Text by Daowud Kringle
Pianist, organist, bandleader, and composer Carla Bley’s death was confirmed by her longtime partner, collaborator, and MFM member, Steve Swallow.
Born Lovella May Borg in 1936 in Oakland, California, Bley was introduced to the piano at the age of three. She left school at 14 and began her musical journey playing piano in Bay Area jazz clubs. At 17, she moved to New York and worked for a short time at the iconic jazz club Birdland. She met pianist Paul Bley, who encouraged her to start composing. She toured with him under the name Karen Borg before changing her name in 1957 to Carla Borg. She married Bley and took his name the same year. They divorced in 1967, but she continued to use the surname in a professional capacity.
Bley would become known as a composer. Some of the musicians who’d recorded Bley’s compositions included George Russel, Jimmy Giuffre, and Paul Bley (whose album Barrage consisted entirely of her compositions).
In 1964, she was involved with Michael Mantler in organizing the Jazz Composer’s Guild. Bley and Mantler also formed and led the Jazz Composers Guild Orchestra. They recorded their first album in April 1965. They also founded the JCOA record label which issued a number of historic recordings by Clifford Thornton, Roswell Rudd, and Don Cherry, as well as recordings by Bley and Matler. They also formed the New Music Distribution Service. In 1972, Bley received a Guggenheim fellowship for composition. She and Mantler formed another record label, Watt. Over the next 35 years, Watt released more than two dozen of her albums, with distribution through ECM Records.
Bley and Mantler were married from 1965 to 1991. Their daughter Karen would become a musician. After her marriage to Mantler ended, she began a relationship with bassist Steve Swallow.
Bley’s career grew. Over the years, she collaborate with many musicians, including Charlie Haden, Gary Burton, Lee Soloff (of Blood, Sweat, & Tears), Robert Wyatt, Jack Bruce (of Cream), Mick Taylor (of the Rolling Stones), John McLaughlin, Don Ellis, Art Farmer, Steve Kuhn, Steve Lacy, Don Preston, Tony Williams, Howard Johnson, Gato Barbieri, Linda Ronstadt, and Nick Mason (of Pink Floyd).
Her output was prolific. She wrote songs that became jazz standards, like Ida Lupino and Lawns, big-band pieces like Fleur Carnivore, classical-based compositions, and other projects like Escalator Over the Hill, a jazz-rock opera.
During the 2010s, Bley focused on the Liberation Music Orchestra, which preserved Charlie Haden’s musical vision. In 2016, she included a new version of her late-’60s composition “Silent Spring” on the orchestra’s fifth album Time/Life. She would perform and release albums on ECM mainly with Swallow, touring internationally and releasing several albums for ECM. In 2009, she received the German Jazz Trophy. She received the NEA Jazz Masters Award in 2015. Her last album, Life Goes On, was released in 2020.
Bley died from Brain cancer on October 17th, 2023. She is survived by her partner Steve Swallow and her daughter with Mantler, the pianist and vocalist Karen Mantler.
Bley was the quintessential free jazz composer in that she was not constrained by any ideas but her own. Her reputation as an avant-garde composer seemed to contrast with her adherence to tonal harmony and standard rhythm. Amy C. Beal, in the biography “Carla Bley,” described her music as “vernacular yet sophisticated, appealing yet cryptic, joyous and mournful, silly and serious at the same time.” In 2016, Bley was quoted as saying “There’s nobody that plays like me — why would they? So if I’ve had an influence, maybe it would be if they decided to play like themselves. In other words, the whole idea of not playing like anybody is a way of playing.”
MFM salutes the memory of Carla Bley.
