Carla Bley

Acknowledgments

ix acknowledgments I wish to sincerely thank Carla Bley and Steve Swallow for their warm and generous support of this project, for taking so much time to talk with me at their beautiful home, and for providing me with much appreciated materials. I am also indebted to the following people for talking with me about their work with Bley: Gary Burton, Charlie Haden, George Lewis, Karen Mantler, Michael Mantler, Timothy Marquand, Roswell Rudd,“Blue” Gene Tyranny, and Gary Valente. Several friends and correspondents helped me in various scholarly and practical ways while I was writing this book, and I wish to thank them as well: Gordon Beeferman , Amy Benson, Ran Blake, Michael Byron, Eric Drott, Guy Ducornet, Daniel Goode, Jo Hayward-Haines, Ellie Hisama, Jim and Zona Hostetler, Douglas Kahn, Paul Machlis, Jeff Magee, Leo McFadden, Noah Meites, Myra Melford, Cameron Mozee-Baum, Kate Peoples, Benjamin Piekut, Larry Polansky, Douglas Repetto, Eric Richards, Suzanne Roodman, Gayle Sherwood, Jeffrey Taylor, Ma’ayan Tsadka, Kent Underwood, and all my students who have taken an interest in this project. I am especially grateful to Ralf Dietrich for introducing me to the wonderful world of Carla Bley’s music in the first place. Laurie Matheson at University of Illinois Press has provided support and sound advice from the moment I mentioned this idea, and the encouraging yet cautionary voices of the two anonymous readers of my proposal were ever in my mind while writing. The scholars Sherrie Tucker and George Lewis offered much appreciated commentary on the manuscript in the later stages. In addition, I am thankful for the help of Edward Berger and Annie Kuebler at the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University.The University of California at Santa Cruz provided a greatly appreciated faculty research grant. During my research sabbatical in the autumn of 2009, the Center for Jazz Studies and the Department of Music at Columbia University graciously sponsored a public colloquium that x Acknowledgments gave me an opportunity to begin sharing my research on Bley with a wider audience . Finally, I wish to thank my colleague Eric Porter and the graduate students in his jazz historiography seminar, taught at the University of California at Santa Cruz, during the spring of 2009. I appreciated their willingness to let me eavesdrop on their conversations, and I wrote this book armed with their insights. carla bley i-xii_1-116_Beal.indd 11 9/14/11 8:36 AM “I went west over toward Willow,” what a country locution; the place was getting to him, “and I was up this one hill and heard some music. I have an ear for music.” “Do you?” “Yup. Heard someone pounding out some complex damn tangled chords on a piano and came downhill following the sound. There was this big modern angled house, slate, pale wood, high triangular windows. I circled it. The music was coming from the basement. Someone was working through a sequence of these really dense tenfingered chords—one chord, another, then a third, didn’t like it, tried it another way, then another, then back, thrash thrash thrash, really beating the shit out of the music. It took me awhile to recognize the style and figure out that it was Carla Bley.” “Did you meet her?” Iris asked him, and the Bear was pleased to hear whatmighthave been a note ofjealousyin the musicofhervoice. “Not today, but I did meet her one time when I was a cub and Jones took me down to Birdland on a leash. She was a cigarette girl at the time. I don’tknow ifshe remembersme from then, butrecentlyI heard through Jones she’d like me in her band. I had to say no, of course.” “Why didn’t you go in and introduce yourself?” “Today? Naw. I just listened to her thrashing these chords out and thought, hey, if it’s this much work for her maybe it’s okay it’s hard for me sometimes. That’s intelligent, right?” “In a touching, rudimentary way,” Iris said. “How I was finally sure it was Carla Bley’s house, there were long tufts of frizzy blond hair tied to the chickenwire all around the garden—” “That’s strange.” “I thinkit’ssupposed to keep the deer from eating hervegetables.” —Rafi Zabor, The Bear Comes Home ...