This is the first comprehensive treatment of the remarkable music and influence of Carla Bley, a highly innovative American jazz composer, pianist, organist, band leader, and activist. With fastidious attention to Bley's diverse compositions over the last fifty years spanning critical moments in jazz and experimental music history, Amy C. Beal tenders a long-overdue representation of a major figure in American music. Best known for her jazz opera "Escalator over the Hill," her role in the Free Jazz movement of the 1960s, and her collaborations with artists such as Jack Bruce, Don Cherry, Robert Wyatt, and Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason, Bley has successfully maneuvered the field of jazz from highly accessible, tradition-based contexts to commercially unviable, avant-garde works. Beal details the staggering variety in Bley's work as well as her use of parody, quotations, and contradictions, examining the vocabulary Bley has developed throughout her career and highlighting the compositional and cultural significance of her experimentalism. Beal also points to Bley's professional and managerial work as a pioneer in the development of artist-owned record labels, the cofounder and manager of WATT Records, and the cofounder of New Music Distribution Service. Showing her to be not just an artist but an activist who has maintained musical independence and professional control amid the profit-driven, corporation-dominated world of commercial jazz, Beal's straightforward discussion of Bley's life and career will stimulate deeper examinations of her work.

All compositions published by Slagle Music BMI.

Publisher Description

Traces the impact of women on the development of jazz and profiles the careers of influential female jazz musicians and singers

A book about the links between avant garde music and the art scene in New York City in the 1960s. John Cage and Iggy Pop, together at last.

A suite of interviews held between 1985 to 1990 of 40 jazz musicians who shaped the current state of art of American jazz including: - Miles Davis, Gil Evans, Dizzy Gillespie, Jay McShann, Red Rodney, Frank Morgan, John Hendricks, Max Roach, Willie Ruff, Art Blakey, Betty Carter, Jackie McLean, Horace Silver, Abdullah Ibrahim, Sonny Rollins, Phil Woods, Johnny Griffin, Pepper Adams, Michel Petrucciani, McCoy Tyner, Max Gordon, Archie Shepp, Herbie Hancock, Tony Williams, Keith Jarrett, Branford Marsalis, Rudy Van Gelder, George Benson, Wynton Marsalis, Charles Brown, Joe Sample, Jack DeJohnette, Denny Zeitland, Don Cherry, Carla Bley, Steve Gadd, Donald Fagan, Bobby McFerrin, Dave Grusin, Bob James.