Carla Bley

Introduction: "Like a Mockingbird"

1 Introduction “Like a Mockingbird” in rafi zabor’s jazz-historical novel The Bear Comes Home,a saxophone-playing talking bear moves to Shady,in the NewYork Catskills. The sudden presence of Carla Bley in this otherwise mostly fictional novel, and the explicit references to certain facts about her life history and persona—a job as a “cigarette girl” at Birdland; an isolated life in Willow, New York; frizzy blond hair; avid gardening—suggest her almost legendary status within the jazz community . The Bear’s obvious relief in discovering that composing is hard work for the enigmatic Bley, clearly an artist he admires and respects, speaks further to the reputation she maintains as a serious artist, one who toils inexhaustibly over her craft. Fiction aside, neither jazz histories nor histories of American music in general have included Carla Bley in their dominant narratives. Perhaps some of this inattention is due to her music’s hovering in a gray space between appealing, accessible works and complex, avant-garde ones. Bley’s music offers a staggering amount of variety, and for the most part, her compositional style is impossible to classify. She makes music that is vernacular yet sophisticated, appealing yet cryptic , joyous and mournful, silly and serious at the same time. Bley is full of contradictions , both when she talks about her music and when she composes. Her music takes us to jazz clubs but also to church, ballrooms, rock concerts, festival 2 c a r l a b l e y | Introduction stages, punk dives, cabarets, and coffeehouses. She speaks many musical languages fluently—“like a mockingbird,” as the bassist Charlie Haden, her lifelong friend, puts it—but holds citizenship papers in no one style.1 She writes in many identifiable idioms of music with both respect and irreverence, yet she also composes original, idiosyncratic works that can be identifiable only as hers alone. Bley is a prolific and influential American composer. And though her career, which began in the 1950s, has taken place largely within the venues and institutions of the jazz world, her music is often characterized as Third Stream, postmodernist , or just plain experimental, these labels due in part to her ability to write conventional big-band charts as well as classically influenced chamber works. Her compositions fall into a number of overlapping categories: lead sheets and short jazz tunes designed for improvising, completely notated and orchestrated chamber music, big-band ensemble parts, and larger works containing multiple connected parts (e.g., concept albums and suites). Her oeuvre varies widely in structure and style, from the eleven-beat-long Walking Woman to the monumental 105-minute “jazz opera” Escalator over the Hill. Much of her work explores unusual approaches to harmony, reveals a fondness for quotation, and revels in juxtapositions of tonal, tuneful textures with extended sections of chaotic freedom. A modest yet skilled pianist, Bley loves traditional instrumental combinations, such as the brass chorale , as well as bizarre sound effects (mechanical instruments, untrained voices singing, etc.). She moves fluidly between improvisational and nonimprovisational performance practices, in both traditional jazz and nonjazz contexts. Like any experienced bandleader, she displays a confident respect for the virtuosic players who bring her music to life. The results of all these ingredients are whimsical, baffling, entertaining, emotionally evocative, erudite, and profound. Though Bley is first and foremost a composer, her career has taken many forms.2 She is a pianist and organist (and occasional vocalist and saxophonist), bandleader, arranger, collaborator, organizer, and businesswoman. She has been called “Countess Basie” by her band members, who value her leadership, and “Bleythoven” by Steve Swallow, who points to her gifts as a composer. In a musical tradition historically dominated by African American men, the self-taught, self-effacing Caucasian Carla Bley is an anomaly in the world of jazz, especially as a bandleader.3 This status alone suggests that Bley is worthy of study simply because she is unique. To be sure, an examination of her life and work can help us critically reexamine the role and historiographical treatment of women in jazz, but an “exceptional woman” strategy would sell her music short. Instead, this book offers a straightforward discussion of her life story and compositional style with the hope that it will stimulate deeper examinations of her work. 3 Bley herself says that questions about gender put her on the defensive.“When these subjects come up,” she continues,“it’s like...