Obituary, Carla Bley (1936-2023)

The iconoclastic American pianist and composer Carla Bley has passed away at the age of 87 following complications from brain cancer. Her death was confirmed by her husband and longtime collaborator, bassist Steve Swallow, earlier this week. Along with her signature shocking-frizz hairstyle and sense of humour, she was best known for her profound abilities as a composer and orchestrator, co-leading several large ensembles in her time including the Liberation Music Orchestra, the Jazz Composer's Orchestra Association and her own eponymous big band. Broadly speaking, the major strands of Bley’s career can be marked by the series of professional collaborations with her three successive romantic and musical partners: Paul Bley (1957-64), Michael Mantler (1965-1991) and, finally, Swallow (1991-2023).

Born Lovella May Borg to Swedish parents in Oakland, California on 11th May, 1936, Bley was raised in a musical household from an early age. Encouraged by her choirmaster father, Emil, to take up piano and singing, she moved to New York as a teenager where she found work at the Birdland jazz club  before meeting the Canadian pianist, Paul Bley. With the couple marrying soon after, the musician began championing his wife's compositions, recording many himself and offering a number others to a small but prolific number of collaborators including George Russell and Jimmy Giuffre. 

An early career highlight came in the form of the groundbreaking jazz-opera, Escalator Over The Hill (1971) — a fiercely avant-garde work or 'chronotransduction' which featured contributions from the likes of Jack Bruce, Linda Ronstadt and Don Cherry amongst a tempestuous multitude of other talented musicians. Bley's bombastic compositional style lent itself to the mammoth undertakings of large-scale pieces such as Escalator, and her work with then-husband Mike Mantler would further explore this wildly creative terrain with records such as 13 & 3/4 (1975). Her daughter from that relationship, Karen, performed on many of Bley's records commencing in the seventies and beyond, emerging with her own solo career on My Cat Arnold (1989) and Karen Mantler and Her Cat Arnold Get the Flu (1990). During this time, Bley and her husband established their family-run label, WATT, as well as its two subsidiaries, XtraWATT and SubWATT — one of the first artists to do so, a testament to her self-assured talent and vision. 

Having received the NEA Jazz Masters Award in 2015, Bley is survived by her family members, Mantler and Swallow. She leaves behind a rich legacy as one of the most innovative voices in progressive jazz of the last half-century and will be sorely missed. 

Explore some highlights from Bley's remarkable career below.