Carla Bley obituary
The jazz composer Carla Bley, who has died aged 87, created an enormous body of work with emotional punch, intellectual reach and musical depth. She was also a role model for independent musicians, with her own label and studio in New York state.
She wrote short, unforgettable tunes with the same authority that she applied to long, through-composed suites. Three works established her importance. A Genuine Tong Funeral (1968) was a “dark opera without words”, adapted for the vibraphone player Gary Burton. Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra album (1969), for which Bley arranged tunes such as We Shall Overcome and Ornette Coleman’s War Orphans, showed that she could lead an unruly crew of soloists and bond them together without losing anyone’s individuality. The third career-launcher was the ambitious “chronotransduction” Escalator Over the Hill (1971), the jazz-rock-world “opera” she made with the librettist Paul Haines.
Released on the independent JCOA label that Bley co-founded, this triple LP box overflowed with a deliriously entertaining, bewildering and bewitching mix of glorious anthems, fullthroated jazz, pop flamboyance and downtown weirdness. Fronted by stars such as Linda Ronstadt, Paul Jones (exManfred Mann), Jack Bruce of Cream and the Andy Warhol actor Viva, Escalator Over the Hill also featured big jazz names such as Don Cherry, Gato Barbieri and John McLaughlin.
Though she used the name Carla for her recording career, she was born Lovella Borg in Oakland, California. The daughter of Arline (nee Anderson), who died when Lovella was eight, and Emil Borg, both musicians, she played and sang at church, and grew up in a relaxed but religious household. She was largely self-taught on piano.
“My father was a piano teacher,” she told me in 2009, “so I heard scales all the time. He started teaching me, but soon gave up. I quit studying when I was four or five. My father didn’t insist on anything. He let me run wild. We had a ‘hay party’ in my house, and we brought in 10 bales of hay, spread it all over the living room, piled bales of hay everywhere. And the hay was in the house for the rest of our lives.”
As a teenager she earned money accompanying dance classes, rollerskated seriously and discovered jazz. “Lionel Hampton was the first band I heard when I was 13 and I was blown away. I didn’t know if I could do it, but I could listen. The next year I went to the Black Hawk in San Francisco … Gerry Mulligan and Chet Baker.”
A few years later she hitched to New York, where a job as a cigarette girl at the Birdland jazz club meant she could hear the world’s best musicians. She wrote tunes for the Canadian pianist Paul Bley, whom she married in 1957:
compositions such as O Plus One and Ida Lupino date from this time. Other musicians who championed her work include George Russell, Jimmy Guiffre, Don Ellis and Steve Lacy.
After splitting from Paul, she married the Austrian-born trumpeter Michael Mantler in 1965, and they had a daughter, Karen. Their partnership also yielded the JCOA label, Escalator Over the Hill and the New Music Distribution Service, a not-for-profit distributor for experimental music. In the 1970s they moved to Willow in New York state, where they founded their Watt label and a recording studio, Grog Kill. The label’s first album was her charming Tropic Appetites (1974), with vocals by Julie Tippetts. Bley worked on more records and played with the Jack Bruce Band for six months in 1975.
Over the next few years Bley, whose distinctive hairstyle made her instantly recognisable on stage, toured and recorded with her own bands, usually rumbustious 10-piece units that sounded bigger and funnier than most big bands, with great sidemen such as the French horn player Vincent Chancey, bassist Steve Swallow, trombonist Gary Valente and the former The Modern Lovers drummer D Sharpe, who memorably sang I Hate To Sing on Bley’s 1984 album of that name.
She wrote words and music to the punkish Fictitious Sports by the Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason, which was recorded at Grog Kill with vocals by Robert Wyatt in 1979 and released two years later. I’m a Mineralist pays witty tribute to Philip Glass; Boo to You Too expresses Bley’s feelings about playing difficult music in public.
She made crucial contributions to the producer Hal Willner’s 80s albums celebrating the music of Nino Rota, Thelonious Monk and Kurt Weill. In that decade Bley also began a relationship with Swallow that lasted until her death. When I asked Bley about the lustrous Night-Glo (1985), she said: “That was me and Steve right at the beginning, and we were just falling in love. We were infatuated with what they called ‘quiet storm’, music you played late at night, like Marvin Gaye or something.”
Three more decades of composing, recording and touring followed, including The Very Big Carla Bley Band (1991), Fancy Chamber Music (1998), the delightful Carla’s Christmas Carols (2009), quartets and a trio with Swallow and British saxophonist Andy Sheppard, plus more with the Liberation Music Orchestra.
Bley won many awards including a Guggenheim fellowship, Deutscher Schallplattenpreis and an NEA Jazz Masters fellowship, and was nominated for many more, but never quite fitted in. She worked within a scene whose promoters, fans, critics and musicians tend to misunderstand the role of the jazz composer. Her piano-playing, though enthralling, was there to serve her compositional goals.
Bley talked about the challenges of getting other musicians to play her repertoire. “It would be nice to not have to travel to play the music. I wrote a bunch of chamber music and thought, ‘Oh, now, all the chamber groups that are interested in jazz will play it.’ No one ever played it. I always had to be there.”
