Friday, October 26, 2018

FRIDAY MUSIC: Carla Bley, by JD

You may not know Carla Bley but she is well known to jazz aficionados and at the age of 82 she is still playing and touring and will be appearing at London's Jazz Cafe at the end of this month.

As you can see from the Wiki entry she has had a rather interesting life and has always been a keen 'musical explorer' having collaborated and recorded with musicians from other musical genres. She has recorded with Jack Bruce (on her jazz opera called "Escalator over the hill" - too long to include here) as well as Pink Floyd's drummer Nick Mason on "Nick Mason's Fictitious Sports" which is a Carla Bley album in all but name.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carla_Bley

The first video here would have been better if Steve Swallow had used his acoustic bass instead of the bass guitar but that is just my own personal preference.

I have also included a live version of "Boo to you too", an oddity from the aforementioned Nick Mason album.











1 comment:

wiggiatlarge said...

Steve Swallow, who is married to Carla Bley, was in his early days an outstanding double bass player, and his work in the sixties with George Russell, Don Ellis, Stan Getz, and Jimmy Giufre shows that and he was the winner of many awards, his switch to electric bass was considered in the jazz world to be "revolutionary" at the time.
Yet I have never been convinced and I feel the same way about Carla Bley, she carries despite being extremely talented, to much over from her Paul Bley days and much of her work has the same stilted sound, much of it hard work for me to listen to, odd items come through all this but the general body of work leaves me a bit cold, but interesting to hear some of it again after a long period away to see if I had changed my mind, I hadn't.
Despit having said that without people like Carla pushing the boundaries of music it would all stagnate.