NO MORE AGAIN - CARLA BLEY

 

It was the afternoon of Saturday, 16 February 1980, a day I'll remember for the rest of my life, when I travelled to the old Bridge Street Library in the heart of the old Gorbals, in Glasgow, to listen to Escalator Over The Hill. The work had intermittently crossed my radar but I had not actually listened to it and knew of Carla Bley largely by reputation only. Because I lived in Uddingston at the time I was only allowed to borrow books and music from Lanarkshire county libraries, but because my father worked in Glasgow I managed to get a pass to read books and listen to music in Glasgow libraries, even though I couldn't take them out.

So it was that I listened, on library headphones, to all six sides of Escalator. Shortly beforehand I had dreamed the entire record and was now naturally very keen to listen to the thing itself. I was utterly transported, and transformed. I left that library in a daze, wandered around various, mostly disused areas of Clydeside. It was as if the entire world had been opened up for me to explore. The record was like nothing I had ever heard before. I searched for it, venturing as far as Virgin Records in Edinburgh on a sunnier Saturday afternoon not long afterwards, only to be told that it had been deleted just a few months beforehand, in October 1979.

I eventually contacted Honest Jon's Records on the Portobello Road, who did have a copy in stock for £4.50 and duly posted it to me. I lived within that record for at least a year and predictably felt the urge to find as much else of Carla Bley's music as possible. For the best part of 1980 I listened to little else.

There was a route to Escalator; it did not emerge from nowhere. Lovella May Borg, as she was born in Oakland in May 1936, was taught music at an early age by her father Emil, who worked as a church choirmaster and piano teacher. Her mother died when she was just eight. At seventeen she moved to New York and found work as a cigarette girl at Birdland. There she also met her first husband, the Montreal pianist Paul Bley, who encouraged her to compose music.

Her works initially appeared in dots and flashes, which was a fair way of summing up her quixotic and elusive rhythmic and harmonic approach. George Russell's sextet recorded "Bent Eagle" for their 1960 album Stratusphunk, while the Jimmy Giuffre 3, whose line-up also included Paul Bley and, crucially, the young bassist Steve Swallow, interpreted "Ictus" for their Thesis album one year later. Paul Bley himself recorded an entire, fiery album of her compositions entitled Barrage in 1965.

Carla, in tandem with the Austrian composer and trumpeter Michael Mantler, joined up with the Jazz Composers Guild in 1964. Despite residual misogyny from some other members of that organisation - notably Sun Ra, who regarded having a woman on board as a sign that the ship would sink - she and Mantler prevailed, and not long afterwards married. Many of Bley's early recordings were shared enterprises between the rather austere Mantler and her brighter, more mischievous self. "Roast," which she composed and directed for (though does not play on - Paul Bley was the pianist on that session) the first Jazz Composer's Orchestra album Communication in 1965, is a rhythmically intriguing puzzle which draws committed improvising from soloists Milford Graves, Steve Lacy and Archie Shepp. Thereafter the 1966 Jazz Realities quintet album, which gives equal space to Bley and Mantler's compositions, suggested a freer approach, although an exhausting European tour with saxophonist Peter Brötzmann in the line-up told Bley that perhaps she didn't need to get that free. In the meantime, remembering her church beginnings, she contributed to the book anthology A Wreath Of Carols, edited by one Betty M Owen, in 1966.

Carla already knew the poet Paul Haines - you can clearly hear the two converse between numbers in the very sparse audience on Albert Ayler's 1964 Prophecy album - and by 1967 Haines had moved to India to work as a teacher. He sent Carla some of his work, and by that time Carla's head had been turned around by exposure to the Beatles' Sgt Pepper. Ideas for an even more extensive concept album sprung to both minds.

In this context, A Genuine Tong Funeral, a work Bley wrote (with a written but unsung libretto by Haines) for the Gary Burton Quartet and a five-piece horn section drawn from the Jazz Composer's Orchestra repertory company, acts as a kind of prelude to Escalator; elements of the latter's themes subtly pop up in the former. Despite some good playing, however, the quartet and horns seem to exist in separate universes and coincide only very rarely, and sometimes haphazardly. The experiment was still being fermented.

Work on composing Escalator began in earnest - Bley came up with a total of twelve separate themes which she had to weave into a coherent framework - and some recording work on it was undertaken in November 1968. The process was long drawn-out, however, because the work proved very costly indeed, driving Bley and Mantler into six-figure debt and not a little discomfort; the record was only completed in the summer of 1971. During that period she also appeared on half of Mantler's historic The Jazz Composer's Orchestra double album (1968), providing a raised eyebrow of a piano solo on "Communications #8," though was somewhat obscured by the other half of the record being dominated by Cecil Taylor.

More profitably, she did many of the arrangements for, and was the de facto co-leader on, the eponymous first album by Charlie Haden's Liberation Music Orchestra, one of 1970's rawest and most explosive protest records. I first heard "Circus '68;'69" on Peter Clayton's Jazz Record Requests show on Radio 3 in November 1976 and was completely blown away by it, not knowing at the time about Bley's involvement (it is her organ which mightily and solemnly begins to play "We Shall Overcome" in the midst of orchestrated chaos). I caught up with the record itself - again, via Honest Jon's (this was a major factor behind my eventual decision to move to London) - not long after my first listen to Escalator, and there was an air of elegiac slapstick about Bley's voicings and, in some cases, compositions, which adhered to my heart.

When Escalator finally appeared in Britain, in March 1972, Richard Williams in Melody Maker declared it one of the greatest records ever made, if not the greatest. I cannot disagree with that declaration over half a century later. It represents the emancipation of all types of music - classical, free (and not so free) jazz, pop, rock, country, abstract electronics, incipient World Music - in a form which nobody has bettered before or since. Haines' words are askew in their obliqueness, but as with his unlikely spiritual cousins The Bee Gees, one is intended to feel the words before (or perhaps even instead of) understanding them. If you look at the booklet accompanying the album, there are unsung lyrics scored to accompany instrumental passages. You were trusted to be able to keep up with, and accept, what was going on.

The plot of Escalator, as such, is obscure. Much of it appears to take place in a decrepit establishment called Cecil Clark's Hotel - commonly supposed to represent the Chelsea Hotel in New York (indeed the Warhol superstar Viva acts as the work's narrator) - but some of it happens in India, some in a field which may or may not exist, and all of it happens pretty exclusively in the listener's mind. I had no idea, for instance, that the almighty rupture we hear at the beginning of side two signified the Los Angeles earthquake of 1971, but my wife Lena, who was present in Los Angeles when that happened, confirms that this was indeed the case.

Overall, however, amid all the humour and fourth-walling, there is an air of profound melancholy about Escalator. It would not, of course, had worked without the contributions of the fifty-four people who perform on it (at least; contractual issues suggest that even more musicians, including some extremely famous ones, appear on the record anonymously) - above all Jack Bruce, the conscience which holds the entire work together, but also Roswell Rudd, Gato Barbieri, John McLaughlin (sounding the most committed he had sounded on record to date), Charlie Haden, Linda Ronstadt, Jeanne Lee, Sheila Jordan, Paul Jones, Leroy Jenkins, Paul Motian (the work's unsung hero, called upon to drum in a vast variety of styles throughout) and many, many others, especially Don Cherry, whose Desert Band sequences (which do not appear on the record until very late in the day) escort an already spellbinding record into something approaching holiness. One could spend a lifetime immersed in the greatness of this work which, as the elongated fadeout confirms - on the original album it is a locked groove - could theoretically last forever.

I doubt that Escalator could ever have been bettered, and suspect that Bley knew it. 1974's Tropic Appetites, also composed with Haines, was supposed to act as a whimsical footnote to Escalator, but doesn't really sound anything like it - only eight musicians essentially appear on it, but via multi-tracking sound like a lot more - though has its own, extremely strong moments; I wonder if the young Elvis Costello had heard "Caucasian Bird Riffles," beautifully sung by Julie Tippetts with plaintive trumpet from Mantler, and remembered it when he recorded his own version of "Shipbuilding," featuring Chet Baker, nine years later (the two songs are structurally not alike in any way, but the arrangement and delivery of one may have influenced the other).

Bley continued to skirt around the borders of what Escalator had implied. She was her own featured soloist on 1975's magnificent classical piece "3/4 For Piano And Orchestra" and in the same year briefly entered the arena of rock when she joined Jack Bruce's band, together with recent Stones guitarist Mick Taylor - an experiment possibly better in theory than in practice. In 1976 she contributed to the John Cage/Jan Steele Voices And Instruments anthology on Brian Eno's Obscure Records and in the following year to John Greaves' Kew.Rhone. During the same period she also maintained a supportive role with the Jazz Composer's Orchestra (and the shortlived New Music Distribution Service), contributing piano to Don Cherry's Relativity Suite, Grachan Moncur III's Echoes Of Prayer and Clifford Thornton's The Gardens Of Harlem. She was obviously also key to Michael Mantler's works of the period - superb with just Jack Bruce and (occasionally) Don Cherry on the Beckett adaptation No Answer (1974), submitting icily Futurist Korg string synthesiser on the Edward Gorey anthology The Hapless Child (1975), less convincing on the Pinter setting Silence (1976), and in a refreshingly good mood on the two jazz-rock albums Movies (1977) and More Movies (1978).

As far as her own music was concerned, Bley seemed slightly directionless in the mid-late seventies. Dinner Music (1976) attempted to marry boisterous horns to smooth fusion (Steve Gadd, Richard Tee, Eric Gale and Cornell Dupree were among the players involved) with only limited conceptual success, and probably contributed to the need to organise and tour her own band. In 1977 that involved several key British players, including Elton Dean, Hugh Hopper and Gary Windo, and their European Tour 1977 album, though a studio recording, sounded the most vital Bley's music had done in some time.

So impressed was Bley by Gary Windo's saxophone playing in particular, and so appalled was she by the fact that he had to work as a car mechanic to pay the bills, that she kept him in her band and took him over to the United States. His unapologetic approach - somewhere between Junior Walker and Pharaoh Sanders - contributes greatly to the impact of the otherwise irritatingly jokey Musique Mecanique (1978), as do guests Eugene Chadbourne and (gleefully sending up his own Liberation Music Orchestra approach) Charlie Haden.

This in turn led to the remarkable Nick Mason's Fictitious Sports album, recorded in 1979 but not released until 1981, bankrolled by the Pink Floyd drummer and long-term Bley fan and featuring Robert Wyatt doing most of the vocals; critically misunderstood at the time, it is a patchy but sometimes very profound art-pop record. But Bley largely turned away from pop after that - apart from appearing on a couple of records by The Golden Palominos, that really was it with her and pop - and back towards jazz, developing a slow-burning but enveloping dynamic around her music and the musicians she chose to play it. There are twenty-four albums still to go, most of which were strongly affected by her estrangement from Mantler and ultimate happiness and companionship with Steve Swallow, and those are just under her own name; four other albums by Charlie Haden's Liberation Music Orchestra, at least two of which (1983's The Ballad Of The Fallen and 2005's Not In Our Name) are indispensable, as well as striking contributions to several anthologies by Hal Willner, some involving unlikely but compatible players such as Phil Woods and Johnny Griffin.

Of those remaining twenty-four named Bley albums, I have always had a soft spot for 1986's Night-Glo, routinely dismissed at the time as cocktail muzak but which gradually and magnificently undermines its own premise with increasing discordancy. The big band albums are consolidatory and relatively unadventurous but the live Fleur Carnivore (1989) best captures its essence. Songs With Legs (1994), a trio date with Swallow and saxophonist Andy Sheppard, features perhaps her most committed piano improvising. The Lost Chords (2004) and its sequel, The Lost Chords find Paolo Fresu (2007), were unexpected late and very profound masterpieces. Finally there was a trilogy of records by the Bley/Swallow/Sheppard trio - Trios, a revisiting of earlier compositions (2013), Andando el Tiempo (2015), perhaps the bleakest and most moving of Bley records, and the comparatively playful Life Goes On (2020) provided a richly satisfactory coda.

I would propose that Carla Bley, and Escalator Over The Hill in particular, was (or were? are?) instrumental in shaping the way in which I have approached music these past forty-three years. Its implications remain insufficiently realised, but it - and she - certainly altered this person, and the church in which he has chosen to dwell. No more "again," perhaps, but at the same time there is always again. That was her work's primary lesson.