Carla Bley and What's Left Out of a Legacy
For most of a century, a woman’s role in jazz was usually to sing—or be sung about.
To listen to “Ida Lupino,” Paul Bley’s version from 1966, is to be led into dance by sound. I don’t mean that it makes me want to dance, although it does that too, in its dreamy lilting way. Rather, I am pulled around a conjured room in my mind—the song not the soundtrack for my steps, so much as a confident, gentle lead dance partner. The opening chords, which repeat for the duration, are a firm hand on the small of my back. With their faint suggestion of a tango’s rhythms and the lightness of a dandelion tuft, they carry me effortlessly into each next move. The dings of Barry Altschul’s patient ride cymbal deck the ballroom in twinkle lights as they propel the music forward.
The melody joins, and a strange split vision takes hold. At once, I am the follow dancer in this imagined space, moving through the melody, being moved. And yet I can see her in the middle distance: a solo jazz ballerina, swaying in nonchalant elegance, the melody personified. This cognitive dissonance builds, along with musical tension, until a full keyboard run twirls us both around, leaving only curlicues of smoke and the lingering scent of a question. Blink again and the song’s already over. What was it when it was here?
“Ida Lupino,” along with seven other songs on the pianist Paul Bley’s Closer, was written by Carla Bley, who died in October at age 87. When Paul recorded Closer, he and Carla had recently divorced, but she had begun writing for him during their marriage. He came to her seeking compositions to play in a trio format. “I need six tunes by tomorrow night,” went the demand. Evidently, she delivered.
Reading her Times obituary, I was struck by an odd lacuna: the word woman. It’s missing, too, from the pianist Ethan Iverson’s 2018 profile of her in the New Yorker, which introduced me to her work. To be clear, the significance and splendor of Carla’s music does not need a gendered qualifier. I suspect that such identity-based discussions were left out in both of these pieces to avoid condescending to her in the way that the erstwhile Grammy award “Best Female Pop Vocal Performance” did to its recipients, promising them safety from competition with the boys.
And yet, it seems to miss something important about Carla’s life and music to present her as a vital and charismatically original jazz-and-beyond composer, without recognizing that these accomplishments were astoundingly rare for women in the mid 20th century. For most of a century, a woman’s role in jazz was usually to sing—or be sung about. You can probably count the canonized jazz musicians who are women on a hand or two. One finger is all you need to tally those who have received this hilarious overstatement in the New Yorker: “Every jazz fan knows the name of Carla Bley.” Here’s Manfred Eicher, founder of the legendary ECM label, on Carla’s compositions: “There are so many of them, each as well crafted as pieces by Satie or Mompou—or Thelonious Monk for that matter. Carla belongs in that tradition of radical originality.”
This would be impressive in any context, but the particulars of her career distinguish her from her peers in more than sound. How many musicians learned to play by working as a cigarette girl at Birdland? In the 1950s, Carla would listen to Count Basie night after night in her pillbox hat, handing out smokes. “I got to hear him more than anyone else,” she said, “and it was an education.” How many musicians got their big break writing songs for their husbands? Mary Lou Williams—an even more titanic composer and pianist than Carla—spent her early years playing in, arranging and composing for her husband’s Kansas City bands. Alice Coltrane’s work with John completely changed her career trajectory. But there aren’t many male jazz musicians with a similar story—who had to toil to be understood as their own artist separate from their spouse.
There was also the masculine milieu she had to endure, day after day, as a rare woman gigging with the guys. Charles Mingus “was a little bit crude in his talking to me. He used to say things like, ‘Ah, Carla, you wanna play? Let’s play together.’ You knew he didn’t mean the piano!” Sonny Rollins, a bandmate of her husband’s but also a musical peer, once came over and handed her a large bag of fruit to go wash in the kitchen. (He apologized a decade later, upon the insistence of his own wife.) Ornette Coleman, Carla said, would pretend to honk a horn whenever an attractive woman walked into the Five Spot.
These, of course, are versions of experiences that were shared across many industries as women began to enter them in greater numbers throughout the course of the 20th century (and beyond). In Carla's case, it's notable that the harassment and belittlement coexisted with collaborations with and great respect from players as inventive and important as Don Cherry, Charlie Haden, Bill Dixon, and Gil Evans. Wash this fruit, honey—and I’ll need six tunes by tomorrow night!
Whether or not contemporary institutions want to think about gender in remembering Carla Bley and her legacy, Carla certainly did, when she was alive. It’s not an accident that one of her signature compositions is named after the Hollywood star1 Ida Lupino. “She didn’t have all the sex appeal that a female star should have. She was sort of serious. Maybe I felt a bond with her for that reason. I wanted to be serious.” But it’d also be a mistake to see Carla as a straightforwardly feminist pioneer; as a mid-century woman looking to be taken seriously in a men’s music world, she seems to have seen prospective fellow travelers as a threat. “I wanted to be the only woman,” she said. “I was glad I stood out in some way.”
Paul Bley would go on to record some 20 albums featuring her material. Perhaps in return, Carla never dropped his surname. Once you become jazz composer Carla Bley, could you ever willingly go back to being Lovella May Borg, daughter of a church organist? (Her childhood was “doused in religion, soaked in it.” She had been “terrified of going to hell.”) At times, her work in the decade and a half that followed her early collaborations with Paul seemed almost designed to shake off his association: humorous suites, a persistent marching band fetish, a rock opera, an album with the drummer from Pink Floyd. She was staking out her own idiosyncratic territory—even while recording several albums with her second husband, the trumpeter Michael Mantler, and later with her third and final husband, the bassist Steve Swallow. Sashaying up ahead, Carla led her men in sound, but they could often be found nearby. Maybe she wanted it that way, in a music that both was and wasn’t hers.
