WBGO Composer, conductor and pianist Carla Bley at the Town Hall, on a 2015 memorial for her longtime collaborator Charlie Haden.
When Carla Bley hitchhiked from Oakland, Calif. to New York City at age 17, it was one in a series of renegade actions that have defined an irrefutably original career. She found her way to Birdland, landing a job as a cigarette girl and a perfect perch to absorb musical lessons from the likes of Count Basie, Miles Davis and Horace Silver.
Largely self-taught as a pianist (having learned the basics from her father), Carla was first and foremost a composer. She began to earn a reputation when her pieces turned up on albums by equally free-thinking artists like George Russell, Gary Burton and Jimmy Giuffre, along with her first husband, pianist Paul Bley. She then helped organize an avant-garde collective called the Jazz Composers Guild with another partner, Michael Mantler.
John Doran
, April 13th, 2021 08:31
Carla Bley is arguably the greatest living jazz composer; John Doran talks to the woman fellow musicians have nicknamed Countess Bleysie and Bleythoven about foundational free jazz sessions, the magic of The Liberation Music Orchestra and her epic jazz opera, Escalator Over The Hill. Home page photograph courtesy of Tod Papageorge
Edward Said immersed himself in the final works of Beethoven, Genet and Beckett while writing his own last book. Said, who produced
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