This Week on Jazz Spectrum – Celebrating Carla Bley

By Fritz Byers

(A few of my thoughts on Carla are in my post from two days ago.)

Carla’s music, spanning more than fifty years, was vast and vibrant. From her early years with Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra; through her shifting mid-size bands (usually about octet-ish), which were always staffed by protean instrumentalists at home in the avant-garde and also lured by Carla’s sly wit; to her late sumptuous, richly colored recordings with the saxophonist Andy Sheppard and long-time bassist Steve Swallow – Carla never failed to be interesting. Against all sorts of odds, she followed where her muse led. For decades, I’ve been delighted to trail along.

This week, both Jazz Spectrum and Jazz Spectrum Overnight celebrate Carla’s achievements as a composer, arranger, bandleader, and pianist. 

The first hour of Jazz Spectrum features early Carla, beginning with her first releases as a leader (the opening tune is her characteristically intricate and fetching composition “What Will Be Left Between Us and The Moon Tonight," from the 1974 release, Tropic Appetites), and following that with a set of her work with the Liberation Music Orchestra. The second set ends with the LMO’s treatment of her enduring composition, “Utviklingssang,” which I commented on in the last post.

The second hour presents more mid-size Carla from the late 70s and then leaps to the early 2000s with a personal favorite, the sort-of title track from her 2006 Big Band recording, Appearing Nightly. Carla’s tours through music were never exactly de force, but the 25-minute track that concludes hour two is about as representative of her body of work as anything, and it’s about as interesting as music gets.

After a two-set detour for the song of the week (“All or Nothing at All”), the third hour concludes with a few diverse Carla tunes, including a funny Big Band venture aptly called “Greasy Gravy.” 

The final hour of Jazz Spectrum is filled with Carla’s chamber music – duets with the bassist Steve Swallow and selections from her quartet The Lost Chords (comprising the trio I mentioned earlier, plus the drummer Billy Drummond), including their engaging collaboration with the trumpeter Paolo Fresu; and then the final luminous recordings by the trio. The show concludes with her suite, “Beautiful Telephones,” from her final recording, Life Goes On.

If you stick around for Jazz Spectrum Overnight, you’ll come across plenty more of Carla’s music, including her composition “Ida Lupino,” performed variously by the pianist Paul Bley (both solo and with a trio), the singular guitarist Mary Halvorson, the all-female ensemble Lioness, and the trumpeter Giovanni Guidi (a personal favorite, as I mentioned in the preceding post).

All of this is intended as an appetizer. I’m pretty sure you’ll find something that draws you in and onward.