Remembering Carla Bley, the mother of modern jazz

Remembering Carla Bley, the mother of modern jazz

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Revolutionary and brilliant, Carla Bley was creativity without limits, the synonym of music in any dictionary.

“The Lost Chords find Paolo Fresu” . This is the title of the first Carla Bley album that fell into my hands. I have to admit that I bought an album practically blind, because although I was aware of the role that Carla Bley had played (and was still playing at that time) in the world of jazz, I had barely heard little or anything of what the world had offered this brilliant composer and pianist.

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As luck sometimes accompanies the brave, I was completely right. The album that found Bley with the Italian trumpeter, included the inseparable Andy Sheppard and Steve Swalow , accompanied on this occasion by Billy Drummond on drums. Since that happy encounter, with Bley’s records I follow the same method: I completely forget about their existence and let them be the ones who end up finding me. The last one, which responds to the name “Life goes on” ( 2020), is a trio miniature that is enjoyed with the same intensity as his great big band compositions.

Accustomed to losing and losing ourselves, to inevitable defeats and to platform music that devours everything, his death on October 17 leaves us somewhat more orphaned. Few women have meant so much to avant-garde jazz and musical modernity. She, who at the age of 17 began working as a cigarette-girl at Birdland in New York, among other reasons to be able to hear Count Basie’s Big Band live, would not take long to demonstrate her enormous capacity as a composer; first arranging songs for Paul Bley, whom she would marry in 1957, but a little later for the cream of jazz at the time, composing for names like Jimmy Giuffre, Art Farmer, Steve Lacy, Steve Kuhn and Attila Zoller.

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And not just composing. At the beginning of the 60s, it was common to see her on stage adding her piano to the band of names such as Don Cherry, Pharoah Sanders, Gato Barbieri, Paul Motian or Andrew Cyrille. That he was not going to settle for being next to, or accompanying, he would demonstrate in that same decade. Together with Michael Mantler , her second husband, she would launch the Jazz Composer Orchestra Association (JCOA) , an organization with which to give a voice to the avant-garde musicians of the moment. Under this label, he would begin to publish his first albums, giving free rein to his imagination in a collaboration with vibraphonist Gary Burton, “A genuine tong funeral” , published in 1967.

Bassist Charlie Haden would request his services to arrange in 1969 that album that was so special for Spanish fans, “Liberation Music Orchestra”, since three songs on the album make reference to the losers of the civil war: “El Quinto Regimiento”, “ The Four Generals” and “Long live the Fifteenth Brigade”. Two years later she would probably publish the album for which she is most recognized, “Escalator Over The Hill” , a two-hour jazz opera, which also combines traditions such as Indian music, rock, disco music, more than 20 vocalists and anything else we can imagine, in a wonderful madness that transcends everything that had been done up to that point.

To combat the lack of interest on the part of the recording industry when it comes to releasing music that challenges the status quo and wants to go a little further than what is “accepted and acceptable”, Carla and Michael launch their New Music Distribution Service , a new initiative that within JCOA served as a vehicle to distribute the records of the association’s members to other labels interested in experimental and avant-garde music (and vice versa). ‘s NDE stood out Among these, Manfred Eicher . So while NMDS brought ECM’s music to other American labels, Bley’s records reached new markets under the European label, in a fruitful synergy that developed over 18 years. And not only: names like Philip Glass, Lauire Anderson, John Zorn, Sonic Youth, Gil Scott Heron and Keith Jarrett recorded for NMDS. Next to nothing.

The experiment worked so well (within what “good” means for the world of jazz) that in 1972 the couple went one step further and founded “WATT”, their own label, which at that time was not common. Under his own label, Bley would record more than 30 albums (in 1974 “ Tropic Appetites” would be the first), finally deciding in 2012 that he no longer wanted to deal with everything that came with managing a company and signing exclusively for ECM.

But if Michael was his life partner, his musical partner was bassist Steve Swallow , Gary Burton’s sideman and veteran of the Stan Getz Quartet, who would join Bley’s band in 1977 and never look back. Together they would do everything that can probably be done in the world of jazz, including a beautiful foray into the world of R&B in the mid-80s, which resulted in the publication of the albums “Heavy Heart” (1984), “Night -Glo” (1985) and “Sextet” (1987).

At the end of that decade he began writing music for large ensembles, releasing some of the best-known albums of his career and taking his Big Band to tour the world for more than a decade, which together earned him three award nominations. Grammy and the Prix Jazz Moderne. Until not too long ago, he continued composing for other groups, such as the O’Farrill Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra, which published “Blue Palestine” in 2020 . In the 21st century he continued to grow, especially in intimate formations (duos and trios) with Swallow and saxophonist Andy Sheppard . We will miss her very much.

Carla Bley – The Lost Chords Find Paolo Fresu – Four

The Lost Chords find Paolo Fresu is an album by American composer, bandleader and keyboardist Carla Bley with Andy Sheppard, Steve Swallow, and Billy Drummond and Paolo Fresu recorded in Europe in 2007 and released on the Watt/ECM label.

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