![]() ![]() On Jit was announced that Bley will receive the NEA Jazz Masters Award 2015.The first time I saw the American composer and pianist Carla Bley perform live was back in June 1974, when she played keyboards for the Jack Bruce Band a couple of years later the first of her albums that I bought was ‘Dinner Music’, released a couple of years later. In 2009, she was awarded the German Jazz Trophy "A Life for Jazz". ![]() Awardsīley was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1972 for music composition. In 2005 she arranged the music for and performed on Charlie Haden's latest Liberation Music Orchestra tour and recording, Not in Our Name. In 1997, a live version of Escalator over the Hill (re-orchestrated by Jeff Friedman) was performed for the first time in Cologne, Germany in 1998 "Escalator" toured Europe, and another live performance took place in May 2006 in Essen, Germany. ![]() Her current partner, the bassist Steve Swallow, has been her closest and most consistent musical associate in recent years and the two have recorded several duet albums. ![]() She has continued to record frequently with her own big band, which has included Blood, Sweat and Tears notable Lew Soloff, and a number of smaller ensembles, notably the Lost Chords. In the late 1980s, she also performed with Anton Fier's Golden Palominos and played on their 1985 album, Visions of Excess. She contributed to other Willner projects, including the song "Misterioso" for the tribute to Thelonious Monk entitled "That's the Way I Feel Now", which included Johnny Griffin as guest musician on tenor saxophone, and the Willner-directed tribute to Kurt Weill, entitled "Lost in the Stars", where she and her band contributed an arrangement of the title track, with Phil Woods as guest musician on alto saxophone. Her arrangement of the score for Federico Fellini's 8½ appeared on Hal Willner's Nino Rota tribute record, Amarcord Nino Rota. She arranged and composed music for Charlie Haden's Liberation Music Orchestra, and wrote A Genuine Tong Funeral for Gary Burton. Bley and Mantler were pioneers in the development of independent artist-owned record labels and also started the now defunct New Music Distribution Service which specialized in small, independent labels that issued recordings of "creative improvised music".īley has collaborated with a number of other artists, including Jack Bruce, Robert Wyatt and Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason, whose 1981 solo album Nick Mason's Fictitious Sports was a Carla Bley album in all but name. Bley and Mantler followed with WATT Records, which has issued their recordings exclusively since the early 1970s. With Mantler, she co-led the Jazz Composers' Orchestra and started the JCOA record label which issued a number of historic recordings by Clifford Thornton, Don Cherry and Roswell Rudd, as well as her own magnum opus Escalator Over The Hill and Mantler's The Jazz Composer's Orchestra LPs. Bley and Mantler were married from 1967-92. She then had a personal and professional relationship with Michael Mantler, with whom she had a daughter, Karen, now also a musician in her own right. In 1964 she was involved in organising the Jazz Composers Guild which brought together the most innovative musicians in New York at the time. Later life and careerĪ number of musicians began to record Bley's compositions: George Russell recorded "Bent Eagle" on his 1960 release Stratusphunk in 1960 Jimmy Giuffre recorded "Ictus" on his album Thesis and Paul Bley's Barrage consisted entirely of her compositions. The couple later divorced but she kept his surname professionally. After giving up the church to immerse herself in roller skating at the age of fourteen, she moved to New York at seventeen and became a cigarette girl at Birdland, where she met jazz pianist Paul Bley, whom she married in 1957. Her father, a piano teacher and church choirmaster, encouraged her to sing and to learn to play the piano. Carla Borg was born in Oakland, California. ![]()
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