This is the first comprehensive treatment of the remarkable music and
influence of Carla Bley, a highly innovative American jazz composer,
pianist, organist, band leader, and activist. With fastidious attention
to Bley's diverse compositions over the last fifty years spanning
critical moments in jazz and experimental music history, Amy C. Beal
tenders a long-overdue representation of a major figure in American
music.
Best known for her jazz opera "Escalator over the Hill," her role in the
Free Jazz movement of the 1960s, and her collaborations with artists
such as Jack Bruce, Don Cherry, Robert Wyatt, and Pink Floyd drummer
Nick Mason, Bley has successfully maneuvered the field of jazz from
highly accessible, tradition-based contexts to commercially unviable,
avant-garde works. Beal details the staggering variety in Bley's work as
well as her use of parody, quotations, and contradictions, examining the
vocabulary Bley has developed throughout her career and highlighting the
compositional and cultural significance of her experimentalism.
Beal also points to Bley's professional and managerial work as a pioneer
in the development of artist-owned record labels, the cofounder and
manager of WATT Records, and the cofounder of New Music Distribution
Service. Showing her to be not just an artist but an activist who has
maintained musical independence and professional control amid the
profit-driven, corporation-dominated world of commercial jazz, Beal's
straightforward discussion of Bley's life and career will stimulate
deeper examinations of her work.
