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| 4.250 Ft
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| 1. | Major
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| 2. | A Dog's Life
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| 3. | Satie For Two
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| 4. | Lost In The Stars
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| 5. | King Korn
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| 6. | Playing With Water
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| 7. | Musique Mecanique
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Jazz / Avant-Garde Jazz
Carla Bley piano
Steve Swallow bass
The third duo album from partners Bley and Swallow is a kind of "road movie", a document of a gruelling, ill-starred, zig-zag tour through Europe. Impossible schedules, lumpy beds and bad food notwithstanding, Carla and Steve rise to the occasion and deliver attractive - and remarkably good-natured - music.
Carla Bley and Steve Swallow's third outing as a duo captures them live on their 1998 European tour sounding fabulous. Three of the seven tunes are by Bley: "Major," an infectious triadic shell game; "King Korn," a whimsical run through rhythm changes in the keys of E flat and C; and "Musique Mecanique," an ambitious three-part suite adapted from Bley's 1978 album of the same name. Three other compositions are by Swallow: "A Dog's Life," a Ray Charles-style tune in a slow 6/8; "Satie for Two," an affecting tribute to the minimalist composer; and "Playing With Water," a bossa nova previously performed by Swallow's 1991 sextet. The only non-original of the set is Kurt Weill's ballad "Lost in the Stars," which Bley and Swallow play beautifully.
Bley's piano is remarkably versatile and passionate, and Swallow's signature electric bass sound tickles the senses, especially during the Weill song where one moment he makes the room vibrate with low notes, and the next reaches the stratosphere of his range with singing melodies. ~ David R. Adler, All Music Guide
Carla Bley
Active Decades: '60s, '70s, '80s, '90s and '00s
Born: May 11, 1938 in Oakland, CA
Genre: Jazz
Styles: Progressive Big Band, Post-Bop, Progressive Jazz, Experimental Big Band
Post-bop jazz has produced only a few first-rate composers of larger forms; Carla Bley ranks high among them. Bley possesses an unusually wide compositional range; she combines an acquaintance with and love for jazz in all its forms with great talent and originality. Her music is a peculiarly individual type of hyper-modern jazz. Bley is capable of writing music of great drama and profound humor, often within the confines of the same piece. As an instrumentalist, Bley makes a fine composer; she plays piano and/or organ with most of her bands, and while her playing is always quite musical, it's clear that her strengths lie elsewhere. Bley's asymmetrical compositional structures subvert jazz formula to wonderful effect, and her unpredictable melodies are often as catchy as they are obscure. In the tradition of jazz's very finest composers and improvisers, Bley has developed a style of her very own, and the music as a whole is the better for it.
Born Carla Borg, Bley learned the fundamentals of music as a child from her father, a church musician. Thereafter, she was mostly self-taught. Bley moved to New York around 1955, where she worked as a cigarette girl and occasional pianist. She married pianist Paul Bley, for whom she began to write tunes (she also wrote for George Russell and Jimmy Giuffre). In 1964, with her second husband, trumpeter Michael Mantler, Bley formed the Jazz Composer's Guild Orchestra, which a year later became known simply as the Jazz Composer's Orchestra. Two years later, Bley helped found the Jazz Composer's Orchestra Association, a nonprofit organization designed to present, distribute, and produce unconventional forms of jazz.
In 1967, vibist Gary Burton's quartet recorded Bley's cycle of tunes A Genuine Tong Funeral, which brought her to the attention of the general public for the first time. In 1969, Bley composed and arranged music for Charlie Haden's Liberation Music Orchestra. In 1971, Bley completed the work that cemented her reputation, the jazz opera Escalator Over the Hill. In the '70s and '80s, Bley continued to run the JCOA and compose and record for her own Watt label. The JCOA essentially folded in the late '80s, but Bley's creative life has continued mostly unabated. For much of the past two decades, she's maintained a midsized big band with fairly stable personnel to tour and record. She's also worked a great deal with the bassist Steve Swallow, in duo and in ensembles of varying size.
Bley wrote the music for the soundtrack to the 1985 film Mortelle Randone. She also contributed new compositions to the Liberation Music Orchestra's second incarnation in 1983. All through the '80s, '90s, and into the new millennium, Bley continued releasing albums through ECM, ranging from duets with bassist Steve Swallow to the Very Big Carla Bley Band. She released a third duets album with Steve Swallow, Are We There Yet?, in 2000; Looking for America in 2003; The Lost Chords Find Paolo Fresu in 2007; and the big band album Appearing Nightly in 2008.
---Chris Kelsey, All Music Guide |
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