Carla Bley (American Composers series)
By Amy C. Beal (University of Illinois Press, 2011)
I knew the name, but had no real sense of Carla Bley until a few years ago, when the Yale-based experimental bassist Jack Vees told me about her cult jazz concept album Escalator Over the Hill. I downloaded it from iTunes at once and kept it on my iPhone for months, more curious about it than captivated. This book has a very useful chapter on the creation of that album, Escalator’s relation to live theater and other arts, and how it served as a transition to more avant-garde, and jazzier Bley works.
It’s nice to learn conclusively who some of Bley’s artistic influences were on the project, and how deliberately theatrical some of its elements are. Escalator Over the Hill has non-singers vocalizing, the use of performers such as Warhol superstar Viva, a loose narrative that circles ‘round on itself. It’s openly experimental yet supremely confident. It’s cohesion as a longform piece of “chronotransduction” (Bley and her collaborators’ term for what others label a “jazz opera) is remarkable considering how spread out (both geographically and timewise) its composition was.

“The elaborate instrumentation of Escalator Over the Hill,” Beal writes, “reflects Bley’s eclectic tastes, as well as the serendipity and haphazardness of her casting; having little money to pay performers, Bley notoriously drew in everyone she could, plus their relatives and roommates. The musical casting also expressed her affinity for rock music, low brass, elaborate orchestral color, ecstatic solos and occasional experimentation with electronics and unusual sound effects.”
The book is full of such useful matter-of-fact appraisals of how Bley matter-of-factly made transcendent art.
Now I’m less curious about Escalator and dying to sample Bley’s most recent work.
It’s barely over a hundred pages, but as “first compehensive treatment” of Bley in print,” Amy Beal’s book piques interests aplenty.