Carla Bley born 11 May 1936

Carla Bley (born Lovella May Borg; May 11, 1936 – October 17, 2023) was an American jazz composer, pianist, organist, and bandleader. An important figure in the free jazz movement of the 1960s, she gained acclaim for her jazz opera Escalator over the Hill, as well as a book of compositions that have been performed by many other artists, including Gary Burton, Jimmy Giuffre, George Russell, Art Farmer, Robert Wyatt, John Scofield, and her ex-husband Paul Bley. She was a pioneer in the development of independent artist-owned record labels, and recorded over two dozen albums between 1966 and 2019.

Born Lovella May Borg in Oakland, California, to Swedish parents. Her father, Emil Borg, a piano teacher and church choirmaster, encouraged her to sing and to learn to play the piano; her mother, Arline Anderson, died of a heart attack when Bley was eight years old. After giving up church to immerse herself in roller skating at the age of fourteen, she dropped out of high school and moved to New York City in 1953 to experience live jazz first-hand. Her primary vantage point was her job selling cigarettes inside Birdland, the Midtown Manhattan jazz club. It was there she met Canadian pianist Paul Bley, who she married after relocating to Los Angeles in 1957, later divorcing. 

She kept the Bley surname professionally thereafter. With her husband’s encouragement, the rechristened Carla Bley began writing music, including “O Plus One,” which appeared on Paul’s 1958 album Solemn Meditation. Returning east, she continued to compose while working in the coat check rooms at New York’s Basin Street and the Jazz Gallery, and her songs began to attract the attention of artists like Jimmy Giuffre, who featured two of her compositions on Fusion (1961) and George Russell, who recorded “Dance Class” and “Beast Blues” for George Russell Sextet At The Five Spot (1960).

Bley’s membership in the Jazz Composers Guild introduced her to Austrian trumpeter Michael Mantler, whom she married in 1965. Their daughter, musician Karen Mantler, was born in 1966. Bley and Mantler formed the Jazz Composer’s Orchestra, which brought together a broad range of musicians, including Cecil Taylor, Steve Lacy, Archie Shepp and Don Cherry, and an affiliated supporting organization — the Jazz Composer’s Orchestra Association — which commissioned work, sponsored performances and functioned as a record label. 

                                    

Bley’s breakthrough came with three major works that were released in the late ’60s: Gary Burton’s A Genuine Tong Funeral (1967), Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra (1969) and the sprawling Escalator Over The Hill (1971), which was released under the Jazz Composer’s Orchestra name but featured 36 musicians, stretching from singer Linda Ronstadt to guitarist John McLaughlin and a young Karen Mantler on vocals. With lyrics by poet Paul Haines, Escalator drew wide praise, including an influential review in Rolling Stone that called it “an international musical encounter of the first order” and a French Oscar du Disque de Jazz award.

In 1972, Bley was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for composition and, with Mantler, founded a new label, WATT. Its first release, Tropic Appetites (1974) was Bley’s debut as a leader. Following a brief sojourn in the U.K., where she worked with bassist Jack Bruce and Rolling Stones guitarist Mick Taylor, she formed the Carla Bley Band and entered a very active period of touring and recording, using a core that included her husband, trombonist Roswell Rudd, Steve Swallow and drummer D. Sharpe. Throughout her career, Bley thought of herself as a writer first, describing herself as 99 percent composer and one percent pianist.

Bley and Mantler were pioneers in the development of independent artist-owned record labels, and also started WATT Records and the now defunct New Music Distribution Service, which specialized in small, independent labels that issued recordings of "creative improvised music". In the mid-’80s, Bley downsized to a sextet and made a shift to more amplified music with Steve Swallow, guitarist Hiram Bullock and drummer Victor Lewis. She and Swallow also formed a duo, which toured and recorded frequently for five years, during which time Bley left Mantler and formed a 32-year relationship with the bassist. In spite of achieving a higher profile, with tours that took her to Europe and Japan, Bley remained circumspect about her talent. As she told DownBeat in 1984: “I’m just a composer, and I use jazz musicians because they’re smarter, and they can save your ass in a bad situation. … I need all the help I can get.” 

Saxophonist Sheppard re-joined Bley and Swallow for Songs With Legs (1994) and they continued as a trio for more than 20 years. Bley arranged and composed music for bassist Charlie Haden's Liberation Music Orchestra, and wrote A Genuine Tong Funeral for vibraphonist Gary Burton. Bley collaborated with a number of other artists, including Jack Bruce, Robert Wyatt, and Nick Mason, drummer for the rock group Pink Floyd. Mason's solo debut album Nick Mason's Fictitious Sports was written entirely by Bley, and features, alongside Mason on drums, and many of her regular band musicians. The ’90s also saw Bley working more often in a big band setting — both with her own unit and as a guest composer.

In 2005, she arranged the music for and performed on Charlie Haden's latest Liberation Music Orchestra tour and recording, Not in Our Name. In 2009, she received the German Jazz Trophy "A Life for Jazz". During their later years, Bley and Swallow became the most celebrated couple in the jazz world, touring in various formations and appearing as special guests on the festival circuit. In 2015, she was named a Jazz Master by the National Endowment for the Arts, and the following year, to celebrate her 80th birthday, ECM Records organized a special event at Steinway Hall in New York. Her final album, Life Goes On, was released in 2020.

In 2018, Bley was diagnosed with brain cancer, from which she died at home in Willow, New York, on October 17, 2023, at age 87.

(Edited from DownBeat & Wikipedia)