A Few Thoughts on Carla Bley

By Fritz Byers

Last weekend I watched the noir-adjacent movie, On Dangerous Ground, directed by Nicholas Ray and released in 1951. The movie’s upending of convention isn’t of Crying Game-magnitude, but the shift in tone and visual mood from the familiar grit of classic noir to the sun-and-snow spangled landscapes that dominate the second half of the movie is unlike anything in the canon. 

I watched the movie because it stars Ida Lupino, who was on my mind because the great pianist Carla Bley named one of her most engaging compositions after Ida and because Carla passed last week, aged 87. I’ve valued the tune since I first heard it, many years ago, on Paul Bley’s marvelous solo recording, Open to Love (ECM - 1972). I’d speculated about the provenance of the tune and why a musician of such singular vision would have been drawn to a movie star and director of such singular vision — Ida, if you don’t know, was among the first widely recognized female directors, creating eight memorable movies, including two noir demi-classics, “The Hitchiiker,” and “The Bigamist,” in which Ida became, as best I can tell, the first female director to direct herself in a starring role (alongside Joan Fontaine). To my untutored eyes, “The Bigamist” reflects, in all the best ways, lessons Ida learned from her time on set with Nicholas Ray, blended with her own subversive sensibility.

Come to find out, I don’t have to guess any longer. Carla explained the origins of the tune to the pianist Ethan Iverson: 

“I just saw a few movies she did, and I thought she was sort of stripped and basic. She 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. It wasn’t anything to do with her being the first female director. I learned that later.”

You can’t really call Carla’s tune a standard, but it’s been recorded many times by all sorts of musicians. One of the more obscure is among my favorites: the pianist Giovanni Guidi recorded it in 2015, with Gianluca Petrella on trombone and clarinet-wizard Louis Sclavis. I believe Giovanni said somewhere that he considered his recording of “Ida Lupino,” which also is the name of the album, to be a tribute both to Carla as composer and to the pianist Paul, who throughout his own long career remained true to his own seductive ideas of musical beauty.

Yes, Carla has been on my mind for the last week. For nearly sixty years, she produced music that you just could not fail to pay attention to. Before she began her recording career as a leader, she wrote the arrangements and played piano for Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra, whose eponymous 1969 recording changed the idea of how a big band can embrace the avant-garde innovations of Ornette Coleman and his acolytes. (Some of the logical extensions of this recording are realized in the Orchestra’s 1983 sequel, Ballad of the Fallen, a not-to-be-missed treasure.) And with the Jazz Composers’s Orchestra, she wrote all of the music for the jazz opera Escalator over the Hill, with the libretto of Paul Haines. The world, at least the one I live in, hasn’t yet caught up with some of Carla’s innovations on this recording, released in 1971 as a triple-LP box. If you wanted to find the earliest ventures that melded jazz conventions with world-music, you might begin here.

In 1974, Carla released her debut as a leader, Tropic Appetites, recorded with an octet. And over the next fifty years, she never stopped changing — as a composer, arranger, bandleader, or pianist. Her recorded legacy includes stripped down duets with the bassist Steve Swallow (her long-time musical and personal partner), big band extravaganzas (don’t miss Appearing Nightly, recorded in performance in 2006), and some of the most engaging, surprising, and luscious music of the current century with her trio, in which she’s joined by Steve on bass and the saxophonist Andy Sheppard. On the 2013 recording Trios, they present one of Carla’s enduring masterpieces, “Ultviklingssan,” in a setting that is at once spare and lush, and the result somehow lets you hear how Carla thought about the tune when she wrote it, and how she was thinking about it anew during this recording.

That may seem like a kind of magical thinking. But magical thinking is part of what Carla’s music produces.

Jazz Spectrum and Jazz Spectrum Overnight this weekend will present a wide range of Carla’s music. I’ll post some program notes Friday.