Obituaries

Carla Bley obituary: Champion of full-throated jazz, pop flamboyance and downtown weirdness

She worked within a scene whose promoters, fans, critics and musicians tend to misunderstand the role of the jazz composer

Carla Bley wrote short, unforgettable tunes with the same authority that she applied to long, through-composed suites. Photograph: Roger Ressmeyer/Corbis/VCG via Getty

Sat Oct 28 2023 - 00:08

Born May 11th, 1936

Died October 17th, 2023

The jazz composer Carla Bley, who has died aged 87, created an enormous body of work with emotional punch, intellectual reach and musical depth. She was also a role model for independent musicians, with her own label and studio in New York state.

She wrote short, unforgettable tunes with the same authority that she applied to long, through-composed suites. Three works established her importance. A Genuine Tong Funeral (1968) was a “dark opera without words”, adapted for the vibraphone player Gary Burton. Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra album (1969), for which Bley arranged tunes such as We Shall Overcome and Ornette Coleman’s War Orphans, showed that she could lead an unruly crew of soloists and bond them together without losing anyone’s individuality. The third career-launcher was the ambitious “chronotransduction” Escalator Over the Hill (1971), the jazz-rock-world “opera” she made with the librettist Paul Haines.

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Released on the independent JCOA label that Bley cofounded, this triple LP box overflowed with a deliriously entertaining, bewildering and bewitching mix of glorious anthems, full-throated jazz, pop flamboyance and downtown weirdness. Fronted by stars such as Linda Ronstadt, Paul Jones (ex-Manfred Mann), Jack Bruce of Cream and the Andy Warhol actor Viva, Escalator Over the Hill also featured big jazz names such as Don Cherry, Gato Barbieri and John McLaughlin.

Though she used the name Carla for her recording career, she was born Lovella Borg in Oakland, California. She was the daughter of Arline (nee Anderson), who died when Lovella was eight, and Emil Borg, both musicians. She played and sang at church, and grew up in a relaxed but religious household. She was largely self-taught on piano.

As a young adult she hitched a lift to New York, where she worked as a cigarette girl at the Birdland jazz club and got to hear some of the world’s best musicians. She wrote tunes for the Canadian pianist Paul Bley, whom she married in 1957: compositions such as O Plus One and Ida Lupino date from this time.

After splitting from Paul, she married the Austrian-born trumpeter Michael Mantler in 1965, and they had a daughter, Karen. Their partnership also yielded the JCOA label Escalator Over the Hill and the New Music Distribution Service, a not-for-profit distributor for experimental music. In the 1970s they founded their Watt label and a recording studio, Grog Kill. The label’s first album was her charming Tropic Appetites (1974). Bley worked on more records and played with the Jack Bruce Band for six months in 1975.

Bley won many awards, and was nominated for many more, but never quite fitted in

Over the next few years Bley, whose distinctive hairstyle made her instantly recognisable on stage, toured and recorded with her own bands, usually rumbustious 10-piece units that sounded bigger and funnier than most big bands, with great sidemen such as the French horn player Vincent Chancey, bassist Steve Swallow, trombonist Gary Valente and the former The Modern Lovers drummer D Sharpe.

In the 1980s, Bley began a relationship with Swallow that lasted until her death. Talking to the Guardian about the lustrous Night-Glo (1985), she said: “That was me and Steve right at the beginning, and we were just falling in love. We were infatuated with what they called ‘quiet storm’, music you played late at night, like Marvin Gaye.”

Three more decades of composing, recording and touring followed, including The Very Big Carla Bley Band (1991), Fancy Chamber Music (1998), the delightful Carla’s Christmas Carols (2009), quartets and a trio with Swallow and British saxophonist Andy Sheppard, plus more with the Liberation Music Orchestra. Bley won many awards, and was nominated for many more, but never quite fitted in. She worked within a scene whose promoters, fans, critics and musicians tend to misunderstand the role of the jazz composer. Her piano-playing, though enthralling, was there to serve her compositional goals.

Her marriage to Mantler ended in divorce. She is survived by Swallow and Karen.

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