She’s been writing them for more than sixty years now.(George Russell recorded her composition, “Bent Eagle,” on his Stratusphunk album in 1960.) Her music has gone as far out as the dada-free jazz-rock opera, Escalator Over the Hill (1968-1971), and as expansive as her writing for Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra (1969 on), Gary Burton’s A Genuine Tong Funeral (1967) and her own Big and Very Big Bands (1978 on).īut as good as all these have been, I believe her signature contribution to music will turn out to be her work as a miniaturist, on these three albums and in her half classical, half-jazz Fancy Chamber Music (1998). Of course, they start with a plus –no one writes better or quirkier tunes than Carla Bley. Over the course of three exquisitely musical, eminently listenable albums -Trio (2013), Andando el Tiempo (2015), and now this album –the Bley-Sheppard-Swallow trio has set the standard for intelligent and listenable modern jazz small group music. It’s elegant music, like all the other pieces, ten in all, three suites, on this elegant record. Short phrased utterances from the sax, piano chords, bass notes spaced out, slower and slower, and all gone. The music slows down, driven by Swallow’s ever slowing bass notes and Bley’s slowly vanishing piano. At 6:26, Carla takes over for a typically short, less than a minute long, solo. Then back to the head melody, Sheppard in the lead, bass line and piano running parallel. Another tempo and melody change at 5:28, Sheppard continuing to lead, but circling back and setting up for the piece’s close. There’s another key change around 4:30, initiated by Bley’s piano, while Shepard continues to solo. The beat and mood change at three minutes, slowing down, hinting at minor tones, an intricate cross play of piano and bass guitar, the piano chorded, the bass guitar playing a single note line, merging around 3:40 in a typically lovely Sheppard solo, bass and dancing piano chords behind him. Whoever has played bass guitar as elegantly –musically-as Swallow has, for what? Forty, fifty years now? Two and a half minutes in, Sheppard enters again on a counter riff. Swallow takes the first solo, Bley’s repetitive chords backing him. Fifteen seconds in, Andy Sheppard enters on soprano sax and solidifies the melody, playing over the others’ continuing lines. Listen to the fourth cut in, “And Then One Day.” It lasts 9 minutes and 03 seconds and is the last song in a four-song suite entitled “Life Goes On.” Steve Swallow’s five-string electric bass guitar starts it with a rhythm riff, Carla Bley’s piano picks up the beat and (hinted at) melody and amplifies it, playing two-step chords in the spaces between Swallow’s bass line. To learn more about how and for what purposes Amazon uses personal information (such as Amazon Store order history), please visit our Privacy Notice. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie Preferences, as described in the Cookie Notice. Click ‘Customise Cookies’ to decline these cookies, make more detailed choices, or learn more. Third parties use cookies for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalised ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. This includes using first- and third-party cookies, which store or access standard device information such as a unique identifier. If you agree, we’ll also use cookies to complement your shopping experience across the Amazon stores as described in our Cookie Notice. We also use these cookies to understand how customers use our services (for example, by measuring site visits) so we can make improvements. We use cookies and similar tools that are necessary to enable you to make purchases, to enhance your shopping experiences and to provide our services, as detailed in our Cookie Notice.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |