Carla Bley, jazz composer and pianist, dies at 87

Carla Bley, composer, pianist and pioneer of free jazz, has died aged 87.

The influential US musician died at her home in Willow, upstate New York on Tuesday (October 17).

Her death was confirmed by bassist Steve Swallow, Bley’s longtime partner and collaborator, who said the cause was brain cancer complications, as per The New York Times.

Bley was known for her avant-garde approach in her early career and become a pioneering musician in the free jazz movement.

“I wanted to object to as many things as possible that were wrong in the world of jazz and change the whole system that existed in the music world,” she later explained (per The Guardian).

The musician was born Lovella May Borg in Oakland, California in 1936, where she started learning the piano aged three. She dropped out of school aged 14 before moving New York in the ’50s aged 17, where she worked as a cigarette girl in the jazz club Birdland.

The artist went on the become a key figure in the free jazz scene, joining the Composer’s Orchestra and its associated Guild – a union which campaign for musicians’ working conditions.

“There’s nobody that plays like me – why would they?” she told The New York Times in 2016. “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.”

She was also a conductor and arranger in the Liberation Music Orchestra helmed by bassist Charlie Haden from 1969, a politically inspired ensemble.

Her best known word, the jazz opera ‘Escalator Over the Hill’, was released in 1971. She would go on to write the music for Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason on his 1981 solo debut album, ‘Nick Mason’s Fictious Sports’. Lead vocals were also sung by Robert Wyatt of Soft Machine.

Bley married the pianist Paul Bley in 1957 but divorced – and kept his name – in 1967 before she married Australian trumpeter Michael Mantler, with whom she had a daughter, Karen.

The musician worked on her own self-titled band, too, releasing a trio of albums with Swallow and saxophonist Andy Sheppard. Their most recent release was 2020’s ‘Life Goes On’.

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