Carla Bley

In the summer of 1978 or '79, I took my little brother with me to Copley Square in Boston to see The Carla Bley Band. I was a student at Boston University at the time, living in the "student ghetto" of Alston-Brighton; he was a teenager from suburban Winchester, Massachusetts.  Bley and her band were playing as part of the city's Sunmmerfest series of free concerts in municipal places.

Although I was a big fan of the genre, I think it was my brother's first exposure to jazz music. It was certainly his first exposure to modern jazz in a live setting. He really liked the show, although it didn't noticeably change his taste in music. After the show, he went on listening mostly to the same stoner rock he and his friends had liked before. 

His tastes did mature with age, though.  A decade or so later, he took me to hear the band Birdsongs of the Mesozoic at an art gallery in Gloucester, Mass.  It was my first exposure to post-rock music, but that's a whole different story.

A year or so after the Copley Square show, The Carla Bley Band played the Paradise Theater in Boston, a rock-music venue. Their status at the time was such that it wasn't at all surprising to see them appear at the Paradise. The audience treated them like rock stars, calling out the names of performers and soloists as if they were members of The Who. My memory of the show is hazy like all my memories from the 1970s (like all my memories, period), but as I recall she had an all-star band that included Michael Mantler, Alan Braufman, Gary Windo, and Bob Stewart on various reeds and brass, and local hero D. Sharpe on the drums (Sharpe was the original drummer in Jonathan Richman's Modern Lovers).

I somehow managed to go nearly 40 years without seeing Carla Bley perform live again after the Paradise show, but then I saw her trio with bassist Steve Swallow and saxophonist Andy Sheppard at Big Ears in 2019. 

As you've probably heard, Carla Bley died yesterday at age 87. Impermanence is swift.

If you don't have any of her records, her music's available on Spotify and YouTube and other streaming services. There are better writers than I who've discussed her music elsewhere and I won't try to improve on what's already been said. Besides, words describing music are like fingers pointing at the moon and not the actual thing. You have to hear to understand.

But I will mention the amount of mischievous humor that surfaces in her music. She took her music seriously, but what she expressed with her music reflected the playfulness in her personality.  Her composition Musique Mecanique I opens with the band sounding like a wheezy and broken wind-up music box. Over the nearly 10 minutes of the piece, that creaky toy seems to grow into larger and larger versions of itself until by the climax it sounds like some extremely large, out-of-control, industrial monstrosity, which of course breaks down at the very end back to the little old music box of the beginning. 

Spangled Banner Minor and Other Patriotic Songs, true to its title, sounds like the American and other national anthems as seen through a kaleidoscope. Her take on gospel music is titled The Lord Is Listenin' To Ya, Hallelujah!. She has compositions titled Song Sung Long and Wrong Key Donkey. Her composition that appears at the end of the first side of Charlie Haden's Liberation Music Orchestra is titled The Ending to the First Side.  And of course, Blues in 12 Bars is followed by Blues in 12 Other Bars.

If all this makes her music sound a little silly and frivolous, you've got the wrong impression.  She was a gifted and expressive composer, and her playing could equally express sorrow and sadness as well as mirth and mischief.  A world with Carla Bley no longer in it seems like a world a little less bright, a little less fun. 

Her age (83 at the time) showed at her 2019 set at Big Ears - not in her playing, which was as sharp and crisp as ever, but in her posture. She sat slumped over the piano, her head hanging down over the keys. She barely moved - that is, until she stood up between songs and walked over to a microphone to explain the dirty joke behind the title Sex with Birds.

R.I.P., Carla.