There’s another of Carla’s identities that, without defining her, surely informed and affected her music and experiences in ways that would have differentiated her from many of her peers. She was white. “What could a white girl do in a black man's music?” she once recalled. “I wanted so much to be black that I gave myself permanent to be frizzy. In six months, all my hair fell out.” Even beyond the elements of minstrelsy here, it’s good that she moved on from that appropriation, as the hairstyle she eventually developed—like a lampshade with bangs, or a hay bale with a face—is among the best in American music.
Though she wasn’t the only white musician in elite jazz circles—not by a long shot—her career probably benefited from her whiteness in numerous ways, intangible and otherwise. But she also wasn’t completely off-base to worry that she might have been viewed as an outsider seeking to enter the jazz world in the 1950s. She was one: her earliest exposure to music was not spirituals, the blues, jazz, Tin Pan Alley tunes, or even honkey-tonk—it was her Swedish father’s church organ.2
Describing one of Carla’s compositions, “Jesus Maria,” Ethan Iverson suggests that her 1960s work prefigured the “the famous ‘ECM sound’ several years before the label was founded.” ECM has released more than 1,700 albums across a wide variety of idioms. It’s put out music by the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Marion Brown, Jack DeJohnette, Wadada Leo Smith, and countless others whose playing is often at odds with the popular conception of “the ECM sound.” But as a pseudo-genre, ECM is associated with a kind of Third Stream-adjacent, atmospheric jazz with a lot more space in it than blues and swing. It conveys an austere European coolness. (ECM is based in Munich.) “The term “‘Euro-Jazz’ is used pejoratively in the United States. It means ‘they don't swing,’ and it's a euphemism for ‘white,’” one indelicate critic put it in 2006. “The ‘ECM Sound’ personifies the genre.”
If Carla Bley’s work helped invent the ECM sound, and that sound has strong (if usually unspoken) associations with whiteness, then it seems reasonable to wonder whether yet another of Carla’s constituent identities may have played a meaningful role in who she became—and the music she made. But those elements won’t make the obits. They’re probably considered impolite to bring up. Which is too bad because the thorny mix of sociology and sound doesn’t mean the music isn’t good or important. “None of this is digested whole,” Henry Threadgill writes in his recent memoir. “But it all goes in.”
One song that feels pregnant with “it all,” is “Jesus Maria,” which Ethan Iverson correctly heard as an anticipation of “the ECM sound.” The best-known version of it appears on Jimmy Giuffre’s 1961 album Fusion, which came out long before jazz fusion signified jazz with synthesizers, funk, and rock-influenced drumming. The title was meant as a fusion of the minds of musicians “searching for a free sense of tonality and form.” Carla has two compositions on the project. Giuffre, a reed player, was often working without drummers—then fairly unusual. (Think of him, perhaps, as a mid-century Ka.) He had been a swing-band mainstay and then a West Coast jazz player in the ‘40s and ‘50s, before his student Ornette Coleman opened his third eye, and led him to free jazz as it was being developed in the 1960s. As Ben Ratliff has written, Giuffre “seemed to belong in two eras at once.”
Besides Giuffre’s eyebrow-raising clarinet, “Jesus Maria” features Carla’s then-husband Paul Bley on piano, and her husband-to-be Steve Swallow on bass. The piece is a great example of the mysterious openness that I associate with Paul and Carla’s best work. (“And Now the Queen” is another.) As Giuffre’s melody beckons us down a winding, narrow path, Bley responds with an ascending line that sounds like an opening of some kind of gate—or maybe the doors of perception.
Part of what’s so beguiling about this song, and lots of Giuffre’s work, is its friendliness toward what Ratliff, borrowing from the writer and musician Amit Chaudhuri, calls double hearing. Giuffre’s “records often suggest connections, usually through some quality of inner motion or atmosphere or harmonic relations, toward other traditions far from his own,” he writes. “Some of those connections can appear contradictory or confusing. Some of them are to music that didn’t exist when he was creating his own. Some of them are to musical expressions that do not seem to square with what type of guy Giuffre was.” In various Giuffre tracks, Ratliff hears the Grateful Dead, Tears for Fears, Julius Hemphill, and the Doors’ “L.A. Woman.”
At 0:44 in “Jesus Maria,” and a few more times throughout, I double hear “The Christmas Song,” specifically the melody of “they know that Santa's on his way / He's loaded lots of toys and goodies on his sleigh…” There’s so much contained in the song, from Carla Bley, Jimmy Giuffre, and all the life they’d imbibed up to that point—as well as whatever associations we bring to it as a listener. Give it a listen and see what connections present themselves to you. Maybe it’ll take you for a little dance.
And pioneering director—though Carla didn’t learn about that side of her career until later on.
In the 1950’s Carla’s father’s Oakland church began its transition to becoming a predominantly Black congregation. Before she was born, the church had a radio station with “Jesus Saves” on the transmitter scaffolding. It was apparently the first station to carry the voice of future civil rights-era Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren.