Carla Bley in the New Yorker

[JSngry]

On 5/19/2018 at 7:20 PM, ep1str0phy said:

...the contrast with Threadgill is pretty extreme...

 I mean, seriously? Ya' think? Etc?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carla_Bley

Bley was born in Oakland, California to Emil Borg (1899-1990), a piano teacher and church choirmaster, who encouraged her to sing and to learn to play the piano, and Arline Anderson (1907-1944), who died when Bley was 8 years old. After giving up the church to immerse herself in roller skating at the age of fourteen,^[1] she moved to New York at seventeen and became a cigarette girl at Birdland, where she met jazz pianist Paul Bley.

I'm thinking that I hear all of that in her music, and there's plenty of it that I'm indifferent to, but in none of it do I not hear that.

God bless the Evolved Puritans. Roller skates can take you places.

 

[ep1str0phy]

On 5/19/2018 at 6:48 PM, danasgoodstuff said:

Thanks for the nice, calm reply; that may well be what she's doing, I just find it more problematic than you.  If I was a serious fan of circus/carnival music (I'm sure there are some) I'd probably find what I posted above less satisfying.

 

C'mon man, I'm only on the internet for the violent antagonism. 

With regard to what Jim says--keep in mind I'm not dumping on Bley so much as trying to articulate a kind of ambivalence I have toward much of her work. The comparison with Threadgill is is meant to underline how two people who can and do use similar source materials wind up on completely different sides of reality. The socio-politics of this are one thing, and the musical content is something else entirely. When Threadgill interfaces with idiomatic blues tropes, you get "I Can't Wait Till I Get Home":

When Carla Bley does, you get this:

In all fairness, there's a lot of harmonic meat in the second example that might be considered archetypal Bley (that nebulous-sounding descending octave line in the horns, for one). And the Threadgill example is and isn't paradigmatic Threadgill, since it's less inflected than a lot of the Sextett stuff. But--and this is important, at least to me--there's a kind of stiltedness when Bley mixes into the 6/8 thing that is just impossible to ignore. The solos are relentlessly professional, the harmonies perfectly balanced and articulated, the timekeeping precise and unobtrusive. When working with more recalcitrant players--like a Motian or Andrew Cyrille--the edges start showing, but it's almost in spite of the charts rather than because of them. 

I think it's up for debate whether these issues are merely a matter of choosing the "right" sidemen or something intrinsic to the music itself. And maybe I was wrong to imply that Bley's approach is somehow less personal, but I do maintain that there's an overriding dispassion and distance in so much of Bley's work that the remove begins to feel like a decision rather than an accident. I always feel like Threadgill is being real with the audience and the performance; Bley, much less so. 

 

Edited May 20, 2018 by ep1str0phy

[duaneiac]

 

[JSngry]

8 hours ago, ep1str0phy said:

 I always feel like Threadgill is being real with the audience and the performance; Bley, much less so.

Real? In what sense? I really don't get that. I've never heard a Carla Bley record where it sounds like she's not aware of what choices she's making, the reasons seh'd making them, and what it means that she's making them. How can you get more real than that? The interviews over the decades are just as much like that as are the records. Carla Bley brings Carla Bley to the table, nobody else. Now sure, Carly Bley is capable of arch irony, playful and deadly at the same time, and I get that hipsters have killed irony for the masses, but it wasn't always so. And I get that a roller skating Nordic-American church girl probably starts life in the teenage jazz cigarette girl world with more than a little, shall we say..."distancing" in the pump for the road trip ahead, but geez, what's not real about any of that?

[Hot Ptah]

.....

Edited May 20, 2018 by Hot Ptah

[ep1str0phy]

13 hours ago, JSngry said:

Real? In what sense? I really don't get that. I've never heard a Carla Bley record where it sounds like she's not aware of what choices she's making, the reasons seh'd making them, and what it means that she's making them. How can you get more real than that? The interviews over the decades are just as much like that as are the records. Carla Bley brings Carla Bley to the table, nobody else. Now sure, Carly Bley is capable of arch irony, playful and deadly at the same time, and I get that hipsters have killed irony for the masses, but it wasn't always so. And I get that a roller skating Nordic-American church girl probably starts life in the teenage jazz cigarette girl world with more than a little, shall we say..."distancing" in the pump for the road trip ahead, but geez, what's not real about any of that?

