the navy. Soon thereafter Bley met a young man at the Black Orchid and decided to drive to New York with him. His father happened to be the Boston Symphony Orchestra concertmaster, and they took along a borrowed credit card and a loaf of bread. "The reason we did this," she said, "is because I wanted to go to Café Bohemia and hear Miles Davis." Further, she had become fascinated by Teo Macero's What's New? (an album released in 1955), music that, in its approach toward harmony and improvisation, was more avant-garde and atonal than anything she had heard previously. Macero's music featured accordion, timpani, wordless vocalizations, and free, abstract, coloristic sections of music juxtaposed to more conventionally swinging pieces. It was highly unusual for its time, especially in the degree to which it was composed and orchestrated, and it motivated Bley to learn more about modern jazz.
Recalling her first encounter with New York City, Bley has said: "I got there and went right to the Café Bohemia, and then my life really started." She was most likely eighteen years old when she arrived in the city, which celebrated not only Miles Davis but also the brilliance of Charlie Parker, but it is not clear exactly when Bley first got there. She remembers standing outside a club, straining to hear Parker play; he died a short time later, on March 12, 1955 (Bley would turn nineteen that May). At the time, in myriad ways, the music industry was about to undergo drastic reorganization due to a "tectonic change," in the words of the Dutch economist and philosopher Wilfred Dolfsma, with popular music drenched in rock and roll coming to dominate the market fully during the 1960s and afterward.
New to the city, Bley slept temporarily in Grand Central Station and then paid for an inexpensive hotel room near Times Square. She began working at the jazz clubs Basin Street and Birdland. At Birdland, which was located at the corner of Broadway and Fifty-second Street, she sold cigarettes and stuffed animals. She occasionally worked as a photographer, too, taking pictures of couples in the audience. (Bley lied about her age by one or two years to be eligible for a cabaret card, necessary for employment in jazz clubs at the time.) For a budding composer, there was no better education than hearing the jazz artists who played at these clubs—Count Basie, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Stan Getz, Dizzy Gillespie, Charles Mingus, Thelonious Monk, Anita O'Day, Bud Powell, Lester Young, and many others came through Birdland during its golden era, in the mid-to-late 1950s. Birdland, which had opened in 1949, was an epicenter of American music, and Bley had a front-row view, night after night. This opportunity allowed her ears to become finely tuned, and she received a first-rate education for free. It was there, probably at some point during 1956, that she met Paul Bley (b. 1932), the celebrated Canadian pianist. (Paul Bley's first record, Introducing Paul Bley, had been released on Charles Mingus's independent label Debut Records in 1953.) He bought a pack of cigarettes from her even though he did not smoke. They soon became a couple, and she traveled with him on a Canadian tour that included performances at the Cellar in Vancouver and the Penthouse/Windsor Steak House in Montreal, where "the sultry songstress Karen Borg" performed with him during the autumn of 1957. Shortly after turning twenty-one, during the summer of 1957, she officially changed her name to Carla Borg (her father's middle name was Carl), with the unusual explanation on the correctional affidavit that the "incorrect name was added to the birth certificate at time of registration."
Encouraged by Paul Bley, who recognized both her imaginative instinct for original musical ideas and her patience in working them out and writing them down, Carla Borg started composing regularly. The couple moved to Los Angeles, where, on August 21, 1957, Paul recorded an album (with the bassist Charlie Haden, the drummer Lennie McBrowne, and the vibraphonist Dave Pike) called Solemn Meditation, which included Borg's first mature composition, dated January 27, 1959. The work's title, O Plus One, was perhaps wordplay on the notion that this was her "Opus One." Borg also wrote the liner notes and took the cover photo of Paul Bley for this album. After a brief separation, she and Bley were married in Sausalito, California, in the presence of her father. At this point she took the name Carla Bley, which she retains to this day.
During this period Paul Bley had a long-running engagement in Los Angeles at Hillcrest Club, on Washington Boulevard, performing with Haden, McBrowne, and Pike. Through a series of personnel changes, the band gradually transformed into a quintet consisting of Bley, Haden, Ornette Coleman on saxophone, Don Cherry on trumpet, and Billy Higgins on drums. Carla Bley listened to this new music intently, "like one huge ear": "I listened like I'm sure no musician could who played. I heard every note everybody played, every wart on every note everybody played. I'm sure that as a listener, I was unique." She even recorded this music, with a hand-held tape recorder, on one occasion in October 1958. These tapes would be commercially released (as The Fabulous Paul Bley Quintet [America 30 AM 6120] and also as Coleman Classics Vol. 1 [Improvising Artists IAI 373852]) and are now heralded as early documents of a poignant moment in the birth of a musical style that has since come to be known as "free jazz." Coleman also recorded several of his important early albums during this period in Los Angeles, including Something Else! (1958) and Tomorrow Is the Question (1959).
