Carla Bley: 1936-2023

Carla Bley, a pianist, composer and arranger who carved out her own niche in avant-garde jazz, creating a singular musical style that was both daring and distinctly tender, died on October 17. She was 87.

During my interview with Carla for The Wall Street Journal in 2020, she was remarkably open and almost journalistic recalling her childhood years. As she said during our conversation:

My family lived in East Oakland, Calif., in a small white house next to a vacant lot with two large trees. I was an only child and spent most of my free time climbing them to sit on favorite limbs. My father, Emil, was an organist at the local Evangelical Free Church. He thought climbing the trees was dangerous, but he never kept me from going up there. My mother, Arlene, had been a musician at church as well.

But she contracted rheumatic fever and was in bed nearly all the years I knew her. We weren’t very close, though I used to sit on her bed and talk to her. She didn’t say much. Near the end, my father took her to her mother’s house. I was 8. When she died, I climbed onto the roof of the playhouse my father had built for me and screamed, “My mother is dead.” I wasn’t that upset.

Carla began piano lessons at age 4, but it wasn't until she visited a jazz club in Monterey, Calif., in her late teens that her interest was aroused. One night, she met a boy who was driving to Boston. She asked if she could ride along. Her goal was to reach New York and see Miles Davis at the Café Bohemia. With her mission accomplished in New York, she went to work at Birdland as a cigarette girl so she could “hear jazz all the time."

In 1957, she began dating jazz pianist Paul Bley. For the next 10 years, she immersed herself in jazz by listening to it before even attempting to play in a group. But listening didn't mean sitting still. After her husband encouraged her to write, she composed O Plus One, for his Solemn Meditation album in 1958. It was a play on Tommy Dorsey's 1943 hit Opus One.

Carla's first album as a leader was a three-record jazz opera called Escalator Over the Hill, recorded between 1968 and '71. One of the singers was Linda Ronstadt. Carla then locked into her jazz approach and recorded nearly 30 albums as a leader and many others in collaboration with others, especially her partner, bassist Steve Swallow. Her last studio album was Life Goes On, released in 2020.

During my conversation with Carla, I sensed enormous courage and conviction. The road she chose to take as an artist wasn't easy or overly rewarding, commercially. But it did allow her to be herself and to thrive. I sensed a toughness that was likely forged in childhood with a bedridden mother and absent father. Most of all, I sensed a star who was keenly aware of her identity and image and hungry for visibility on her terms. As for her helmet hair style that made her immediately identifiable, I was surprised by her answer when I asked her about it: 

I started wearing it this way when I was 30 [in 1966]. I cut it myself. It's something of a disguise.

Carla was hiding in plain sight. And as long as you couldn't see her eyes through her long bangs, she was safely camouflaged and free to express herself through music.     

Let's have a look and listen to six of my favorite YouTube clips..

Here's Carla and Steve Swallow playing Lawns...



Here's Carla with Steve and Andy Sheppard on tenor saxophone...



Here's Carla and her big band with vocalist Karin Krog in 1972 on Lovely Footage Anyway...



Here's a minidoc shot in Glasgow, Scotland, rehearsing Birds of Paradise...



Here's a celebration of Carla in New York in 2016...



And here's the title track of her final studio album, Life Goes On...