A FIRESIDE CHAT WITH CARLA BLEY


The list of living composers that I admire is a short one (and I hate lists). Andrew Hill, Ornette Coleman, Muhal Richard Abrams, Henry Threadgill, Sam Rivers, Wayne Shorter (Blue Note and Miles years), Dave Douglas, Charles Lloyd, and Carla Bley. Carla has always intrigued me since I heard Charlie Haden's Liberation Music Orchestra. Carla composed all the music on all three LMO albums. It is not everyday that Carla grants interviews, so I was quite honored to have spoken with her. As always, I bring it to you, unedited and in her own words.


FRED JUNG: Let's start from the beginning.

CARLA BLEY: I got started when I was three years old because my father was a music teacher and my lessons were free. Instead of learning to walk, you learn to play the piano. My father was a piano teacher that was teaching classical, but at that stage, the students he had, there was no category. Everyone just learned what note was E and which note was F and if it was a circle without being colored in, it was longer than the little notes that were colored in, stuff like that. That is just plain old learning to speak a language.


FJ: What was the catalyst that prompted you to gravitate towards improvised music?

CARLA BLEY: That was when I was maybe fourteen and a friend of mine had four brothers, who each contributed to my education in one way or another, and one of her brothers liked jazz and would play me things and also once took me and my girlfriend to the Black Hawk in San Francisco, so we could hear Gerry Mulligan and Chet Baker. He also took me to a big place to hear Lionel Hampton. So that's the first three people that I heard and I was very impressed and I thought that this is the kind of music I like.


FJ: What was it you liked about those three in particular?

CARLA BLEY: Well, of course, Lionel Hampton, it was because his whole band went into the audience and looked like they were having a good time and nobody had to sit up straight. It was just really more relaxing than the music I had heard in church. And then Gerry Mulligan and Chet Baker, that was just sort of being fascinated with the dark side of music and people. They seemed so sophisticated and bad that I wanted to be like that.


FJ: So you like bad boys?

CARLA BLEY: I did. I just loved them. And bad girls I might add. Anita O'Day, she was my hero because she used four letter words. That was really neat. I didn't myself say them for a long time, but I loved hearing her say them.


FJ: When did you trade the California sun for the New York nightlife?

CARLA BLEY: As soon as I could. First guy that was driving to New York, I just hopped in the car and ended up with absolutely no money in New York City. But I got a job selling cigarettes at Birdland and that is where my whole education took place and I got paid for it.


FJ: You had some moxie.

CARLA BLEY: Yeah, I did things like that. I didn't value life that much. It was fun.


FJ: Let's touch on your time as a cigarette girl at Birdland.

CARLA BLEY: I wore a tray around my neck and in there were Luckys, Camels, Philip Morris, most of them were pretty short, the cigarettes. I sold these from a tray around my neck, but most of the time I was just listening to the music, standing as close as possible to the bandstand. People would have to tap me on the shoulder to actually get my attention and actually get the cigarettes.


FJ: What shows stand out in your mind?

CARLA BLEY: There were a handful. MJQ, Modern Jazz Quartet absolutely knocked me over. I just loved them. I think if I had to name one, I would say the MJQ, maybe because they were polite and sitting up straight and I felt a little bit more comfortable.


FJ: Not a bad way to get your education.

CARLA BLEY: Well, when you are studying jazz, I think the best thing to do is to listen to records or listen to live music. It isn't as though you go to a teacher. You just listen as much as you can and understand everything and absorb everything and learn to speak that language and after about thirty years you can (laughing). It's hard, but you immerse yourself in the music and the people in that scene. Working there, I guess what was eight hours a night, six, eight hours a night, hearing everybody. I mean, Thelonious Monk was playing there. Bud Powell was playing there. I never got to see Charlie Parker. I missed him by just a couple of years, but everyone else, Horace Silver, Art Blakey, you name them. They were playing for a week at Birdland and I just got to hear every note. And after I left Birdland, I started working at the Jazz Gallery. So it was bout five years my college course lasted. It was a five year plan. In the end, I guess I still couldn't play, but I knew how to listen. I was probably the world's best listener.


FJ: How essential is the listening process in what you do?

CARLA BLEY: Listening is more important than anything else because that's what music is. Somebody is playing something and you're receiving it. It is sending and receiving. Being a listener, you are receiving, sometimes more than another musician will receive it, the pleasure you're receiving and the message. What does music do to people? It makes them excited, happy, sad. It makes them feel things. It expresses things they themselves can't express, stuff like that.


FJ: So how does one go from listening to bop heroes like Thelonious Monk and Bud Powell to something so avant-garde as free jazz and your interest in Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry?

