The Music of Carla Bley: An Underlooked Innovator to Avant-garde Jazz

The name “Carla Bley” rings familiar in the ears of many jazz fanatics, though Carla’s name is quite untouchable when you attempt to characterize her contribution to jazz itself. I developed an extreme connection to Carla Bley’s music while exploring the music of Paul Bley, a prominent jazz pianist in the free jazz movement of the 1960’s and Carla’s ex-husband. A year ago, I’d discovered Paul Bley from the Ornette Coleman Quintet, Ornette being one of the lead powers in the movement and driving the music forward with albums such as “The Shapes of Jazz to Come”, and his work on Paul’s album, “The Fabulous Paul Bley Quintet (1971)”. I found myself delving headfirst into a new realm of expression within jazz, a sense of freedom being explored through a means of unfamiliar harmonic progression, form, and most importantly, general style. The music of Carla Bley captures the old avante-garde jazz style of the 1960’s in its totality- nuanced harmonic use meshed with freeing, impressionistic ways of playing the music.

The most renowned of Carla’s work is found in her recordings of “Escalator Over the Hill”, a jazz opera that features an odd instrumentation, though fitting for the style and overarching idea of the work. The only words that comes to mind for many to describe how Carla utilizes distinct motifs and styles within jazz in coalition with one another is “haunting, but beautiful.” The opera starts out with “Rawalpindi Blues”, a strong start to the opera that conveys not only raw energy in its totality, but is reminiscent of hard rock and even metal at the time- this made sense for the group of musicians that played the opera on the original album. The cast itself was composed of 50 different artists, ranging from rock musicians to prominent avant-garde jazz artists at the time. However, you truly realize how ambitious this album was for it’s time when Carla Bley’s virtuism as a composer soaks into the listener’s ears- Carla makes the transition from a shredding guitar solo, the drums banging in the background, to a meditative drone-like passage, inspired by the very popular eastern sound that innovators like John Coltrane and Yusef Lateef explored. The first section of the work ends in harmonic la-la land, and the hand drummer creates a groovy, bubbly rhythm to end the first section of the opera, leaving the audience stunned, confused, and inspired in simultaneity.

The next major section of the jazz opera is titled “End of Rawalpindi”, identifiable for its funk-like beat from the rhythm section, accompanied by odd, seemingly random repetitions of the phrase “and it’s again” throughout the first minutes of the section. The vocals then seep into a diminished-like embellishment over the groove, singing short but distinct phrases over the chords and the fire-powered drums. The tonality is again reminiscent of eastern music, only again putting Carla Bley’s talent as a jazz musician, a music theorist, and her ability as a composer on display. Flurry-like phrases from the trumpet break out over all of this, again making the sound of the section very meditative, loose, and open. To close it off, the lead vocalist sings the actual melody, the drums making clear hits in sync with the vocalist and producing a rock-like effect.

The second to last part of this opera, titled “End of Animals”, is initiated by a rubato section led by the lead trombonist singing vocals- this is an eccentric decision on the behalf of Carla Bley, as her cast of 50 is composed of at least five solo vocalists. The start is conducted and sang in harmony by the other five vocalists backing the trombonist- though, the slow, triumphant feeling is immediately erased by the trombonist’s pickup into his solo, immediately playing a wavy, loud high note and cuing the drummer to start playing a loose, effortless latin-like groove that seems to hold so much energy. To emphasize this “raw energy” that the whole band is carrying around 2 minutes into the trombone solo, the most ambitious of all the decisions in this chronotransduction is shown to the audience when one of the vocalists starts screaming into the mic during the solo- from the description, this seems inappropriate for a “musical” context, but oddly enough, it meshes in with the whole band perfectly. This decision can be seen as an exploitation of the ideas that innovators like Eric Dolphy and Ornette Coleman were perpetuating through their music at the time; a sense of freedom carried through assumed looseness in their playing, “free as a bird”. The section ends as the trombone solo dies off and the drums cut out, leaving the band to decay in the rest of it.

However, it doesn’t end there, as the last section truly fits in with the description, “haunting, but beautiful.” After the band decays in “End of Animals”, a drone remains in the background, in which the section smoothly transitions into “And It’s Again”. The end of the previous section is unclear, but in the continuity of the opera, it doesn’t matter- a percussionist immediately starts babbling into a mic and playing random flurries of phrases with a specific drum set, odd in its formation. The recurring theme here, if anything, rings “spontaneity” and “quirky”, so expectedly, Carla Bley goes from a randomized passage to a chant-like section, dissonances from a multitude of vocalists mixing in with each other and proving the “haunting” feeling. Keeping conservative to that same idea, the drums come in banging as the vocalist repeats “and it’s again”, self-referential enough as this passage “came again” from the “End of Rawalpindi”. From the constant change in genres, tonalities, and styles, it should be clear by now that Carla Bley was a prime innovator for fusion and funk, sprouting the ideas of freedom of expression from the free jazz movement and the avant-garde jazz era. These ideas in music were radical, in the sense that one song or tune does not stay strictly within a bound of feeling, tonality, or sound, and that spontaneity and extremity in contrast within music is acceptable and is still, in essence, musical.

The end of the whole opera completely reveals Carla’s innovative nature for her time. With the constant introduction of new ideas, and jazz musicians taking inspiration from impressionistic composers, Carla transcends the bounds of “jazz” with the final minutes of the work. As the drums settle down from banging to an eventual halt, the whole band starts humming into their mics as one person tells a poem to the audience. The feeling is spiritual, meditative, and reflective- as you hear the poem ease over the drone, the listener is left alone with their thoughts, surroundings, emotions, and this one poem to guide them. As the poem ends, the band holds a drone, each member filing off stage one-by-one, leaving the audience starstruck by Carla Bley’s genius.