– An interview with Carla Bley – February 1, 1977 – WGBH-FM, Boston – Gordon Skene Sound Collection –
While we’re celebrating the work and the career of Carla Bley, there was also the side of a woman who was deeply committed to nurturing new talent, getting the message across and diving into the business of putting out records.
In 1964, Carla Bley was involved in organizing the Jazz Composers Guild, which brought together the most innovative musicians in New York at the time. She then had a personal and professional relationship with Michael Mantler, with whom she had a daughter, Karen Mantler, who also became a musician. Bley and Mantler were married from 1965 to 1991. With Mantler, she co-led the Jazz Composers’ Orchestra and started the JCOA record label which issued a number of historic recordings by Clifford Thornton, Don Cherry, and Roswell Rudd, as well as her own magnum opus Escalator Over The Hill and Mantler’s The Jazz Composer’s Orchestra LPs. Bley and Mantler were pioneers in the development of independent artist-owned record labels, and also started the now defunct New Music Distribution Service, which specialized in small, independent labels that issued recordings of “creative improvised music”.
Carla Bley arranged and composed music for bassist Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra, and wrote A Genuine Tong Funeral for vibraphonist Gary Burton. Bley collaborated with a number of other artists, including Jack Bruce, Robert Wyatt, and Nick Mason, drummer for the rock group Pink Floyd. Mason’s solo debut album Nick Mason’s Fictitious Sports was written entirely by Bley, and features, alongside Mason on drums, many of her regular band musicians, leading Brian Olewnick of AllMusic to consider it a Carla Bley album in all but name.
Wolfgang Sandner summarized for Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung that Carla Bley was “great as a stimulator, as a muse, catalyst, idea generator, as a sounding board and amplifier, also in refusing – virtuosity, fetishised technique, perfect craft, convention and false pathos”.
Here is Carla Bley having a chat over WGBH-FM, Boston during a promotional tour for JCOA Records on February 1, 1977.
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