Jazz pianist and composer Carla Bley dies at 87

Composer and jazz pianist Carla Bley died Tuesday at her home in Willow, New York, her partner, bassist Steve Swallow, said.

“After a career spanning more than 70 years and nearly 60 albums, composer and pianist Carla Bley left us on Tuesday morning at the age of 87,” the musician said in a statement, as quoted by The New York Times.

Carla Bley, an “irrepressibly original” creator, is “responsible for more than 60 years of insightful provocation in and around jazz,” writes the North American newspaper.

According to Steve Swallow, quoted by The New York Times, Carla Bley died of a brain tumor.

Lovella Mae Borg 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. Blay, however, did almost all of the training herself.

She discovered jazz at age 12 thanks to vibraphonist Lionel Hampton, who brought her to New York, the center of the jazz scene at the time, when she was still 17. There she met such musicians as Miles Davis and John Coltrane, Dizzy Gillespie and Count Basie , a regular musician at the Birdland club where Carla Bley began selling cigarettes just to listen to her heroes.

It didn’t take long to get noticed. First, the Canadian pianist Paul Blay, whom she married in 1957 and who inspired her to write music. Then pianist George Russell, who invited her to write for his sextet, and 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 eventually became the Jazz Composer’s Orchestra, which Carla Bley founded with Austrian trumpeter Michael Mantler, her second husband.

In 1969, he began composing for the Liberation Music Orchestra under double bassist Charlie Haden, whom he later joined and with whom he recorded José Afonso’s “Grândola, vila morena” for the album “The Ballad of the Fallen”, 1983.

In 1971, he completed the opera Escalator Over the Hill, which was premiered and recorded by such musicians as Jack Bruce, Don Cherry, Gato Barbieri, John McLaughlin, Dewey Redman and Charlie Haden – names who came from both projects and remained close throughout all the time. subsequent decades in their big bands, as did others such as Sharon Freeman, Paul Motion, Gary Valente, Dewey Redman, Jim Pepper. Jazz soloists and musicians of great orchestras led by Carla Bley.

In the early 1970s, Carla Bley had already gained recognition as a composer. A subsequent Guggenheim Fellowship enabled him to found the Watt record label in 1972, through which he published almost his entire discography for nearly 40 years, distributing it through ECM Records, a “label” with which he remained associated until not the end.

An exception may be Nick Mason’s Fictitious Sports, a 1979-1981 rock-leaning album written with and for the Pink Floyd drummer as part of a project published by the former Columbia that also featured guitarist Mick Taylor and musician Robert Wyatt. , then known as Soft Machine.

The 1990s were largely devoted to big bands, to which he returned later, after the death of Charlie Haden in 2014, when he resumed the Liberation Music Orchestra, his social activities and a new version of “Silent Spring”, which he wrote in the 1960s for the tribute album “Time/Life”, released in 2016.

The name of Carla Bley became known and constant in Portugal at the turn of the 1980s and 1990s, first thanks to festivals such as the Jazz em Agosto of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, then, little by little, everywhere, performing in Lisbon, Porto, Coimbra. Espinho, at the main jazz festivals of the country, in the main venues, from Gulbenkian to the Casa da Música, where he performed with Orquestra Jazz de Matosinhos.

In the last decade he has worked mainly with his partner of more than 30 years, Steve Swallow, and with saxophonist Andy Sheppard, who came from his last big bands; He almost always worked in threes, sometimes performing more intimate programs, sometimes more extensive, never forgetting the restlessness, humor and silence that he also liked to use.

With a discography including titles such as Tropical Appetites, Dinner Music, Mechanical Music, Social Studies, I Hate to Sing, Night Glow, Fleur Carnivore, The Very Big . Carla Bley Band”, “Big Band Theory” and “Unusual Chamber Music”, as well as “Songs with Legs” in a trio, back in the 1990s, with Sheppard and Swallow, and “The Lost Chords” with Paolo Fresu. , since 2005.

After “Carla’s Christmas Carols” in 2009 with the brass quintet Partyka, three albums followed in the intimacy of those closest to them, always Sheppard and Swallow, with some of Bley’s most simple and seductive compositions: “Trios” 2013, “Andando el Tiempo” 2015 and the latest, 2020, “Life Goes On.”