"Real" in that I seldom feel like she's tackling the musical content--with its contextual implications, the technical possibilities inherent in the material, the broader narrative of whatever culture on genre she's plugging into--on its own terms. Keep in mind I don't feel as if she's under any obligation to do so, and I should also state that I feel as if Bley is a great artist in her own right--but as I (kind of) said above, I feel as if her genius resides in concept play and curation of genres rather than engaging with those genres in any really profound way. 

My assumption is that "Very Very Simple" is meant to serve as a counterexample to "Two Banana," since it's the same kind of blues shuffle feel and it's a lot less buttoned down. I think it actually reinforces my core point--the band is playing pretty mundane stuff, with the exception of Valente's solo (which is it's own kind of mannered, to be fair--but what isn't, and that's splitting hairs). The music is basically just a prop for some irony and clever concept work. It's 100% Carla Bley, which is why I agree that it's unfair to say that her music is any less personal than anyone else's--but I also think that it's so disengaged from the base materials of the music that it has to have been by design.

I think it's telling that Bley says what she does about D Sharpe in Iverson's article: “I just loved him at first sight and first sound. He was from the rock and roll world. D. Sharpe dressed really great. He had a cool demeanor about him. He looked so different. I liked him the way he was physically. Then, he would use two loaves of Italian bread or something to take a solo. He had a good sense of humor. I thought he had a nice groove, too.” It's very personal stuff--about vibe and appearance, and a little bit about Sharpe's musical piquancy. One would assume that these are many of the things that are most meaningful to her about that relationship--and it's little about what Sharpe actually plays. Maybe she'd go into more detail in another context, who knows. But, again, I don't think CB is under any obligation to do so, and that's not a knock.

And lest it go unsaid, I wouldn't knock anyone for being, as you say, "a roller skating Nordic-American church girl." And that's definitely a part of her aesthetic ethos. And again--again--I say this as someone who really admires a lot of Carla's work and loves, on a profound level, a significant amount of that work. 

I do have some personal (which are consequentially musical) reservations about how she handles music that lies outside of her purview. There is actually a much denser conversation here that I willingly open myself up to--but which I will say up front I am not totally equipped to unpack--about race and perception. There is a lot to dissect about the phrase, "Just as it was, I thought free jazz needed work"--and that enters the realm where personal reservations veer into issues of identity and ideology and axes to grind. 

Edited May 21, 2018 by ep1str0phy

[JSngry]

Yeah, well, I think she's being - has always been - true to herself, and really that's the real reason anybody plays, right? Because they feel that something needs work, if only themselves. Not all great music comes from "within" any particular/specific world, some of it comes from observations in, around, and about that world. Bley is, I believe, somebody who does that, and she's been pretty damn good at it along the way.

Besides, she understands the visual a lot more than most jazz musicians have. Her comments about D. Sharpe, her album covers, her promo shots, she's fully aware of what all that means. To that end, I'm moved by how shrunken and "frail" she's gotten with age.

And yet she persists.

 

[7/4]

"EI: Of course, some of these people are legends that are on this record, but some of them are not so famous. I think they are all English, like this person Elton Dean.

CB: They were bad boys of questionable character. Elton Dean wasn’t very nice. I always made jokes about him. After he played one of his long, squeaky solos, I made the band go, “Ta da!” Like, gimme a break."  

[Simon Weil]

41 minutes ago, 7/4 said:

"EI: Of course, some of these people are legends that are on this record, but some of them are not so famous. I think they are all English, like this person Elton Dean.

CB: They were bad boys of questionable character. Elton Dean wasn’t very nice. I always made jokes about him. After he played one of his long, squeaky solos, I made the band go, “Ta da!” Like, gimme a break."  

Well, you know. She has her views. Don't make it right. The above is from the interview Iverson does with her on his website. In it, she also says:

"I didn’t like Bud Powell. He played too many notes. I saw him play once in New York,  maybe Basin Street or maybe Birdland. But when I went to Europe later I got to see him a couple of times at clubs like in Paris and stuff, and I thought he was sort of mean. A mean person."

[mjazzg]

1 hour ago, 7/4 said:

but some of them are not so famous. I think they are all English, like this person Elton Dean.

Really? Does Iverson not know about Dean to that, somewhat dismissive, extent - "this person". 

Edited May 22, 2018 by mjazzg

[Brad]

1 hour ago, Simon Weil said:

Well, you know. She has her views. Don't make it right. The above is from the interview Iverson does with her on his website. In it, she also says:

"I didn’t like Bud Powell. He played too many notes.”

Something he and Mozart may have had in common. 

 

[Simon Weil]

!

