Every week, we share a specially curated playlist featuring some of the best new jazz…
Tag: Charlie Haden
Longtime collaborators Pat Metheny and Charlie Haden’s 1997 full-length, Beyond the Missouri Sky (Short Stories),…
Pianist Keith Jarrett and bassist Charlie Haden reunited during the making of a 2009 documentary…
No musician in the jazz world seems to connect with listeners as viscerally as the…
The Week in Jazz is your roundup of new and noteworthy stories from the jazz…
Remember record stores? Remember the thrill of turning your friends on to new music by…
Remember record stores? Remember the thrill of turning your friends on to new music by…
In 1983, Charlie Haden reunited most of the principal members of his 1969 Liberation Music…
Charlie Haden expressed his passion for vintage movies through several recordings he made with Quartet…
The great Italian maestro Ennio Morricone passed away today, July 6. He was 91. Morricone…
Jazz may not have an official yearbook, but it does have a vast and well-documented…
Jazz may not have an official yearbook, but it does have a vast and well-documented…
Charlie Haden, one of the most influential bassists in jazz and a musician whose stylistic…
This meeting between Charlie Haden and Brad Mehldau unites two musicians from separate generations who…
The best new music from our February 2019 issue.
In this issue, we delve into the raw yet refined art of pianist Myra Melford, chat with Larry Grenadier about his first solo bass recording and check in with saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock, guitarist Bobby Broom, drummer Allison Miller and more.
Taken at a glance, saxophonist Joe Lovano’s career is most often associated with the straightahead…
“Moonlight Serenade” is one of the most popular songs of the swing era. It also…
In an interview with French philosopher Jacques Derrida, saxophonist and composer Ornette Coleman told the…
On May 6, Carla Bley celebrated her 80th birthday. Five days later, on May 11,…
Author Amy C. Beal, who wrote a book on the music and influence of Carla Bley (Carla Bley, 2011) stated that “Donkey” can be credited as being Bley’s earliest mature work. She wrote it in 1958, and it was recorded in 1960 by musician Don Ellis for Essence, the title of which comes from another Bley composition. “Donkey” is based on a standard 12-bar blues structure and the publication of the song in a collection of piano music from 1981 instructs the player to improvise “in the traditional manner.” This would suggest that bebop and blues form the foundations of Bley’s mature compositional work. However, Beal also says that Bley has claimed in the past to have been introduced to jazz as an adolescent. Considering that she started playing piano at the age of 3, this would be quite late on her formative timeline. In fact, Beal’s book also informs that Bley considers to have written her very first composition as a child and that it was a set of variations on the traditional church hymn “Onwards Christian Soldiers.” The impact of religious music on Bley also draws an interesting parallel with two names that often come up in critical writings on her music: Charles Ives and Duke Ellington. The modernist composer Charles Ives, who was among the first composers to engage in a systematic program of experimental music, shared many of the formative elements of Bley’s upbringing, such as church-music traditions of his youth and an early exposure to European art music. Duke Ellington created three Christian jazz concerts in the last decade of his life, between 1965 and 1973, and called them "the most important thing I have ever done.”
Despite being born in a family of Christian fundamentalists, Bley herself claims to have become an atheist at the age of 12. This has not distanced her in any way from church music. Time and time again, she has embraced its influence on her works by including hymns in her songs and by writing for church choirs. The Carla Bley Big Band Goes to Church (1996) was entirely recorded in a Church in Perugia, Italy, performed during the Umbria Jazz Festival. She even released a critically acclaimed album of Christmas songs, Carla’s Christmas Carols (2009), although its track list included an original composition titled “Hell’s Bells,” which she described to an NPR interviewer as a carol for people who don’t go to heaven. “Everything’s going wrong in that piece. It’s sort of like hell — what hell must be, I thought. I have these little scenarios that amuse me as I’m writing.”
The imaginative narrative quality in some of Bley's works is often a concrete source of inspiration for Bley's music in its own right. The stories she tells through her compositions and arrangements range from abstract and bizarre to human and personal. Escalator Over the Hill revolves around strange happenings in a hotel populated by even stranger individuals. Each one of the instrumentalists in the ensemble, credited as the Jazz Composer's Orchestra, plays an active role in its storyline. A polar opposite is represented by "Saints Alive!" from Andando el Tiempo, a subtle waltz inspired by the scenario of a group of old ladies sitting on a porch on a cool evening, gossiping. On this track, Bley, Swallow and Sheppard are the three old ladies and the imagined set-up provides a narrative structure to their musical interplay that feels like a colloquial ladies’ chit-chat.
