Jazz composer and pianist Carla Bley died Tuesday at her home in Willow, New York, her partner, bassist Steve Swallow, announced.
“After a career of more than 70 years and almost 60 albums, the composer and pianist Carla Bley left us this Tuesday morning at the age of 87,” reads the message released by the musician, quoted by the newspaper. The New York Times.
Carla Bley, an “irrepressibly original” creator, was “responsible for more than 60 years of astute provocations in and around jazz,” writes the American newspaper.
According to Steve Swallow, quoted by The New York Times, Carla Bley died from a brain tumor.
Lovella May Borg, given name, was born in Oakland, California, on May 11, 1936. She studied music with her father, musician Emil Carl Borg, a piano teacher and church organist. Bley, however, did almost all of the training herself.
She discovered jazz at the age of 12, with the help of vibraphonist Lionel Hampton, which would take her to New York, the center of the jazz scene of the time, when she was still 17 years old. There she met musicians like Miles Davis and John Coltrane, Dizzy Gillespie and Count Basie, the resident musician at the Birdland club, where Carla Bley began selling cigarettes, just so she could hear her heroes.
It didn’t take long for it to be noticed. First, the Canadian pianist Paul Bley, whom she married in 1957 and who encouraged her to compose. Then the pianist George Russell, who challenged her to write for her sextet, and the saxophonist Jimmy Giuffre, who recorded her pieces such as “Ictus” and “Jesus Maria.”
In the 1960s he founded the Jazz Composers Guild, which fought for better working conditions for musicians. The association would eventually become the Jazz Composer’s Orchestra, which Carla Bley founded with Austrian trumpeter Michael Mantler, her second husband.
In 1969, he began to compose for the Liberation Music Orchestra, directed by double bassist Charlie Haden, which he would later join, and with which he recorded “Grândola, vila morena”, by José Afonso, on the album “La balada of the Fallen”, 1983.
In 1971 he completed the opera “Escalator Over The Hill”, premiered and recorded by musicians such as Jack Bruce, Don Cherry, Gato Barbieri, John McLaughlin, Dewey Redman and Charlie Haden, names that emerged from both projects and remained close throughout the century. . The following decades, in his Big Bands, like others such as Sharon Freeman, Paul Motion, Gary Valente, Dewey Redman, Jim Pepper. Jazz soloists and musicians from the big orchestras led by Carla Bley.
In the early 1970s, Carla Bley was already recognized as a composer. The Guggenheim scholarship awarded to him then allowed him to found the Watt record label in 1972, through which he published almost his entire discography for almost 40 years, with distribution from ECM Records, a ‘label’ to which he remained linked until the end.
The exception would be “Nick Mason’s Fictitious Sports”, an album from 1979-1981, closer to rock, written with and for the Pink Floyd drummer, in a project published by the former Columbia, in which guitarist Mick Taylor also participated. and musician Robert Wyatt. , then still known as Soft Machine.
The 90s were mainly those of the Big Bands, to which he would return later, after the death of Charlie Haden, which occurred in 2014, when he resumed the Liberation Music Orchestra, his social commitment and a new version of “Silent Spring”, which composed in the 1960s, for the tribute album “Time/Life”, released in 2016.
Carla Bley’s name became known and regular in Portugal, between the 1980s and 1990s, first with festivals such as Jazz em Agosto, by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, then, a little everywhere, having performed in Lisbon, Porto, Coimbra . , Espinho, in the main jazz festivals in the country, on the main stages, from Gulbenkian to the Casa da Música, where she performed with the Matosinhos Jazz Orchestra.
In the last decade he worked mainly with his partner of more than 30 years, Steve Swallow, and with saxophonist Andy Sheppard, who came from his last great bands; He almost always worked in a trio, sometimes carrying out more intimate programs, other times more expansive, without ever forgetting the restlessness, humor and silence, which he also liked to use.
In a discography that includes titles such as “Tropic Appetites”, “Dinner Music”, “Musique Mecanique”, “Social Studies”, “I Hate to Sing”, “Night-Glo”, “Fleur Carnivore”, “The Very Big Carla Bley Band”, “Big Band Theory” and “Fancy Chamber Music”, as well as “Songs with Legs”, in trio, still in the 1990s, with Sheppard and Swallow, and also “The Lost Chords”, with Paolo Fresu. , since 2005.
After “Carla’s Christmas Carols”, from 2009, with the Partyka Brass Quintet, three albums would follow in the intimacy of those closest to her, always Sheppard and Swallow, with some of Bley’s most simple and seductive compositions: “Trios”, from 2013 , “Andando el Tiempo”, from 2015, and the last, from 2020, “Life continues”.
Source: TSF