Carla Bley was further encouraged by musicians in Los Angeles. She recalls that the bassist Scott LaFaro liked to "warm up" with her piece Donkey, a fast chromatic twelve-bar blues. But perhaps most important, her encounter with Charlie Haden marked the start of a lifelong friendship, one that has resulted in some of the most innovative recordings ever made by large jazz ensembles, namely, the Liberation Music Orchestra projects beginning in 1969. Haden continually expresses profound respect for what he immediately identified as Carla's gifts: her intelligent ears and her unique musical vocabulary. From the beginning, they were "soul mates," he said, deeply connected as close friends and musical explorers, and they listened to music together extensively during this period.
The Hillcrest Club quintet played much of Coleman's music, and some of Carla's as well; although accounts differ as to exactly how long the group survived, its radically new style of music apparently led the club to fire the band after about six weeks. All six musicians seem to have left California by mid-1959. En route from Los Angeles to New York, the Bleys made a stop at the Lenox (Massachusetts) School of Jazz, where Jimmy Giuffre, Charles Mingus, George Russell, and others were participating in the school's summer performances. The Bleys snuck into concerts, slept on floors, and were treated with contempt for crashing the cafeteria. Nonetheless, this initial encounter with the clarinetist Giuffre would also become an important connection for Carla Bley.
Roswell Rudd, a Dixieland-playing trombonist fresh out of Yale, had come to New York City in 1958. He recalled a musical paradigm shift that occurred while the Bleys were in California, as exemplified by Miles Davis's sessions at Café Bohemia in the West Village:
I stumbled in there one night, and there was the band—Miles had a saxophone player who had just that night come up from Philadelphia to start with him on this gig, and the saxophone player was John Coltrane. I was very much taken with the whole atmosphere. I kept going back that week. I was maybe sleeping over at [Steve] Lacy's loft on Bleecker Street. Café Bohemia was right off Sheridan Square in the West Village, downstairs. Everyone lined up at the bar; you could be real close to the band, standing up. I was really impressed by the atmosphere. Contrary to what Miles had going on in his recordings, this thing was very loose. He was just letting things happen. His drummer came sort of right at the end of the first set, so they played about three-quarters of the first set with no drums. That was really interesting. And when Philly Joe Jones got there, the sound changed. He was very strong. I guess he felt he had to make up for the forty minutes he missed. So that was my introduction to Miles Davis. The other thing about that was that he let Coltrane really have some space, and the thing that was remarkable about Coltrane was that he really put himself out there. He did not play slick saxophone. He was leaving himself open, and painting himself into corners and working his way out. It was almost as if he was making mistakes on purpose to see if he could then transcend his weaknesses. It was just amazing. We all stood at the bar with our jaws down because this guy was just so honest with what he was doing, and Miles was just letting it happen.
The following year, 1959, witnessed the Ornette Coleman Quartet's debut performances at the Five Spot in November, as well as the releases of Coleman's Shape of Jazz to Come, Miles Davis's Kind of Blue, and John Coltrane's Giant Steps and the publication of George Russell's Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Carla Bley by Amy C. Beal Copyright © 2011 by Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS....................ixIntroduction: "Like a Mockingbird"....................1
1. Walking Woman: Oakland, New York, Los Angeles, New York....................5
2. Sing Me Softly of the Blues: Early Short Pieces and Songs without Words....................15
3. Social Studies: The Jazz Composers Guild and the Jazz Composers Orchestra....................27
4. "Mad at Jazz": A Genuine Tong Funeral....................34
5. Escalator over the Hill: Jazz Opera as Fusion....................41
6. Copyright Royalties: New Music Distribution Service....................51
7. Big Band Theory: The Carla Bley Band and Other Projects....................57
8. The Lone Arranger: History and Hilarity....................65
9. End of Vienna: Fancy Chamber Music....................75
10. Dreams So Real: "Jazz Is Really Where My Heart Now Lies"....................83
NOTES....................91
SUGGESTED LISTENING....................99
SOURCES....................101
INDEX....................105