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    Carla Bley, Jazz Composer, Arranger and Provocateur, Dies at 87

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    Her music, which ranged from chamber miniatures to blaring fanfares, was suffused with a slyly subversive attitude.Carla Bley, an irrepressibly original composer, arranger and pianist responsible for more than 60 years of wily provocations in and around jazz, died on Tuesday at her home in Willow, a hamlet in upstate New York. She was 87.Her longtime partner in life and music, the bassist Steve Swallow, said the cause was complications of brain cancer.Ms. Bley’s influential body of work included delicate chamber miniatures and rugged, blaring fanfares, with a lot of varied terrain in between. She was branded an avant-gardist early in her career, but that term applied more to her slyly subversive attitude than to the formal character of her music, which always maintained a place for tonal harmony and standard rhythm.Within that given frame, Ms. Bley found plenty of room to confound expectations and harbor contradictions. In the 2011 biography “Carla Bley,” Amy C. Beal described her music as “vernacular yet sophisticated, appealing yet cryptic, joyous and mournful, silly and serious at the same time.”Certainly, few composers in Ms. Bley’s generation were as prolific or polymorphic in their output while projecting an identifiable point of view. She wrote elegant, drifting songs that became jazz standards, like “Ida Lupino” and “Lawns”; yearning, cinematic big-band pieces, like “Fleur Carnivore”; iconoclastic rearrangements of national anthems and classical fare; and unwieldy, uncategorizable projects like her jazz-rock opera “Escalator Over the Hill.”Originally issued on three LPs, “Escalator Over the Hill” was named album of the year by the weekly British publication Melody Maker in 1973, the same year it won a Grand Prix du Disque, France’s most prestigious award for musical recordings. With a surrealistic libretto by the poet Paul Haines, a cast including some of the era’s leading jazz renegades and vocals by Linda Ronstadt and Jack Bruce of the rock band Cream, it captured the woolly, insubordinate spirit of the age, just as it consolidated the elements of Ms. Bley’s style.That style could be a lot to take in, as John S. Wilson noted a decade later in The New York Times: “She made strong and dramatic use of darkly colored ensembles, of the tuba as a solo instrument or the core of a passage, of trombone solos that could be wildly broad and flatulent or warm and snuggling, of brass-band ensembles with a wry, ragged sound, of saxophones that came squirming up out of stolid fundamentalist ground to a shrill avant-garde ecstasy.”Ms. Bley’s portfolio as a leader included a big band stocked with some of the leading musicians in New York; a fusionesque sextet, whose ranks included Larry Willis on acoustic and electric piano and Hiram Bullock on guitar; and a chamberlike trio featuring Mr. Swallow and the saxophonist Andy Sheppard. She was the original conductor and arranger of the Liberation Music Orchestra, the revolutionary-minded ensemble formed by the bassist Charlie Haden in 1969, and continued to lead it in tribute after Mr. Haden’s death in 2014.When she was recognized as a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master in 2015, Ms. Bley expressed wonderment, still convinced of her fringe existence. “When I first toured Europe with my own band, the audience threw things at me — and I mean fruit mostly, but bottles too,” she said in 2016. “I loved it. Nobody else got fruit thrown at them. That’s so wonderful! Anything that happened that was out of the ordinary, I appreciated.”Ms. Bley at her home in Willow, N.Y., in 2016. “I’m a composer who also plays piano,” she once said, “and I sometimes feel I should wear a sign onstage saying ‘She Wrote the Music.’”Lauren Lancaster for The New York TimesBorn Lovella May Borg in Oakland, Calif., on May 11, 1936, Ms. Bley came to music largely through the ministrations of her father, Emil Carl Borg, a church organist, choirmaster and piano teacher. She was 8 when her mother, Arline (Anderson) Borg, died of heart failure.Ms. Bley’s childhood was dominated by church meetings rather than movies or pop culture. “I was doused in religion, soaked in it, terrified of going to hell,” she recalled in 1974. But she was also an instinctual nonconformist, and by her teens she had broken free of those religious moorings, initially to pursue an interest in competitive roller-skating.She first encountered jazz at age 12, via a concert by the vibraphonist Lionel Hampton. At 17, she hitchhiked across the country to New York City, epicenter of the jazz scene. She worked as a cigarette girl at Birdland, where the Count Basie Orchestra was often in residence. “I was just this girl from Oakland in a green dress I made myself, looking totally out of place, un-New Yorkerly, holding cigarettes,” she recalled. “I think I was noticeable.”One musician who took notice was the pianist Paul Bley. They married in 1957, and he encouraged her to write; most of her earliest compositions