Carla Bley
Life goes on: and then one day....
I am onstage more than fifty years…Sometimes I do shows every night for weeks. Still, it never doesn’t come. Starts four hours before. I don’t even try to fight it anymore. I know it will always be there.
-Mikhail Baryshnikov on his stage fright
I listened to an interview with Carla Bley the other day. She said that she didn’t like to perform. I’ve heard her mention this before. I’m not sure she ever used the word “hated” to perform, but I feel that was what she was saying or wanted to say. I understand that completely.
As a kid, I was a tap dancer. I loved to dance but hated to perform. I had terrible stage fright. I thought I’d get over it as I got older and better, but I never did. I wished it would go away but it only got worse as I got better and the crowds got bigger. The strange thing is it didn’t stop me from performing. I couldn’t stop - my love of tap dancing was greater than my fear of performing. So performing became for me a necessary evil. At 17 years old, when I joined the military, I put away my tap shoes and never pulled them out again (actually, I did once in a bar in Grand Marias, Minnesota – but that’s a different story). After all those years, my performing days were over.
Born Lovella May Borg in Oakland, California in 1936 to Christian fundamentalist parents of Swedish descent, Carla Bley became a performer as a young girl. She remembers holding a little tin cup while singing This Little Light of Mine and people put coins in it. Shortly after her mother died at age six, she gave up the church. Her performing days were over.
She dropped out of high school in 10th grade and became a roller skater. It was a serious hobby and had thoughts of becoming a professional. Then, at 17 years old, with a loaf of bread and a borrowed credit card, Lovella May Borg (I honestly don’t know when she became “Carla”) hitched a ride with the son of the concertmaster at the Boston Symphony Orchestra and drove to New York City. He wanted to hear Miles Davis play at the Café Bohemia. When she got there, she took a job as a cigarette girl at Birdland, where she heard all the jazz musicians. She got a hotel room about a block away, where a lot of the musicians stayed. She also sold stuffed animals and was a photography girl at clubs. At this point in her life, she was just a listener.
However, it was during these club years that she decided she wanted to be more than just a listener. Before long, she met and married pianist Paul Bley, and Lovella May Borg became Carla Bley. She got him his green card (he was from Canada) and took his last name. This was in the late 1950s. With Paul, she started to write compositions and in her own words, “I was useful as a composer and arranger. Every time he needed a tune, he would ask me for one. One night he needed five tunes, and I came up with all five in one night.”
In a 2019 interview with Dan Ouellette, she shared that at the time she married Paul:
I didn’t value marriage or myself. No, but I got better a few years later when I started to play piano with Steve (Swallow). He said, you know how to read, so here’s the Real Book. Play the melody with your right hand and with your left hand you have to read symbols — and then have to deal with letters and numbers. Oh my God. So I slowly learned how to play, and when I wanted to play I’d call him up. He was living in Connecticut with his wife and two kids. So he would come over when I told him I needed a lesson. But we had nothing romantic going on. In fact, with Paul and Michael (Mantler - an Austrian, who she also got a green card), there was no romance. I never married Steve which shows you I didn’t value marriage.
At the time, Steve Swallow was the bassist for Jimmy Giuffre’s trio, which included Paul Bley on piano. The Jimmy Giuffre 3 was a small corner of the new music explosion happening in New York City in the early 1960s. As the trio prepared for a new album, Carla was present at the rehearsals. Their album Fusion was recorded on August 4, 1961, on the Verve label and she contributed two songs: Jesus Maria and In the Mornings Out There. Interestingly, Fusion was remastered, remixed, and re-released by ECM in 1992 as a double album that included the trio's other 1961 Verve recording, Thesis. They are the oldest recordings in the ECM catalog. The Jimmy Giuffre 3 made a memorable impact on ECM founder Manfred Eicher. You can read more about him here:
During this time, Carla was a busy composer, charging $50 a song. She contributed the song Bent Eagle on George Russell’s Stratusphunk, recorded in October 1960. On Paul Bley’s Turning Point, recorded mostly in March 1964, she contributed four compositions. Then on Paul Bley’s ESP-Disk albums Barrage, recorded in October 1964, and Closer, recorded in December 1965, she contributed all but one composition. By the beginning of 1966, she was no longer a listener, now she was a composer; however, still not a performer.
