1/7/2024 0 Comments Carla bley spouse![]() ![]() After Haden’s death in 2014 Carla Bley carried on with the Orchestra. Haden’s Telegraph obituary described the Orchestra as “a combination of free ensemble playing and radical politics” their debut album consisted mainly of republican songs from the Spanish Civil War and ended with We Shall Overcome. She was the original conductor and arranger for the Liberation Music Orchestra, formed with Charlie Haden in 1969, which grew out of the protests against the Vietnam War. That’s so wonderful! Anything that happened that was out of the ordinary, I appreciated.” “When I first toured Europe with my own band, the audience threw things at me – I mean fruit mostly, but bottles too,” she said in 2016. They also set up the non-profit New Music Distribution Service to find new audiences for jazz, and Carla Bley started several record labels, such as JCOA and Watt.īut acceptance of her music was not universal. It soon foundered, but led to her establishing the Jazz Composer’s Orchestra with the Austrian trumpeter Michael Mantler, whom she married in 1967 after amicably divorcing Paul Bley. Times were also changing politically, and she co-founded the Jazz Composers Guild to fight for better conditions for musicians (though the bandleader Sun Ra objected to her presence as a woman). “I wanted to object to as many things as possible that were wrong in the world of jazz and change the whole system that existed in the music world,” she said. As in other creative fields, the avant garde was moving into the mainstream, and Carla Bley was a key figure in that process. The couple moved back to New York, where they dived headfirst into the burgeoning and turbulent free jazz scene. Her upbringing was religious – “I was doused in religion, soaked in it, terrified of going to hell” – but in her teens she rebelled and ran off to be a competitive roller-skater, having dropped out of school at 15. She was born Lovella May Borg on in Oakland, California her father Emil Borg was a piano teacher “for the first six years of my life I heard nothing but badly played scales” – as well as a church organist and choir master, while her mother Arline, née Anderson, died of heart failure when the girl was eight. entirely bewildering and utterly intoxicating.” ![]() It was, said The Wire magazine, “a bloated mess – which contains some of the most exciting music she’s ever put her name to. Recorded over three years, the triple album was wildly inventive and bursting with musical ideas, drawing on such influences as classical, Indian and rock music. The critic John Fordham described it as “the Sgt Pepper of new jazz”. Named album of the year by Melody Maker, and winner of the Grand Prix du Disque in France, it had a surreal libretto by the poet Paul Haines, while its huge roster of musicians included Paul Jones of Manfred Mann and Linda Ronstadt on vocals, Jack Bruce on bass and John McLaughlin on guitar. Her magnum opus was the 1971 jazz opera Escalator Over the Hill. I wanted to rush out and buy the records.” Her music is a bold conversation, full of jokes and twists, dictating the rhythm of everything else. She found another Telegraph fan three years later when the radio critic Gillian Reynolds tuned in to a Radio 3 series on Carla Bley by the playwright and jazz nut Alan Plater, Strange Arrangement: “She is slow fire and thin ice. Carla Bley is a not unworthy successor to those men.” ![]() The album, he wrote, was in the vein of Mingus’s more extended works: “It has the same shouting climaxes, lyrical interludes, episodic structures and even a similar partiality for growling horns. Carla Bley, who has died aged 87, was one of the great figures of modern jazz, a pianist, composer and bandleader who explored the further reaches of free jazz as well as the mainstream, including excursions into rock music while she also assembled small groups, it was her work with bigger outfits that set her apart.Ī 1991 Telegraph review by Martin Gayford of her album The Very Big Carla Bley Band put her firmly in the tradition of experimentalists, a line stretching from Duke Ellington through to Charles Mingus. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |