“I didn’t study music in college”, she now recalls.
Three years later, she’d relocated to New York City, working as a cigarette girl at Birdland. Though she began as a promising student, by age 14, the rebellious youth walked away from both religious and musical studies, focusing instead on, yes, roller skating. Her father, Emil Borg, was a church choir leader and her first and only piano teacher. Inside the modern rustic home Bley shares with bassist Steve Swallow, her partner of many years, the legendary composer and arranger spoke frankly about life and career, her place as a woman in the jazz spectrum, the activism she’s engaged in for decades, and a current project which re-establishes the Liberation Music Orchestra in a time when the nation needs it most.Ĭarla Bley was born Lovelia Borg on in Oakland. It was late June and the sun was already a pulsating beacon hanging over Woodstock. I wasn’t that well behaved,” Carla Bley was saying in her upstate New York home office, surrounded by a treasure trove of scores, files and concert posters traversing a half century. “When my career began, no one would hire me as an accompanist. Bley recently at her Woodstock home studio. At 84, she is still working on new compositions. She’s worked with Jimmy Giuffre, Don Ellis, Don Cherry, Gato Barbieri, Jack Bruce, the Golden Palominos, Dewey Redman, Roswell Rudd, and Charlie Haden. Falling under the spell of ‘free jazz,’ she began composing, and established herself in the male-dominated jazz world, cementing her legacy with the opera Escalator Over the Hill. Having been given a solid background in piano by her father, it was only a matter of time before she’d return to music. By 17, she was working as a cigarette girl at Birdland. CapitalBop is thrilled to be working in partnership with the Washington Women in Jazz Festival to present Bley here with her long-standing trio, featuring bassist Steve Swallow and saxophonist Andy Sheppard.Composer, pianist and activist Carla Bley was, from an early age, a rebel, turning her back on music at 14 to take up roller skating. Bley is at the top of the pantheon of jazz composition. She has amassed dozens of recordings under her name, mostly dedicated to her own compositions, and her pen has helped define the sound of ECM Records, which turns 50 this year. She helped establish the Jazz Composers’ Guild, which promoted lasting camaraderie and collaboration among the city’s innovative musicians, especially those associated with the burgeoning avant-garde movement. However, it is perhaps as a composer that Bley has received the most recognition and made the greatest impact. As a pianist, she was involved in both performing and organizing alongside many other historic names in that period of New York City’s musical history. appearance with her trio in recent memory. Truly one of the master innovators, and a progenitor of radical new approaches to jazz in the 1960s, NEA Jazz Master Carla Bley, 82, will make her first D.C.
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