Her marriage to Mantler ended in divorce. She is survived by Swallow and Karen.
• Carla Bley (Lovella May Borg), musician and composer, born 11 May 1936; died 17 October 2023
world.
If completed, Eacop will include dozens of well pads, hundreds of miles of roads, and camps, in addition to the pipeline connecting oilfields in western Uganda with the Port of Tanga in eastern Tanzania. The oil will be transported to overseas refineries, and over 25 years will lead to almost 380m tons of additional planet-warming greenhouse gasses – the equivalent of France’s total national emissions in 2020, according to the Climate Accountability Institute.
Eacop’s backers claim that the pipeline will bring benefits for people in Uganda and Tanzania including tax revenue, jobs, infrastructure and skills and technology transfer.
A recent report by Human Rights Watch (HRW) found that if completed, Eacop also will displace more than 100,000 people and has already devastated thousands of livelihoods, caused food insecurity and household debt, and decreased school attendance – in addition to exacerbating the climate crisis. Compensation to displaced people is too low, and take years to arrive, according to HRW.
A TotalEnergies spokesperson said: “The figure of 100,000 refers to all people who own an asset – farmland or animal grazing land – on the pipeline route, either because they are located on permanent rights-of-way or for the duration of the construction works. In the vast majority of cases, the owner of the land will be able to use it after the works.”
Transnational corporations have long exploited natural resources including oil, gas and minerals against the wishes of local communities, but in recent years civil lawsuits and criminal charges have been increasingly used to silence and discredit those challenging environmentally destructive projects.
In Uganda, the government crackdown on climate and environmental activists dates back to about 2010, in response to community opposition to an oil refinery being built on the border with the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
It led to new anti-protest legislation requiring police approval for any gathering over three people and the 2016 NGO Act, which placed cumbersome requirements on nonprofits. “By the time Eacop was being discussed in 2018, the government had already created a hostile environment. Now, anyone organizing is suppressed,” said Dickens Kamugisha of the Africa Institute for Energy Governance (Afiego), a research and advocacy non-governmental organization that helps communities affected by Eacop and other large projects.
As the campaign against Eacop has grown locally and internationally, activists say the crackdown has intensified.
In 2021, the government deregistered 54 non-profits working on human rights, environmental and climate issues and anti-corruption efforts – including Afiego and its community partners, for alleged noncompliance with the NGO Act. The move was condemned by rights experts.
Afiego says its staff have been harassed and arrested and that several face spurious criminal charges.
In January 2022, a group of UN experts wrote to the Ugandan government about the “arrests, acts of intimidation and judicial harassment against human rights defenders and NGOs [including Afiego] working in the oil and gas sector in Uganda, which appear to be directly related to their legitimate human rights activities”.
The Ugandan government has not responded to the UN’s concerns.
Afiego and others have documented scores of arbitrary detentions in the far-flung villages where TotalEnergies is acquiring land for the pipeline. Some community leaders have been charged, while others have been let go within hours and without any written proof of the arrest.
“The motive is to disrupt organizing and create fear among communities so people think twice about joining. The arrests are arbitrary. It’s a terror tactic,” Kamugisha said.
In September 2022, the European parliament adopted a groundbreaking resolution condemning Eacop on human rights grounds including the “wrongful imprisonment of human rights defenders, the arbitrary suspension of NGOs, arbitrary prison sentences and the eviction of hundreds of people from their land without fair and adequate compensation”.
The Ugandan government reacted angrily, accusing the EU of interfering in the country’s affairs.
Soon after, government authorities were accused of staging an anti-EU protest by high school students, whom rights groups say were duped into participating. After that, the crackdown against Eacop protesters intensified.
Kajubi Marktom, 24, a community development and social justice student, was among nine university students brutally arrested and charged with public nuisance in October 2022 after trying to deliver a petition to the EU embassy in Kampala in support of its resolution against Eacop.
Marktom was also among the four arrested outside parliament last month. The case is ongoing.
“My studies are affected, I’ve lost friends and family, and face many challenges because of the charges. They want to intimidate us but none of this will stop me from doing what’s right, and fighting against climate injustice,” said Marktom.
Marktom says that he’s received threats from anonymous callers telling him something “bad” will happen if he doesn’t stop fighting the government. “It’s because we stood up as students that so many Ugandans know about Eacop and climate change. If we don’t speak up, who will?” he said.
Lawlor, the UN special rapporteur, said: “Climate change on its current trajectory is incompatible with the universal realization of human rights, and people taking peaceful action and advocating to limit global warming and reduce its effects are human rights defenders. Governments should listen to them and work with them, but instead we are seeing them attacked and repressed.”
The Ugandan police and government did not respond to requests for comment.
A TotalEnergies spokesperson said: “TotalEnergies is vocal about the need for others, including the government and government security forces, to also respect the rights of non-governmental organisations and human rights defenders … TotalEnergies does not tolerate any threats or attacks against those who peacefully defend and promote human rights in relation to its operations.”
If we don’t speak up, who will?
Kajubi Marktom