[7/4]

also from the Iverson interview:

"Some of his songs are the best of the batch of good post-bebop writing. I found a mistake in “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat” and corrected it. He was dead by then. It was a little turnaround thing that wasn’t quite working, and I got it to work. At that point, if a guy was dead and needed anything to be done, I was the person to do it."

[mjzee]

I liked the article; thanks for posting (although I subscribe to the magazine, and would have seen it eventually).  It's good to shine a light on someone who isn't discussed very often.  Considering how many albums she's put out, I suspect the reason she isn't discussed (at least here) very often is that her music doesn't have much of an impact on us.  It can be "appreciated," but if it were missing, I wonder whether people would notice.  One problem with an article like Iverson's is that it's largely hagiography.  And that's understandable: Iverson started out loving Bley's music, she granted him time with her, so he's not going to be dismissive or coolly analytical.  Instead, the problems are elided or glossed over: "there are stretches of later Bley where competent soloists are given a lot (of) space and just don’t have the grit to lift the material into immortality."  Someone who doesn't have skin in the game would say these performances were perfunctory and unmemorable, and perhaps some of the blame can be attributed to the compositions.

So I hope this article begins a discussion on Bley as to what works and, honestly, what doesn't.  I know what I've heard of Bley has been largely forgettable.

[JSngry]

I found the 2nd LMO album, Not In Our Name to be quite memorable, as I do, again, her Christmas record. Also, Night-Glo (sic). That record has so many little details down in the cracks of the details....it's a very rewarding listen on :loop" if you want to check out details. That's a big thing in the best of her music, imo, the little quirky details that are not always set up on top of the music.

And this is an essential jazz recording, imo, if only for the still-definitive reading of "Ida Lupino":

If I'm remembering correctly, she had no real chance at "band-leading" until her and Paul Bley split, and she hooked up with Mantler. So she's got two histories, really, that of composer, and that of band leader (and, I suppose, that of label-director as well), and they only sometimes overlap. 

I do find a lot of her "later" work to be less than engaging, but that's because there's so much humor, and humor is about the most subjective taste of them all. Some of it seems silly to me, like it's a family joke that you gotta be in the family to really get. But then there's stuff like "Boo To you To", with that definitive call-your-bluff line "Do you really HATE it?" But then there's the cutesy stuff, and, you do that thing Carla, it's ok, and thank you for the chance to get up and go make a sandwich.

But I still listen, even in passing,, because, really, she always has that Evolved Puritan thing going on, and there's really no place else to get that in jazz. That's her niche, and she comes by it honestly, created it honestly, and maintains it honestly.

Inspired by this thread, I created a Carla Bley Radio station on Pandora and just let it rip, hardly any thumbs up or down, just to see what would come up. It has been interesting!

[JSngry]

Oh yeah, Fancy Chamber Music is a very good listen, as is all that run of ECM records from the 70s into...whenever. Those records are a voice speaking clearly and confidently.

[paul secor]

I'm with those who heard a little something early on. Her music wore thin very quickly.

[AllenLowe]

On 5/19/2018 at 9:07 PM, danasgoodstuff said:

"I don't think the successes of something like Escalator can be understated--not just in the way of this doom-y, fun house mirror-type big band arrangement, but in the consideration and subtlety behind the genre play"  

I think this says the exact opposite of what you meant it to say, not unlike Carla's work sometimes?, and, like Allen's inability to get 'then' and 'than' straight, it makes the rest of what you say hard to take seriously.  But whatever Carla's doing, I wouldn't call it dull, even when it's not of interest to me.

 

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I think what I meant to say was SCHMUCK. Dane.

And btw, I have not used either word (until this post) on this thread. This, btw, is the kind of petty snottiness that, in the past, hurt this place. But then is then, now is now.

 

 

Edited May 23, 2018 by AllenLowe

[JSngry]

If than, then than.

Then, in Rome, quack like a duck? Why a duck?

[medjuck]

IIRC sometime in the '70s there was a published rumor in the UK that Jack Bruce was putting together a band that included Bley and Mick Taylor  as well as a couple of other interesting players who I can't remember.  it wasn't clear what kind of music they would be playing. Of course it never happened. 

[erwbol]

2 hours ago, JSngry said:

If than, then than.

Then, in Rome, quack like a duck? Why a duck?

[jlhoots]

Probably mentioned earlier, but I like the LMO albums.

[JSngry]

I can get why somebody might not "like" this, but do you HATE it, do you REALLY HATE it?

 

[paul secor]

I don't hate it. I don't really hate it. It just bores me.

[JSngry]

Careful not to nod off!