CARLA BLEY: When that happened, I was just swept off my feet again. I had been in New York and I went to live in Los Angeles and heard Ornette for the first time and it just changed my life. Back then, I wanted to do that and I thought that was most important. But I think it was good to have had the background of a stricter regiment like bebop, which is incredibly organized and it is a deep music with a lot of layers. Playing free was not quite that deep. And if somebody really good wasn't doing it, it was really bad. I don't think it lasted for too long, maybe five years. I heard Ornette do it and tried to do it myself and five years later, decided that I think I like chord changes better. But for five years, I was flailing at the keyboard trying to play without borders, without parameters. It is sort of stupid actually. I think now those years were a bit wasted.


FJ: Do you regret that time?

CARLA BLEY: It doesn't really matter because I'm not a player anyway. I'm a writer so the music I wrote during that period, although it was for free players, was pretty good.


FJ: That is an interesting self-assessment, that you are a composer, not a pianist.

CARLA BLEY: Well, I am like one percent player and ninety-nine percent writer.


FJ: Let's touch on one of your compositions, "A Genuine Tong Funeral."

CARLA BLEY: Well, I wrote everything for the horns first and tried to sell the idea to Atlantic or Columbia or one of the record companies at that time and couldn't. "A Genuine Tong Funeral" just sat in a drawer for a long time, until Steve Swallow brought it to Gary Burton and Gary Burton was interested in it and then I wrote stuff for the quartet, so it was two kinds of music and it happened at two different times, maybe separated by a year. That is going to be performed, Fred, for the first time on stage, next March at the University of Iowa. It is going to be fun.


FJ: What was your inspiration for "Escalator Over the Hill," a massive jazz opera?

CARLA BLEY: Well, that had words, so the inspiration was Paul Haines, the poet who wrote the words. He would send me a page of words and I would put them on the piano and look at them and say, "Well, that phrase sounds like these notes and that location sounds like this part of the world. Those words could best be sung by that person," and slowly wrote the whole thing. But Paul Haines was the inspiration, absolutely.


FJ: And you composed and arranged the music for Charlie Haden's Liberation Music Orchestra.

CARLA BLEY: It was difficult. I complained the whole time. I said, "I don't want to do this. I want to write my own stuff. I'm not interested in this." But he said, "Shut up and write." The first one, I wanted to do. There are three Liberation Music Orchestra albums. The second one was Ballad of the Fallen, and they are all separated by about ten years. The third one was called Dream Keeper and I complained a little more every time. I just didn't want to stop writing what I was writing and do this thing, but Charlie is very persuasive and he got me to do it.


FJ: If Charlie Haden called you tomorrow and asked you to do another one, would you?

CARLA BLEY: No, I don't want to. It is like a job. I'm spoiled. I like to write what I am interested in at the moment, for whatever format I'm interested in. For the next two years, I will be exclusively writing for big band.


FJ: Why did you come to this conclusion?

CARLA BLEY: I think I do that best and I think I have less competition. Living composers writing for big band are very few and far between. There are not a lot of them and I have a talent for doing it and that is why I am doing it. I am zeroing in on what I do best. There are a lot of great trios and a lot of great tunes played by three wonderful players. There aren't a lot of big band writers and so I want to do that. I want to do that for two years.


FJ: As a player you have been playing quite often in a duo setting with Steve Swallow, Are We There Yet?

CARLA BLEY: Yeah, and I am not going to do that anymore. I think, if you just look at the record, you can see that I wasn't having any fun, the pictures that go with it, the photographs. It talks about bad food and people and nosey photographers and it is just really too hard. It is just two people on a stage and I like to be surrounded by a lot of bodyguards, so I'm going to have a big band full of big, tough players. I want some protection. It is very hard to work in America. I'm doing big band in Europe, but I doubt that I will get any further, further south then the Canadian border.


FJ: Why not?

CARLA BLEY: I can't talk about why because it has to do with people and money.


FJ: As everything does these days.

CARLA BLEY: Yeah, and Europe, I'm mostly working in Europe, unless I want to work for a small amount of money and stay at a Howard Johnson or something, which I don't want to do. I don't enjoy traveling in America. I don't like the food. I don't like the cars and all that. It is not exotic enough. It all tastes a bit like airline food. In the deep South, you can eat. You really can eat in the South, Southeast, Southwest, they have some really beautiful food there.


FJ: What attracts your ear these days?

CARLA BLEY: I still prefer the bebop of the Forties. The very stuff I started out with is still the best to me now. I have come full circle. I hope it is not sad, but I think it is the most evolved, the most interesting, and the most evolved music in the world that ever existed.


Fred Jung is the Editor-In-Chief and can't believe Russell Crowe won the Academy Award for Gladiator. Comments? Email him.