He had a cool demeanor about him. One can imagine Bley and Eicher sharing a glass and thinking about how they have both done so much to shape a certain way to integrate European classical music into American-based improvisation, a process that began with Giuffre’s tracking “Jesus Maria” all those years ago.The first American distributor for ECM was New Music Distribution Service.
Thomas Morgan and Rudy Royston Bill Frisell, electric guitar She told me about the early-sixties avant-garde: “In free playing, everybody played as loud as they could and as fast as they could and as high as they could. Carl Ruggles’s hymn “Exaltation” leads into “Religious Experience” with Wolfgang Puschnig’s expressionist alto saxophone repeatedly interrupted by an absurd yet moving quote of Handel’s “Hallelujah,” linking finally to Bley’s own dominating fanfare “Major.”In recent decades, Bley’s own piano is finally being heard in an exposed context, mostly duo and trio with Steve Swallow. Elias Stemeseder & Felix HenkelhausenDjango Bates’ Belovèd Bird, w. Petter Eldh, Peter Bruun
It contains fifteen avant-garde compositions familiar to anyone who loves the divergent currents of early 60s jazz. My small home-town library also had a copy of “The Carla Bley Band: European Tour 1977,” a superb disk of rowdy horn soloists carousing through instantly memorable Bley compositions and arrangements. “It was sort of like a sideshow. However, the three most recent projects bearing her name as leader are exceptionally strong and deserve wider appreciation.“Andando el Tiempo” translates as, “with the passing of time,” and the new suite leading off the second Lugano recording seems to view the continuum from a great height. With this in mind, Carla Bley’s A true giant of the free jazz movement, one wonders how American jazz music would have evolved if one Lovella May Borg hadn’t travelled from Oakland to NYC. One day Paul Bley came to Carla and said, “I need six tunes by tomorrow night.” There’s an obvious thread of European classical music in early Bley compositions, and this fit perfectly with the sixties jazz avant-garde. Whether it was her work with the pioneering Jazz Composers Guild, Don Cherry, Paul Bley, Gary Burton, Nick Mason and countless, many others (I could go on forever doing this) there was always something genuinely inviting about her take on whatever jazz music she was turning inside out.So, you can imagine what the iconic ECM label must have thought when she showed up one day, in 1985, with the masters of In the summer of 1985, Carla and Steve became more than just musical partners but romantic ones. (a triple album, nearly two hours) stylistically eclectic work fuses productive and original jazz and rock musicians working at the time. Their lawn boasts an old oak tree and a massive chain-link dinosaur made by Steve Heller at Fabulous Furniture, in nearby Boiceville. She always hand-picked her musicians that have a certain character.
At 17, in 1955, Carla hitchhiked from California to New York, where she got a job as a cigarette girl in Birdland, a leading jazz venue. . By nature of
The title track is especially moving. Ray Anderson, Marty Ehrlich, Wayne Horvitz, Jerome Harris JIM BLACK TRIO feat. I thought he had a nice groove, too.” After so many albums that emphasized humor and the avant-garde, in the mid-eighties Bley shocked her fans by embracing a smooth-jazz and Motown influence. From the first notes onward, I was never quite the same again.The novelist and musician Wesley Stace has a similar story: “Aged sixteen, and full only of rock and pop music, I came upon Carla Bley by chance through a Pink Floyd solo project, Nick Mason’s ‘Fictitious Sports,’ which I only bought because the vocals were by my favorite singer, Robert Wyatt, once of Soft Machine. She’s everything I want from instrumental music.”In the last half decade, many of Bley’s remaining peers from the early years have died: Paul Bley, Charlie Haden, Roswell Rudd, Ornette Coleman, Paul Motian.