In January 1966, during a European tour, she finally recorded what I think was her first record, Jazz Realities.
Recorded in the Netherlands and released on the Fontana label, She played piano and contributed half the compositions. She had finally become a reluctant performer.
On a second European tour in 1967, she played what she called “high energy hateful screaming music” with the West German free improvisers Peter Brötzmann and Peter Kowald. At the time, partly because of the aggressiveness of this music, she felt “mad at jazz.” Not only was she growing ambivalent about the expressive qualities of free jazz, but she also started to question her relationship to the African-American roots of jazz. As a result, she set out to cultivate a musical alliance with what she considered to be her true culture: European and European-American music.
In the summer of 1967, Bley’s first long-form composition, A Genuine Tong Funeral, was recorded by Gary Burton. It was her first full-scale project involving a larger ensemble and paved the way for her next major project with Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra, released by Impulse! in 1970. You can read more about that here:
This was followed by an even bigger project, the triple LP box set Escalator over the Hill, released in 1971 by JCOA Records with her score performed by the Jazz Composer’s Orchestra. In her own words, “Escalator Over the Hill also seems to thumb its nose at all musical authorities and institutions, particularly the recording industry. In this sense, it is perhaps the quintessential antiestablishment statement of its time.”
By the beginning of the 1970s, Carla Bley was still spending the vast majority of her time as a composer and arranger. As a performer, she remained well hidden behind an orchestra or large band. Throughout the 1970s and into the mid-1980s, I find most of her work interesting and at times inspiring, but her journey went off-track, perhaps swept up or drawn into the strong current of rock music.
I first heard about Carla Bley when her 1987 album Sextet came out. I was in California at the time, and it got a lot of air time on Herb Wong’s “Jazz Perspectives” show on KJAZ. I think that was a turning point in her journey. Beginning with Sextet and then Duets the following year, Steve Swallow was always right there by her side. It was in the duo format, where there’s nowhere to hide, that Carla Bley finally became a performer.
I have nothing to base this on except my intuition, but I think Steve Swallow had a tremendous impact on Carla Bley’s musical journey. It seems to me that he encouraged her to perform and helped her attain an artistic height that she may not have otherwise reached. They came together musically long before they became romantic couples in the summer of 1985. She caught his eye on their first meeting when he was a Yale student playing with Paul Bley at Bard College. Four years later, while living off $5-a-night gigs along Bleecker Street in the Village, he became a patron of Carla’s. For $50 (she recalled it was $25 for him), he commissioned her composition Silent Spring.
Here is Bley and Swallow demonstrating their deep connection on a wonderful performance of her lovely tune Lawns, the song Larry Willis helped make famous, and playing it every bit as beautifully as he did.
And here’s one more for the road. I think Carla Bley’s finest score is Birds of Paradise. Interestingly, this music pits the classically trained violinist against the full jazz orchestra. Here’s an interesting 20-minute documentary of a Birds of Prey rehearsal before a performance at the 1992 Glasgow International Jazz Festival:
Carla Bley always thought of herself as a writer, describing herself as 1% player and 99% composer. However, it was later in her journey when Manfred Eicher suggested she might record for ECM. He thought it would allow her to concentrate on being an artist. In an interview, she suggested it came to be something of a relief. Together with Swallow and British saxophonist Andy Sheppard, they toured and made four trio albums for ECM, allowing her to finally refine her art.
Performing with this trio, I think she finally came home - at peace with her piano playing in an environment where for so many years she struggled to find herself. That’s what makes these ECM sessions so special, and none more than her final album Life Goes On, recorded in May 2019.
About Life Goes On, Bley said, “That composition followed this illness I had and that I survived from. After that, I thought, ‘Life goes on.’ It’s a simple blues that sounds like real life. It’s hard playing these for just a trio and not a big band where I can play a tiny solo every three songs. Now I have to play a lot more. I have to learn how to play a decent solo.”
No more hiding behind the band. Now she is out front, totally open for everybody to see. And the results are beautiful. I wonder if she ever got over her form of stage fright. I like to think she did and conquered that demon. Well, I’m going to believe she did. The ECM trio sessions came all too late, but we can at least listen to them now and remember Carla.
Next week, on that Big River called Jazz, we’ll dig our paddles in and explore the world of Joe Henderson.
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