Carla Bley, pianist and composer who became a towering figure on the modern jazz scene – obituary
Carla Bley, who has died aged 87, was one of the great figures of modern jazz, a pianist, composer and bandleader who explored the further reaches of free jazz as well as the mainstream, including excursions into rock music; while she also assembled small groups, it was her work with bigger outfits that set her apart.
A 1991 Telegraph review by Martin Gayford of her album The Very Big Carla Bley Band put her firmly in the tradition of experimentalists, a line stretching from Duke Ellington through to Charles Mingus. The album, he wrote, was in the vein of Mingus’s more extended works: “It has the same shouting climaxes, lyrical interludes, episodic structures and even a similar partiality for growling horns. Carla Bley is a not unworthy successor to those men.”
She found another Telegraph fan three years later when the radio critic Gillian Reynolds tuned in to a Radio 3 series on Carla Bley by the playwright and jazz nut Alan Plater, Strange Arrangement: “She is slow fire and thin ice. Her music is a bold conversation, full of jokes and twists, dictating the rhythm of everything else. I wanted to rush out and buy the records.”
Her magnum opus was the 1971 jazz opera Escalator Over the Hill. Named album of the year by Melody Maker, and winner of the Grand Prix du Disque in France, it had a surreal libretto by the poet Paul Haines, while its huge roster of musicians included Paul Jones of Manfred Mann and Linda Ronstadt on vocals, Jack Bruce on bass and John McLaughlin on guitar. The critic John Fordham described it as “the Sgt Pepper of new jazz”.
Recorded over three years, the triple album was wildly inventive and bursting with musical ideas, drawing on such influences as classical, Indian and rock music. It was, said The Wire magazine, “a bloated mess – which contains some of the most exciting music she’s ever put her name to... entirely bewildering and utterly intoxicating.”
She was born Lovella May Borg on May 11 1936 in Oakland, California; her father Emil Borg was a piano teacher “for the first six years of my life I heard nothing but badly played scales” – as well as a church organist and choir master, while her mother Arline, née Anderson, died of heart failure when the girl was eight. Her upbringing was religious – “I was doused in religion, soaked in it, terrified of going to hell” – but in her teens she rebelled and ran off to be a competitive roller-skater, having dropped out of school at 15.
By then she had already cottoned on to the appeal of jazz, aged 12, after being taken to a concert by the vibraphone player Lionel Hampton. Five years later she hitchhiked to New York and worked as a cigarette girl at the celebrated Birdland jazz club, soaking up sets by the likes of Count Basie, Miles Davis and John Coltrane.
“I never sold a pack of cigarettes,” she recalled. “I just stood there with the tray around my neck, listening to the music. If someone asked me for a pack of Luckies, I’d say, ‘No, wait until the intermission.’ ” It was around this time that she decided to go by the name of Karen Borg, and then Carla Borg.
At Birdland she met the pianist Paul Bley, who encouraged her to compose. In 1957 they married, moving to California, and he made a point of featuring his wife’s pieces (his 1964 album Barrage consisted entirely of her music). He was soon followed by George Russell, who asked her to write for his sextet.
The couple moved back to New York, where they dived headfirst into the burgeoning and turbulent free jazz scene. As in other creative fields, the avant garde was moving into the mainstream, and Carla Bley was a key figure in that process. “I wanted to object to as many things as possible that were wrong in the world of jazz and change the whole system that existed in the music world,” she said.
Times were also changing politically, and she co-founded the Jazz Composers Guild to fight for better conditions for musicians (though the bandleader Sun Ra objected to her presence as a woman). It soon foundered, but led to her establishing the Jazz Composer’s Orchestra with the Austrian trumpeter Michael Mantler, whom she married in 1967 after amicably divorcing Paul Bley. They also set up the non-profit New Music Distribution Service to find new audiences for jazz, and Carla Bley started several record labels, such as JCOA and Watt.
But acceptance of her music was not universal. “When I first toured Europe with my own band, the audience threw things at me – I mean fruit mostly, but bottles too,” she said in 2016. “I loved it. Nobody else got fruit thrown at them. That’s so wonderful! Anything that happened that was out of the ordinary, I appreciated.”
She was the original conductor and arranger for the Liberation Music Orchestra, formed with Charlie Haden in 1969, which grew out of the protests against the Vietnam War. Haden’s Telegraph obituary described the Orchestra as “a combination of free ensemble playing and radical politics”; their debut album consisted mainly of republican songs from the Spanish Civil War and ended with We Shall Overcome. After Haden’s death in 2014 Carla Bley carried on with the Orchestra.
Her work in the 1970s included playing with Jack Bruce’s band, while her small ensembles included the Carla Bley Band; when they appeared at the Camden Jazz Festival in 1981, the Telegraph’s Peter Clayton, wrote of their “imaginative, catchy, cheeky music”.
That year she collaborated with Wynton Marsalis and other musicians, including Debby Harry and Chris Stein of Blondie, on the album Amarcord Nino Rota, a tribute to the Italian film composer. She also worked with the Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason on his 1981 solo debut, Nick Mason’s Fictitious Sports, writing and co-producing all the tracks.
In the 1990s she formed a trio with her musical and professional partner, the bassist Steve Swallow – who had first recorded her music in 1961 – and the British saxophonist Andy Sheppard, beginning with the 1994 album Songs with Legs. “We’re essentially a chamber music ensemble and this allows me to write music free of bombast and exaggeration,” she said.
When she played the Cheltenham Jazz Festival in 2010, the Telegraph’s Ivan Hewett observed: “She’s never lost a sense of wonder at music’s simple things. She conjures pregnant, playful ideas with just a chord or two.”
She recorded four more albums with Swallow and Sheppard, most recently Life Goes On (2020), the last album released in her lifetime. The jazz critic Dave Gelly commended its “sly details and dry wit”. It was an observation that could have applied to much of her work.
Carla Bley divorced her second husband, Michael Mantler, and is survived by Steve Swallow and by her daughter, the singer, pianist and composer Karen Mantler.
Carla Bley, born May 11 1936, died October 17 2023
