“I do think there was a special premium placed on making something up, on inventing yourself as a musician and as a person as well, and I think that comes and goes. It was a time when Ornette had arrived to play at the Five Spot, there were all kinds of winds blowing in the city at that time. That’s what was valued, and that may have been a special time in New York city. “When we – and I mean Carla and me, but also all of us who had come to New York in the late 1950s and early 1960s to be musicians – that was the idea, that you made it up, you thought of something that hadn’t been thought of before. “I beg to differ on that one,” returns Swallow. I don’t want to be original,” protests Bley, but without much conviction. I’m not trying to do it my own way, and I’ve never tried to do it my own way. I am trying to imitate the people that I love to listen to, and failing. “I failed a couple of times today already.
She is forever trying, and failing, to sound like that Count Basie band of the mid-1950s. “I know from eavesdropping on Carla writing,” Swallow chimes in from the other room, “that that’s true. I have never succeeded in copying anything written by anyone who wrote for that band, but I keep trying.” Her most vivid memories of her time working at the famous midtown Manhattan club are of the Count Basie band.“That was my favourite band and it still is. If someone asked me for a pack of Luckies, I’d say, ‘No, wait until the intermission.’” I just stood there with the tray around my neck, listening to the music. “I got a job as a cigarette girl, and got to listen to everybody playing,” remembers Bley, “and never sold a pack of cigarettes. She has always led her own groups, on piano or organ, releasing the results on her own Watt label, but it is only in the last couple of decades that she began to concentrate on her own performance – she once described herself as “1 per cent player, 99 per cent composer”.īorn in Oakland, California, in 1936, she was still a teenager when she arrived in New York “because that’s where the music was happening”, and landed a job at Birdland, one of the crucibles of modern jazz. Over the decades her tunes have been recorded by major figures from George Russell and Jimmy Giuffre to Jaco Pastorius and her old friend Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra.
They don’t own cell phones, Swallow proudly declares, and at first, it seems as if Bley in particular doesn’t like talking on phones of any description.īley emerged in the early 1960s as a starkly original composer, connected to the avant garde of Ornette Coleman and others, but following her own particular, even wayward muse. When I get them, the two are on phones in different parts of their hideaway home near Woodstock in upstate New York. Would they be prepared to do a joint interview? Yes, he says, I’d be happy to join in. Is that Steve Swallow, pioneer of the electric bass guitar, himself a great and distinctive compositional voice, and incidentally Bley’s life partner? Yes, Swallow admits in his reply, it is.
Carla bley series#
When word comes through about an interview with Carla Bley, ahead of her appearance in the Perspectives series at the National Concert Hall, it comes via an email from her “agent”, a certain Stephen W Swallow.
0 kommentar(er)