appeared on his albums. The noted composer George Russell provided further validation when he commissioned her to write for his sextet. Some of her other pieces, like “Ictus” and “Jesus Maria,” were recorded by the clarinetist and saxophonist Jimmy Giuffre’s trio, with Mr. Swallow and Mr. Bley.Jazz was undergoing a creative revolution in the 1960s — and, partly by association, Ms. Bley found herself at the turbulent center of an emerging avant-garde. She was a founder of the Jazz Composers Guild, which sought better working conditions for musicians. Though short-lived, it yielded a productive institution: the Jazz Composer’s Orchestra, which Ms. Bley formed with the Austrian trumpeter Michael Mantler. After she divorced Mr. Bley in 1967, she and Mr. Mantler married.Ms. Bley is survived by a daughter from that marriage, the vocalist, pianist and composer Karen Mantler, and by Mr. Swallow, her partner of more than 30 years.Ms. Bley in concert in Amsterdam in 1989.Frans Schellekens/Redferns, via Getty ImagesBy the late 1960s, Ms. Bley was widely recognized as a composer full of fresh ideas: The prominent vibraphonist Gary Burton featured her music exclusively on “A Genuine Tong Funeral,” an RCA release on which he led an ensemble that included Mr. Mantler, the saxophonist Gato Barbieri and the tuba and baritone saxophone player Howard Johnson, among others.Those and other musicians from the ranks of the Jazz Composer’s Orchestra formed the core personnel on “Escalator Over the Hill.” Though it was intended for release on a major label, Ms. Bley and Mr. Mantler grew disillusioned with label negotiations and formed JCOA Records to release it — along with the New Music Distribution Service, a pioneering nonprofit distributor for independent releases.After Ms. Bley received a Guggenheim fellowship for composition in 1972, she and Mr. Mantler formed another label, Watt. It released more than two dozen of her albums over the next 35 years, with distribution through ECM Records.Ms. Bley had more than fleeting contact with rock: In 1975 she joined a band with Mr. Bruce on bass and Mick Taylor of the Rolling Stones on guitar. And she wrote all the songs for “Nick Mason’s Fictitious Sports,” a 1981 album credited to Mr. Mason, the drummer in Pink Floyd, with lead vocals by Robert Wyatt, formerly of Soft Machine.During the 2010s, Ms. Bley focused a good deal of her energies on the Liberation Music Orchestra, preserving Charlie Haden’s musical vision as well as his commitment to left-leaning social activism: She included a new version of her late-’60s composition “Silent Spring” on the orchestra’s fifth album, “Time/Life,” released in 2016. As a performer she worked mainly with Mr. Sheppard and Mr. Swallow, touring internationally and releasing several albums for ECM.Ms. Bley outside her home in 2016.Lauren Lancaster for The New York TimesFeaturing some of Ms. Bley’s sparest and most beguilingly lyrical compositions, these albums — the most recent of which, “Life Goes On,” was released in 2020 — also naturally put a spotlight on her piano playing, which had long been a source of mixed feelings for her.“I’m a composer who also plays piano,” she told the German journalist Thomas Venker in 2019, “and I sometimes feel I should wear a sign onstage saying ‘She Wrote the Music.’”But speaking with The Times in 2016, Ms. Bley noted with satisfaction that the idiosyncrasies in her playing were her own:“There’s nobody that plays like me — why would they? So if I’ve had an influence, maybe it would be if they decided to play like themselves. In other words, the whole idea of not playing like anybody is a way of playing.” More

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      The Danish String Quartet’s ‘Prism’ Is Essential Listening

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      This group has wrapped its series of five albums that traced a lineage from Bach to late Beethoven to his successors into the 20th century.The three Danes and a Norwegian who play together as the Danish String Quartet have always had a charming modesty to them. But it was nevertheless a bit of a surprise, when their first studio recording of late Beethoven came out in the initial installment of “Prism,” a series exploring that composer and artistic lineages, to find them writing of themselves as “still a group of boys.”The Danish, who return to Zankel Hall on Thursday to offer the third part of “Doppelgänger,” their project pairing Schubert with new commissions, have never really approached Beethoven’s formidable last works in their genre like children, after all. They were already renowned as one of the major string quartets by the time they recorded Op. 127 in 2016, when the youngest among them was still 32, and they had built their reputation in large part on their preternatural maturity — a sense of proportion, a slight reserve, a certain inexplicable wisdom — in those scores, which can mystify far more senior musicians.As they tell it now, though, they had barely gotten going. Op. 127 was the focal point of “Prism I,” the first of five recordings on the ECM label treating the late Beethoven quartets not as the alien, anomalous masterpieces they often appear, but as part of musical history, on the one hand influenced by Bach, who is represented on each release by a transcribed fugue, and on the other influencing later successors, here Mendelssohn, Webern, Bartok, Shostakovich and Schnittke.