![]() ![]() I’ve moved through many communities of players, and I’ve tried to provide each one with the perfect setting for his or her voice. “And I almost always write for specific musicians. I’m strongly impacted by what I hear,” Bley explained via email from her home in Willow, New York. “I’ve been moved to try new things in music by the ever-changing world around me. Jimmy Giuffre, Art Farmer, Steve Lacy, Steve Kuhn and Attila Zoller all made use of her talents.Įver since her auspicious emergence on the New York scene, Bley’s distinction as a modern composer with a voice all her own has continued unabated. Within the span of a decade, the number of influential bandleaders recording her work had multiplied. George Russell, a leading light in the codification of jazz harmony, included her “Bent Eagle” on his 1960 album Stratusphunk his imprimatur in particular granted the 24-year-old Bley legitimacy as a composer. Paul Bley wasn’t the only prominent musician who championed Carla’s early work. He was becoming a leader in his own right, and his 1958 album Solemn Meditation would give the budding composer her first recorded track: the precocious “O Plus One.” By the early 1960s, she would be writing most of the material on her then-husband’s albums. In Bley’s story, the club was Birdland and the pianist was Paul Bley, who, by the time they married in 1957, had already proven his jazz mettle as a sideman for Charlie Parker, Lester Young and Chet Baker. Together, they absorb the new music in the air and claim a foremost spot in its vanguard. In hindsight, the serendipity of Bley’s career is the stuff of movie plots: Freakishly talented composer-cum-cigarette-girl meets a rising-star pianist at a Manhattan nightclub frequented by Hollywood glitterati. ![]() What were the chances in the 1950s that a teenaged girl from Oakland, California, would land smack in the middle of New York’s vibrant jazz scene, much less emerge as one of its most lasting compositional voices? Bley, who turned 85 this year, enters the DownBeat Hall of Fame after more than six decades of writing, recording and performing. Given the tenor of the times, Carla Bley’s extraordinary career shouldn’t have happened. Carla Bley, the 2021 critics’ choice for the DownBeat Hall of Fame (Photo: Mark Sheldon)
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