Unpacking Big Ears, Part VIII: Another Master

Anyway, back to Big Ears.  As we recall, we were unpacking some of the Masters that we saw perform there before we got distracted with some stuff or another.

Last week, as part of our Dreaming of the Masters series, we posted a very aggressive piece of music fronted by the prodigious Pharoah Sanders, and somewhere deep in the background was a 32-year-old Carla Bley.  At Big Ears last March, we saw an 82-year-old Bley, still composing, still performing, and still provoking (she announced that the title of one of the pieces was Sex With Birds).

It was a quiet and reflective set, beautifully set in Knoxville's lovely Tennessee Theater. The set mostly focused on the near-telepathic rapport Bley has with with the band, particularly long-time musical partner and now husband Steve Swallow.  Here she is in Jerusalem last October with the same trio she performed with in Knoxville, a pretty representative video of how she sounded at Big Ears.

In case you want to see and hear a younger Carla, here she is in 1970 with John McLaughlin and Jack Bruce.

And here she is in 1989 in a duet with Steve Swallow.

Carla has quite the remarkable story.  Born in Oakland, she moved to New York at seventeen and became a cigarette girl at Birdland, where she met and later married the pianist Paul Bley, for whom she wrote some of his best songs.  In the 60s, she was involved in some of the most politically active of the New York avant garde, such as the Jazz Composers Orchestra (last week's raucous post), and she recorded the 1971 cult classic Escalator Over The Hill, a jazz opera released as a "chronotransduction" with words by drummer Paul Haines and music by Bley.  Side note: Haines daughter, Emily, is now the frontwoman for the band Metric.

In the 70s, she was received almost like a rock star, and we saw her perform a free set in Boston's Copley Square and a nightclub show at the Paradise Theater, where the audience called out the name of her sidemen ("Windo!") like they do guitar heroes in rock bands.  In addition to John McLaughlin and Jack Bruce, she's performed with Robert Wyatt and Pink Floyd's Nick Mason.  Mason's solo album, Fictitious Sports, was entirely written by Bley and performed by her regular band with Mason as a guest, making it in effect a Carla Bley album in all but name. She even performed with the Golden Palominos on their 1985 album, Visions of Excess.

And now, all these decades later, she's a highly respected elder stateswoman for improvisational music in general and jazz in particular.  She still has a great sense of humor and she can still spellbind a packed audience with the sheer beauty of her music. A feminist icon and a musical pioneer, and at Big Ears we got to see her again nearly 40 years after those Boston sets of the 1970s.  Sweet.