Theatricality is an equally important element in Bley’s role as a performer, beginning with Bley’s own characteristic outlook, with her straight blonde hair and her matchstick thin figure. A 1979 issue of the Montreal Gazette featured a report from a Carla Bley concert and stated, "Bley, looking like an underweight rag doll in her loose-fitting pink dress, runs between her piano or organ and center stage, her hands flexed into claws, conducting, it seems, by impetuosity." The same report also commented on the comedic behaviors of the band as a whole, stating that they "sucked on beer bottles, they played with puppets, they kidded each other over supposed mistakes and they provided a sometimes breathtaking, sometimes hypnotic display of intricate arrangements."
Bley’s career as a composer really took off in 1955, when she decided to move to New York City on a whim, apparently inspired to attend a Miles Davis concert at Café Bohemia. Soon after that, she started working as a cigarette girl at the notorious New York City night club Birdland. Founded in 1949, Birdland became an epicenter of American music in the ‘50s. During its golden age, many jazz greats performed there regularly, including Count Basie, Anita O’Day, Bud Powell, Stan Getz, Lester Young and many more. By working there, she had the opportunity to learn directly from these artists every night and would listen to them attentively. Bley has credited her time at the Birdland as constituting her formal education. It may not have been formal by any conventional means but it was, perhaps, the best.
Birdland was where she met pianist Paul Bley. The two became a couple shortly after their meeting. At the time, he was looking for less traditionally rooted material to play with his band and encouraged her to write for him. He was also responsible for introducing her to the second stage of her personalized educative process, when she followed him to Los Angeles where his band had landed a long-term engagement at The Hillcrest Club. The Paul Bley Quintet included drummer Billy Higgins, bassist Charlie Haden, trumpeter Don Cherry and saxophonist Ornette Coleman. Carla Bley’s exposure to free playing on a nightly basis would go on to influence her writing for many years.
Shortly after returning to New York City, her reputation started to grow among the exponents of the New York jazz scene. Many artists, including Jimmy Giuffrè and George Russell, recorded her compositions. Around this time, she also met Steve Swallow, who would play a vital part in her growth as an instrumentalist. They had been collaborating for over 20 years before the release of their album Duets (1988). Around this time, Bley seemed determined to put her own piano playing at the forefront. The warm atmosphere and relaxing vibes of the album provided her with enough security to expose herself and evolve as an instrumentalist. Not to mention that the chemistry she shares with Swallow is remarkable. Just by listening and without glancing at the cover artwork, it’s obvious that the two were sharing something special.
Her playing on Andando el Tiempo is, arguably, better than ever. Her typical quirk is slightly subsided for something much deeper and more intimate. The songs set up great interactions between the three musicians, with strong statements by Swallow and Sheppard. Instead of one upstaging the other, all three function like a tight unit, a three-headed monster, a well-oiled machine. Their remarkable mutual understanding and familiarity with one another allows them to delve upon delicate themes in a heartfelt, painful and emotional way.
The album’s opening title track, a three-part suite inspired by the trials and tribulations of addiction, is particularly powerful. The first part of the song, aptly titled “Sin Fin,” (“Endless” in English) is defined by a sad tango-like rhythm and a seven-bar harmonic sequence that seems capable of spiraling onward endlessly. In the liner notes, Bley writes “’Sin Fin’ is the realization that the endless cycle of medication to stay free from anxiety and pain is becoming insufferable.” The second part, titled “Potacion de Guaya,” is also founded on a soft tango rhythm, but comes across as even more somber and sad. She describes it as a representation of “the ongoing sorrow felt by everyone affected.” The third and final section, “Camino al Volver,” ends the track in uplifting hopefulness. This is evoked by its freer structure. While the track is still based on a Latin American rhythm, it leaves plenty of room for each of the members of the trio to play both in unison and as individuals, only occasionally playing one or two carefully placed reoccurring notes to prevent it from getting out of hand. It’s a type of controlled chaos. As mathematically precise as it sounds, it is ultimately just as vulnerable.
Over the years, Bley has kept a healthy habit of staying busy and working on a variety of different projects at the same time. At 80, nothing seems to have changed in these regards. Rather than resting on her laurels, she is as active now as she has ever been. The release of Andando el Tiempo on ECM and upcoming tour dates with the trio is only part of what will keep her busy for the next number of months. She has a forthcoming album with the Liberation Music Orchestra, which will be out on Impulse on June 14. It will be titled Time Life and include two of the last performances by Charlie Haden. In addition, she is currently working on “La Leçon Française” (“The French Lesson”), an oratorio for big band and boys’ choir, which she has called her biggest work to date and is expected to be released on ECM next year.
Words by: Matt Micucci