Carla Bley, a relentlessly inventive composer, arranger, pianist and bandleader whose work assimilated the 1960s avant-garde as well as traditional elements of melody and harmony, helping to shape the sound of jazz for six decades, died Tuesday at her home in Willow, New York, near the Catskill Mountains. She was 87.
The cause was complications from brain cancer, said her daughter, composer and jazz musician Karen Mantler.
With her impish humor, madcap themes and minimalist approach of making more with less, Bley had an instantly recognizable sound, even as she drew on competing strains of swing, bebop, rock and polka, not to mention German cabaret music and the lean but lyrical style of composer Erik Satie.
“I know a Carla Bley tune the minute I hear it,” her collaborator Gary Burton, the vibraphonist and composer, once told DownBeat magazine. “It’s direct. It is not complicated. It is not layer upon layer of subtle interaction. It’s very strong melody, very strong harmony, simply constructed. Carla wants her music to hit you square between the eyes.”
Raised in a strict evangelical Christian household in the San Francisco Bay Area, Bley dropped out of school at 15 and said her life was “a mess” until she turned 30, when she began to find her footing as a composer with support from her second husband, Austrian trumpeter Michael Mantler. She was one of relatively few women to rise to prominence as a jazz composer or instrumentalist – a distinction she said she sought to use to her advantage: “I wanted to be the only woman,” she told the New York Times in 2016. “I was glad I stood out in some way.”
Bley’s compositions included jazz standards such as the wistful “Ida Lupino,” named for the Hollywood actress and filmmaker, as well as monumental pieces such as “Escalator Over the Hill,” a jazz opera – she labeled it a “chronotransduction” – that marked her first album as a band leader.
Released in 1971 as a triple LP (it ran nearly two hours long), “Escalator” featured a libretto by poet Paul Haines and contributions from dozens of musicians, including saxophonist Gato Barbieri, bassist Charlie Haden, guitarist John McLaughlin, trumpeter Don Cherry, and vocalists Linda Ronstadt and Jack Bruce, of the recently disbanded rock band Cream.
With its sumptuous orchestration and fanciful lyrics about the guests and staff of a dilapidated hotel, the composition won jazz prizes in Britain and France. It also helped launch Bley to greater prominence in the United States, where she received a Guggenheim fellowship for music composition in 1972 and was honored as a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master, one of the nation’s highest awards for jazz musicians, in 2015.
Still, her musical interests extended far beyond jazz, and even led Bley to announce that she had “renounced” the art form for a few years in the late 1960s, when she turned from the radical intensity of free jazz to a more playful style influenced by the Beatles and saxophonist Albert Ayler, whom she called “maudlin in the most wonderful way.”
Bley toured with Bruce’s rock band – “It was great; lots of limousines and fine wines,” she recalled – and wrote the music for Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason’s 1981 debut album, “Fictitious Sports,” which featured vocals from onetime Soft Machine singer Robert Wyatt.
For years, she also played piano and wrote and arranged pieces for the Liberation Music Orchestra, a sprawling, politically oriented ensemble formed by Haden. The group straddled jazz and world music with its self-titled 1970 debut, which drew on folk songs from the Spanish Civil War, and continued to perform under Bley’s direction after Haden’s death in 2014, recording elegies and environmental anthems for the album “Time/Life.”
“Her scores for big jazz bands are matched only by those of Duke Ellington and the late Charles Mingus for yearning lyricism, explosive exultation and other expressions of the human condition in between,” jazz critic Nat Hentoff wrote in a 2001 profile for the Wall Street Journal, noting that Bley was comfortable writing for large groups as well as small combos.
He added that “her free spirit encourages her soloists to expand their own voices and join her in surprising themselves. ‘I never give them any directions,’ she says. ‘I just give them the chord changes.'”
An only child, Lovella May Borg was born in Oakland, California, on May 11, 1936. Unhappy with her given name, she changed it by adapting her father’s middle name, Carl. He was a church organist and piano teacher who gave Bley her first music lessons. Her mother, who was also a church organist, contracted rheumatic fever and died when Bley was about 8, in the midst of what Bley described as a dreary, repressive childhood.
“I was doused in religion, soaked in it, terrified of going to hell,” she told the Times in 1974. “The only music that moved me then was church music. I’d hear ‘Nearer My God to Thee’ and I’d fall apart.”
At age 13, she saw vibraphonist Lionel Hampton at the Oakland Civic Auditorium. Bley was transfixed. Four years later, she joined a friend in driving cross-country to New York to see Miles Davis at the Café Bohemia in Greenwich Village. She soon landed a job selling cigarettes at the club Birdland, getting an education in jazz while watching performers that included Count Basie and Thelonious Monk.
Her studies often came at the expense of her customers. Bley recalled that if someone asked for a pack of Luckies or Camels, she would instruct them to wait until the end of the solo – or, better yet, until the intermission. “I was at church, you know, and they were asking to smoke cigarettes? Made no sense,” she told an interviewer with the National Endowment for the Arts. “So I was like keeper of the chalice, in my own impertinent way.”
One customer who did impress her was Canadian pianist Paul Bley, a pioneer of free improvisation. They married in 1957 and moved to California, where he encouraged some of her earliest compositions, even as Bley struggled with insecurity and impostor syndrome. “I was going to a psychiatrist at that point,” she said, “who suggested electroshock therapy to get rid of this feeling that I was a composer.”
Slowly, she began to build up her confidence, aided by commissions from pianist and composer George Russell and by collaborations with Michael Mantler, whom she later married. Together they co-founded the Jazz Composer’s Orchestra, a vehicle for large-scale avant-garde music with a roster of performers that included Barbieri, Cherry and Cecil Taylor. AllMusic critic Brian Olewnick later called the group’s debut album, “Communication” (1965), “one of the masterpieces of creative music in the ’60s.”
Bley went on to write extended compositions including “A Genuine Tong Funeral” (1968), which was recorded by Burton and drew on the jagged melodies of Kurt Weill. With encouragement from bassist Steve Swallow, who became her partner of more than three decades, she also started playing the piano. She later formed a trio with Swallow and saxophonist Andy Sheppard, recording albums such as “Life Goes On” (2020), even as Bley considered herself more a composer than a performer.
“I would rather write music than perform it,” she said. “I’m at a disadvantage when I improvise since jazz solos are instant composition and I’m a slow and thoughtful composer. By the time I’ve thought of the next note, the chorus could easily be over.”
Bley’s first two marriages ended in divorce. In 2021, she married Swallow. He and her daughter are her only immediate survivors.
Looking back on her career in a 2016 interview with NPR, Bley recalled that she wrote her first piece of music when she was 6, with guidance from her father that still resonated more than 70 years later.
“He gave me a sheet of music paper, and he said, ‘You just put dots. And depending on where you put the dots, that’s the note you’re gonna hear.’ So the next lesson I showed up with the page full of dots. It was like a starry sky. And he said, ‘That’s too many dots.’ So I took most of them away. And I’m still working on it, taking them away.”
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