American avant garde jazz composer, pianist, and provocateur Carla Bley died yesterday (17) of complications from brain cancer at the age of 87, at her home in upstate New York. She had been diagnosed with the disease in 2018. The news was announced by her longtime partner and musical collaborator Steve Swallow.
Bley, born in 1936 in Oakland, California, was known both for her own records, with a discography that spanned almost 50 years, and for her many collaborations, including those with Jack Bruce and Nick Mason.
Bruce’s social media outlets observed: “We are very saddened to learn of the death of Carla Bley, a hugely important figure of the 1960s free jazz movement. Composer, pianist, organist and bandleader, Carla collaborated with Jack on various projects including her jazz opera Escalator over the Hill as well as playing in The Jack Bruce Band. The Bruce family would like to extend our deepest condolences to Carla’s husband Steve Swallow, daughter Karen Mantler and all her loved ones.”
The New York Times described Bley as “an irrepressibly original composer, arranger and pianist responsible for more than 60 years of wily provocations in and around jazz.” In a 2011 biography, writer Amy C. Beal described her music as “vernacular yet sophisticated, appealing yet cryptic, joyous and mournful, silly and serious at the same time.”
The aforementioned jazz opera, released as a triple LP in 1971 and described as a “a chronotransduction by Bley and Paul Haines,” was perhaps Bley’s best known work. But her compositions were being recorded from the late 1950s onwards, by artists such as George Russell, Jack Giuffre, and her husband in the 1960s, Jack Bley, whose name she kept after their divorce in 1967.
Other work in that decade included recordings with the Jazz Composer’s Orchestra, Michael Mantler, Charlie Haden, and Steve Swallow, whose partner she also became. Her first solo album was 1974’s Tropic Appetites, and she continued to record prolifically until 2020’s Life Goes On, a work in three suites with Swallow and Andy Sheppard.
Bley appeared with Bruce on The Jack Bruce Band Live ’75, released in 2003, and a Live on the Old Grey Whistle Test disc that came out in 1998. She played on Mason’s first solo album outside of Pink Floyd, 1981’s Nick Mason’s Fictitious Sports, and made another prestigious appearance on the all-star 1985 album Lost in the Stars: The Music of Kurt Weill, performing the title track. The album also featured Sting, Lou Reed, Tom Waits, and many others.