Carla Bley has died yesterday, Oct. 17, 2023

Born Lovella May Borg in Oakland, California, on May 11, 1936, pianist and composer Carla Bley has sadly passed away yesterday due to a brain cancer, as told by her husband, bassist Steve Swallow. For a long time associated with free jazz, Bley during her career spanned through a vide variety of registries, including solos, duos – the longtime collaboration with Swallow – up to exploring all the potentials of big bands.

The most famous projects she collaborated with are obviously Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra, a line up that changed during the decades producing at least one masterpiece – their firsts album for Impulse! released in 1970 – and the project under her name Escalator over the Hill (JCOA, 1971), a triple album for a big band including Jeanne Lee, Gato Barbieri, Karl Berger, Don Cherry, Charlie Haden, Leroy Jenkins, Enrico Rava, Roswell Rudd and many others.

The work was inspired by poems of Paul Haines and it was depicted as a “masterpiece” and by some as “the most important record of all times”. Far from sensationalism, EOTH is simply one of the most successful attempts to mix free jazz, rock, indian music – ragas in particular – and the cabaret music of Kurt Weill. Intense, physical and intellectual at the same time, the album is an unicum in a career that quite often explored delicate and meaningful places such as in the case of pieces like End of Vienna from the album Fancy Chamber Music (ECM, 1998) with its violin, viola, cello and flute delicate and intense dialogues.

In fact, Bley’s music was not only and not always dense and thick, since many times it was lyrical and meditative as in Fleur Carnivore, full of references to classical compostions, even if reworked through a jazz sensitivity, as in More Brahms from Sextet (ECM, 1987) or again adventurous and evocative as in the compositions selected by the Jimmy Giuffre Trio for the alum Jimmy Giuffre 3 (ECM, 1961).

As it happened earlier this year with the losses of Peter Brotzmann and Tristan Honsinger, the death of Carla Bley deprives us not only of a magnificent musician/composer, but also of a refined human sensitivity so useful in these days of conservatorship and cultural, but not only cultural, homologation. Even because these musicians will not be replaced by new or younger ones, more influenced by the days they’re living in than the older ones, freer and less inclined to compromise first and foremost in their minds.