“Prism V” came out earlier this month, and it completes a series that has come to mean more to the quartet than they might initially have expected. The eldest of the “boys” has now passed 40: The broad chords they played with such rich allure at the beginning of Op. 127, they write in the note for their most recent release, turned out not only to be “the entry gate to the promised lands of the late Beethoven quartets,” but “the exit door from our life as a young string quartet.”Op. 127 in E flat, opening“Prism I” (ECM)What a prospect a “fully-fledged” Danish String Quartet, as they describe themselves now, will be, for these releases must qualify as some of the most essential listening of the past decade. No recording could quite capture what makes the Danish so special in concert, could make indelible the fleeting aura of rapt, intense concentration that settles in a hall when they are at their best. But the five “Prism” releases come close, documenting the unique potency of a quartet that may not be the most technically imposing around, nor be the most radical in repertoire, but which excels at being itself.All the elements of the Danish style are here to behold, first among them their particular sound. Part of the intrigue when listening to string quartets comes in hearing how four audibly separate voices convene in music: how they blend together or scrape against one another, or how one rather than the others drives an argument forward. But the Danish play as if they have abandoned their individual personalities entirely to serve the collective — as if they were joined on a single instrument, armed with four bows.For the three Danes who met as not-yet-teenagers — the violinists Frederik Oland and Rune Tonsgaard Sorensen and the violist Asbjorn Norgaard — and the Norwegian cellist Fredrik Schoyen Sjolin, who joined them in their 20s, music has long been an act of friendship. They share it naturally, as equals. Listen to any of the Bach fugues on the “Prism” releases, and you find that few, if any, of the thematic entries are underlined or even pointed out. Even when they adopt the bare tone they favor in Bach, they adjust their balances to welcome a new line, a new thought, with exquisite, barely perceptible ease.You get the sense in these recordings that every bar of music has been as carefully considered as it should be, that the minutest aspect of each note has been discussed; the control of sonority and articulation on show is absolute, even as the range of both is vast.Op. 131 in C-sharp minor, finale“Prism III” (ECM)There are downsides to the Danish approach, sensible as a whole yet bold in details. Their patience pays dividends in the long slow movements of Op. 127 and Op. 132, but becomes a tad staid in the drawn-out variations of Op. 131. Theirs is not a Beethoven of struggle, of strife; if they allow rough edges to creep into the blistering dissonance of the Grosse Fuge, they hardly threaten the general air of composure. The most violent playing across the series, oddly, comes in the first movement of Mendelssohn’s A minor quartet on “Prism II,” as a young disciple rages at a master’s death.For the most part, the Danish impose themselves as indirectly as possible on the music, and they seem happy to let the connections running through the albums strike the listener as they come, too. “Doppelgänger” places Schubert works alongside new pieces explicitly inspired by them — Thursday’s concert pairs Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s “Rituals” with Schubert’s “Rosamunde” — and the links in “Prism” are similar, if less deliberately contrived. They can be a matter of direct quotation, as when Schnittke uses the Grosse Fuge in his Third Quartet, or of something as clear as Bartók beginning his First with a slow canon echoing the methods of Beethoven’s Op. 131. But they can also be elusive; you still have to listen, and listen well.Op. 130 in B flat, fourth movement“Prism II” (ECM)Listening well also reveals the subtle liberties that the Danish bring to their playing, the touches that prevent their performances from ever sounding bland. They find astonishing rhythmic freedom within the confines of their admirable discipline, a lilt to their phrasing that surely stems from the folk songs they so eagerly arrange and perform together. Take, as examples, the sense they make of the awkward opening of the finale of Op. 132, so often ungainly in the hands of others, and the elegant spring they lend to the dancing fourth movement of Op. 130, whose cavatina they unfurl with breathtaking serenity. It’s playing whose virtues speak for themselves, yet its simplicity is anything but.“The first album was recorded by four relatively fresh young men,” the Danish write in their latest release. “Now we are fathers of babies, toddlers and school kids.” Here is a rare middle age we can welcome. More