The jazz composer Carla Bley, who has died aged 87, created an enormous body of work with emotional punch, intellectual reach and musical depth. She was also a role model for independent musicians, with her own label and studio in New York state.
She wrote short, unforgettable tunes with the same authority that she applied to long, through-composed suites. Three works established her importance. A Genuine Tong Funeral (1968) was a “dark opera without words”, adapted for the vibraphone player Gary Burton. Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra album(1969), for which Bley arranged tunes such as We Shall Overcome and Ornette Coleman’s War Orphans, showed that she could lead an unruly crew of soloists and bond them together without losing anyone’s individuality. The third career-launcher was the ambitious “chronotransduction” Escalator Over the Hill (1971), the jazz-rock-world “opera” she made with the librettist Paul Haines.
Released on the independent JCOA label that Bley co-founded, this triple LP box overflowed with a deliriously entertaining, bewildering and bewitching mix of glorious anthems, full-throated jazz, pop flamboyance and downtown weirdness. Fronted by stars such as Linda Ronstadt, Paul Jones (ex-Manfred Mann), Jack Bruce of Cream and the Andy Warhol actor Viva, Escalator Over the Hill also featured big jazz names such as Don Cherry, Gato Barbieri and John McLaughlin.
Though she used the name Carla for her recording career, she was born Lovella Borg in Oakland, California. The daughter of Arline (nee Anderson), who died when Lovella was eight, and Emil Borg, both musicians, she played and sang at church, and grew up in a relaxed but religious household. She was largely self-taught on piano.
“My father was a piano teacher,” she told me in 2009, “so I heard scales all the time. He started teaching me, but soon gave up. I quit studying when I was four or five. My father didn’t insist on anything. He let me run wild. We had a ‘hay party’ in my house, and we brought in 10 bales of hay, spread it all over the living room, piled bales of hay everywhere. And the hay was in the house for the rest of our lives.”
As a teenager she earned money accompanying dance classes, roller-skated seriously and discovered jazz. “Lionel Hampton was the first band I heard when I was 13 and I was blown away. I didn’t know if I could do it, but I could listen. The next year I went to the Black Hawk in San Francisco … Gerry Mulligan and Chet Baker.”
A few years later she hitched to New York, where a job as a cigarette girl at the Birdland jazz club meant she could hear the world’s best musicians. She wrote tunes for the Canadian pianist Paul Bley, whom she married in 1957: compositions such as O Plus One and Ida Lupino date from this time. Other musicians who championed her work include George Russell, Jimmy Giuffre, Don Ellis and Steve Lacy.
After splitting from Paul, she married the Austrian-born trumpeter Michael Mantler in 1965, and they had a daughter, Karen. Their partnership also yielded the JCOA label, Escalator Over the Hill and the New Music Distribution Service, a not-for-profit distributor for experimental music. In the 1970s they moved to Willow in New York state, where they founded their Watt label and a recording studio, Grog Kill. The label’s first album was her charming Tropic Appetites (1974), with vocals by Julie Tippetts. Bley worked on more records and played with the Jack Bruce Band for six months in 1975.
Over the next few years Bley, whose distinctive hairstyle made her instantly recognisable on stage, toured and recorded with her own bands, usually rumbustious 10-piece units that sounded bigger and funnier than most big bands, with great sidemen such as the French horn player Vincent Chancey, bassist Steve Swallow, trombonist Gary Valente and the former The Modern Lovers drummer D Sharpe, who memorably sang I Hate To Sing on Bley’s 1984 album of that name.
She wrote words and music to the punkish Fictitious Sports by the Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason, which was recorded at Grog Kill with vocals by Robert Wyatt in 1979 and released two years later. I’m a Mineralist pays witty tribute to Philip Glass; Boo to You Too expresses Bley’s feelings about playing difficult music in public.
She made crucial contributions to the producer Hal Willner’s 80s albums celebrating the music of Nino Rota, Thelonious Monk and Kurt Weill. In that decade Bley also began a relationship with Swallow that lasted until her death. When I asked Bley about the lustrous Night-Glo (1985), she said: “That was me and Steve right at the beginning, and we were just falling in love. We were infatuated with what they called ‘quiet storm’, music you played late at night, like Marvin Gaye or something.”
Three more decades of composing, recording and touring followed, including The Very Big Carla Bley Band (1991), Fancy Chamber Music (1998), the delightful Carla’s Christmas Carols (2009), quartets and a trio with Swallow and British saxophonist Andy Sheppard, plus more with the Liberation Music Orchestra.
Bley won many awards including a Guggenheim fellowship, Deutscher Schallplattenpreis and an NEA Jazz Masters fellowship, and was nominated for many more, but never quite fitted in. She worked within a scene whose promoters, fans, critics and musicians tend to misunderstand the role of the jazz composer. Her piano-playing, though enthralling, was there to serve her compositional goals.
Bley talked about the challenges of getting other musicians to play her repertoire. “It would be nice to not have to travel to play the music. I wrote a bunch of chamber music and thought, ‘Oh, now, all the chamber groups that are interested in jazz will play it.’ No one ever played it. I always had to be there.”
Her marriage to Mantler ended in divorce. She is survived by Swallow and Karen.
• Carla Bley (Lovella May Borg), musician and composer, born 11 May 1936; died 17 October 2023
