When I was younger I thought I would die at 30 because I was really living hard and not taking care of myself, and sometimes I didn't even wanna be alive. And I didn't ever think I would live long enough for this idea to affect me. Steve has been telling me for years about Bach and Beethoven and how their later stuff affects him the most effectively and most tremendously. However, she sounds delighted when I mention late style: “That is a great, inspiring thing to hear. She, probably doesn’t suffer fools gladly and is quick to pull me up on any misconceptions I have, although she isn’t rude about it. And it’s what I’ve done for 60 years now!” It got more complicated as it went on… as does life.”Ĭarla says that while she doesn’t usually remember “dark thoughts”, she did in the case of ‘Life Goes On’, but rejects the idea that writing the music formed any part of her recuperation: “It was mindless. The first of these is a masterfully languid blues which isn’t riven with fearful complexity, but is delightfully concentrated in form: “I wanted to write a simple blues, but it didn’t come out simple. Perhaps unavoidably, the idea of mortality informed the writing of the opening suite of tracks: ‘Life Goes On’, ‘On’, ‘And On’, concluding with the remarkably buoyant and slightly mischievous ‘And Then One Day’. Her and Steve have had friends get ill with Covid-19 her European tour manager, John Cumming of the London Jazz Festival, and Hal Willner both died after contracting the virus: “Something we’ve become aware of acutely during this crisis is our privilege.” She’s having to isolate now, of course, but given that she lives in rural upstate New York, this is easier for her than for many of her peers, as she admits. The trio she formed 27 years ago with bassist husband Steve Swallow and saxophonist Andy Sheppard got to record one of their crowning long players in Life Goes On. Thankfully, she has recovered enough so that the enforced break was only temporary.
I can’t see the note on the far left of the score until I move my head over there and… what else? Terrible things… some terrible things.”īut then she brightens: “But I can’t remember what they are. I think it was caused by working on three different musical formats at once… it just about burned a hole in my head! So they took it out, but there have been a few things that haven’t been right since. There was a tumour on the tip of the occipital lobe of my brain. Sometimes I don’t know the answer to a question, so I think they must have taken something out by mistake, because ever since the operation I no longer have perfect pitch. They operated on me about three years ago. She says: “I have a little piece of my brain missing. A career that has included nearly 30 albums with her as lead musician, more than 30 collaborative albums (including glorious stints with both the Jazz Composer’s Orchestra and Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra) and six decades’ gainful employment as a jazz composer was brought cruelly to a halt by a bruising tangle with brain cancer in 2018. But at one point not so long ago, her 2020 album Life Goes On must have seemed an unlikely proposition.
CARLA BLEY ON TWITTER FULL
The American composer and pianist Carla Bley has had an extraordinarily long career by any standards – and I sincerely hope that it continues onwards at full strength for many years to come.
While late style can seem old-fashioned and out of step to younger observers, it can still often predict great stylistic shifts ahead for genres as a whole. However slippery a concept “late style” actually is – can we talk about Mozart’s late style when he had the misfortune to die so young? What about the late period of Captain Beefheart, given that Don Van Vliet gave up making music nearly three decades before passing on? – many would agree that while not imprinting a valedictory full stop at the end of a career, the final phase does see a stripping away of extraneous experimentation and unnecessary adornment, to be replaced by a fierce concentration: a distillation of the most necessary themes and ideas.
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