Jazz Articles about Carla Bley

Carla Bley: The Lost Chords

by AAJ Staff
July 18, 2004

Carla Bley would appear to be the resident smart-aleck of the jazz world. In fact, she's a composer, arranger, and bandleader of considerable gifts and stature, and a new release by her is prima facie important. The Lost Chords finds Ms. Bley leading a highly interactive quartet in a live session that offers both depth and fun.

In any Carla Bley release, composition takes center stage. Here she takes a look, actually several looks, at “Three Blind Mice," ...

Carla Bley: The Lost Chords

by John Kelman
July 11, 2004

While she is perhaps better known for her large group work, including Fleur Carnivore , Goes to Church and last year's marvellous Looking for America , Carla Bley has experimented with smaller ensembles over the years, right down to duos and trios. But never, arguably, as successfully as with The Lost Chords , a pared down quartet outing recorded on tour in Europe in October, 2003. Featuring long-standing musical companions Andy Sheppard on saxophones, Steve Swallow on bass, and Billy ...

Carla Bley: Rarum XV: Selected Recordings

by Norman Weinstein
April 17, 2004

ECM has recorded the gifted and goofy composer and keyboardist Carla Bley for three decades, and this single disc career retrospective is a brilliantly compiled testimony to the breath and depth of Bley's singular talent. Until Bley, humor in jazz was primitively realized at best (e.g. vaudeville antics of Slim & Slam, Dizzy's hipster's jokes). She actually brought a cosmopolitan wit to jazz, a jazz player who knew Satie not as a tonal impressionist so much as a musical trickster. ...

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 ...

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 ...

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, ...

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 ...