Jazz Articles about Carla Bley

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The Carla Bley Big Band: Looking for America

by C. Michael Bailey
July 25, 2003

Carla Bley is the love child of Duke Ellington, Gil Evans, and Charles Ives. But still, that does not seem to tell the whole story. Born into a musical family, pre-war, on the West Coast, Bley naturally became a musician and spent a good deal of time in church to boot. The latter of these biographical facts are made apparent in at least one selection on each of her many recordings. Churchy and steeped in rural gospel and R&B, her ...

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The Carla Bley Big Band: Looking for America

by Jack Bowers
May 3, 2003

Composer / pianist Carla Bley, a Californian who has traveled all over the world playing her music, has devoted her latest album to Looking for America, an enormous undertaking by any measure. As a reviewer, my quest is far less ambitious; I am looking only for exciting big-band jazz that swings. I hope she had better luck than I.

That’s not meant to imply that Bley’s venture doesn’t have its delightful moments; she is, after all, a talented writer of ...

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Carla Bley: 4 X 4

by C. Andrew Hovan
November 1, 2000

Yeah, those duo discs with Steve Swallow and Carla Bley are nice, but give me a large ensemble and some Carla originals and then you’ve really got something. 4 x 4 surely is something else, perhaps Bley’s best and most charming work of the past several years. So, what’s with the title? Well, here’s the premise: pick four horns to put in front of a rhythm section of Bley on piano, Larry Goldings at the organ, Steve Swallow on bass, ...

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Carla Bley: 4 X 4

by AAJ Staff
October 1, 2000

One can always anticipate originality from Carla Bley. And she doesn’t disappoint.Admired by other composers as wide-ranging as Tom Harrell and Gary Burton, Bley’s originality springs from her powers of observation and her intent to convert naturally musical sounds to the framework of appropriate meters, of notatable forms and of instrumental pitches. Burton shares this naturalism by freeing the vibraphone to attain more vocal expression. So does Harrell, who draws inspiration from the sounds he hears even as ...

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Meet Carla Bley

by Craig Jolley
June 20, 2000

A Genuine Tong Funeral (RCA). 1967 record by Gary Burton quartet with orchestra; music composed and arranged by Bley. It was my first big break. After the Funeral I did quite a few big projects. After all this time it's going to be performed next March at Iowa State University. The faculty of the music department approached me. They were just talking about doing a concert. I said, “There are parts of this that have never happened yet--the stage presentation." ...

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Carla Bley: Fancy Chamber Music

by Ian Nicolson
January 1, 1999

Carla Bley is sixty this year. Which factoid seems so far beyond the range of the probable that it's worth repeating to myself every time I listen to her astonishing compositions and equally astonishing ensembles. Bley's latest set, with the eight-piece band she named after the new recording (which did come first, chicken or...?), is as calmly revolutionary as even the best of her seventies work.Meanwhile ECM has also chosen to simultaneously re-release two of those seventies gems ...