Carla Bley, Jazz Composer, Arranger and Provocateur, Dies at 87 - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/17/arts/music/carla-bley-dead.html
j’ai adoré le premier « Liberation music orchestra » dont elle a écrit les arrangements. Bien sûr le grand délire 70’s de « Escalator Over The Hill », et surtout le disque grand public « Dinner Music » que j’ai régulièrement écouté depuis cinquante ans.
Et j’ai eu la chance de voir Carla Bley avec Steve Swallow et Andy Sheppard au Théâtre de Caen. bye bye Madame.
Ms. Bley’s influential body of work included delicate chamber miniatures and rugged, blaring fanfares, with a lot of varied terrain in between. She was branded an avant-gardist early in her career, but that term applied more to her slyly subversive attitude than to the formal character of her music, which always maintained a place for tonal harmony and standard rhythm.
Within that given frame, Ms. Bley found plenty of room to confound expectations and harbor contradictions. In the 2011 biography “Carla Bley,” Amy C. Beal described her music as “vernacular yet sophisticated, appealing yet cryptic, joyous and mournful, silly and serious at the same time.”
Certainly, few composers in Ms. Bley’s generation were as prolific or polymorphic in their output while projecting an identifiable point of view. She wrote elegant, drifting songs that became jazz standards, like “Ida Lupino” and “Lawns”; yearning, cinematic big-band pieces, like “Fleur Carnivore”; iconoclastic rearrangements of national anthems and classical fare; and unwieldy, uncategorizable projects like her jazz-rock opera “Escalator Over the Hill.”
Originally issued on three LPs, “Escalator Over the Hill” was named album of the year by the weekly British publication Melody Maker in 1973, the same year it won a Grand Prix du Disque, France’s most prestigious award for musical recordings. With a surrealistic libretto by the poet Paul Haines, a cast including some of the era’s leading jazz renegades and vocals by Linda Ronstadt and Jack Bruce of the rock band Cream, it captured the woolly, insubordinate spirit of the age, just as it consolidated the elements of Ms. Bley’s style.
Jazz was undergoing a creative revolution in the 1960s — and, partly by association, Ms. Bley found herself at the turbulent center of an emerging avant-garde. She was a founder of the Jazz Composers Guild, which sought better working conditions for musicians. Though short-lived, it yielded a productive institution: the Jazz Composer’s Orchestra, which Ms. Bley formed with the Austrian trumpeter Michael Mantler. After she divorced Mr. Bley in 1967, she and Mr. Mantler married.
Ms. Bley is survived by a daughter from that marriage, the vocalist, pianist and composer Karen Mantler, and by Mr. Swallow, her partner of more than 30 years.
Ms. Bley had more than fleeting contact with rock: In 1975 she joined a band with Mr. Bruce on bass and Mick Taylor of the Rolling Stones on guitar. And she wrote all the songs for “Nick Mason’s Fictitious Sports,” a 1981 album credited to Mr. Mason, the drummer in Pink Floyd, with lead vocals by Robert Wyatt, formerly of Soft Machine.
During the 2010s, Ms. Bley focused a good deal of her energies on the Liberation Music Orchestra, preserving Charlie Haden’s musical vision as well as his commitment to left-leaning social activism: She included a new version of her late-’60s composition “Silent Spring” on the orchestra’s fifth album, “Time/Life,” released in 2016. As a performer she worked mainly with Mr. Sheppard and Mr. Swallow, touring internationally and releasing several albums for ECM.
