Carla Bley has just died, so I'm bumping this to the top of the queue. It's excerpts from an interview with Ethan Iverson. Note the Louis Armstrong passage I've high-lighted in yellow. I suspect the approach she attributes to him in that passage was wide-spread in the old days. It may well have been the dominant practice. Bebop is when jazz musicians started created a new solo each time they played a tune. I mention this in my 1993 article, Stages in the Evolution of Music.
I haven't listened to the whole thing, but the first tune, Song of the eternal waiting of canute, is wonderful. Carla Bley is a stone-cold genius.
Here's a passage from the opening of a long 2018 interview with Ethan Iverson:
Ethan Iverson: Carla, you’ve been interviewed so much. There’s a good book about you by Amy C. Beal, and you yourself have written about your own music quite a bit over the years. Instead of going over a bunch of ground that’s already documented, I simply have list of names to ask you about to see if anything comes to mind. We could start with Count Basie.
Carla Bley: Okay, that would be a good one. Count Basie was playing at Birdland, Basin Street, and the Jazz Gallery when I was working as a cigarette girl. I got to hear him more than anyone else, and it was an education. That’s the kind of music I wanted to hear, and that’s what I learned. I sort of picked up on a lot of it and put it away for use later. I was very impressed by him and the whole band, particularly all the arrangers and the fact that they weren’t getting any credit for it, as far as I thought, they weren’t. Neal Hefti got a lot of credit, but some of the other guys like Ernie Wilkins were more interesting to me.
I just sort of wrapped myself in the atmosphere of a Basie gig.
On Sundays at the Jazz Gallery there’d be family day, and every guy in the band could bring his wife and children to the gig. They’d all be sitting there in the audience and watching their husbands play with Count Basie. That was really interesting.
An early influence and still something to always answer to the question,”Who do I like as a piano player:” Count Basie. That’s the final arbiter of how to play two notes, the distance between them and the volume of them is perfect. I can’t hold myself to that standard, but I can appreciate it.
EI: Duke Ellington?
CB: I never liked Duke Ellington. I thought he was stealing music from Billy Strayhorn, basically. But aside from that, I didn’t like his style of playing or talking to people. I didn’t see him a lot either, because he worked festivals and I worked clubs. Later I found out that even before Billy Strayhorn started writing music for the band, there was some great music in the earliest Duke bands. I didn’t know that at the time, so later I absolved him from his crime. I have a book on him, and I’m not even reading it, I just can’t quite get into it.
EI: What about Louis Armstrong?
CB: I actually met Louis Armstrong! That was really amazing. It was in the subway and he was with his wife, they were going home to Queens. I just practically fell over. I couldn’t believe it. I thought that he lived on a cloud somewhere, in a palace, not in Queens. He was a very nice person, nice to me, anyway. I, of course, revere him for the same reason as I revere Count Basie. Everything is perfect. Every note, all the phrasing, is perfect. He worked on it. He told me he didn’t have that ethic that the rest of the musicians have, always coming up with something new, never repeating themselves. He just worked on a solo until he had it, and that was really freeing for a person like me, used to writing everything down. I couldn’t really enjoy improvising. When it turns out great, I am thrilled. But on the way to sounding even good, I’m in a terror. I just cannot relax.
I didn’t like a lot of the musicians at the beginning. I didn’t like John Coltrane for about 20 years. And then I just loved him.
EI: Why didn’t you like him at first?
CB: I didn’t like his sound. I didn’t like his sort of slippery ease with playing. It was stupid. I hated Cecil Taylor and all these guys I love now.
EI: But this is pretty common process, I think. I had trouble with Charlie Parker and Bud Powell at the beginning.
CB: Those are recent discoveries for me too. I gave Charlie Parker all the credit anyone could, but I didn’t have an emotional reaction until many years later. I never saw him live. I arrived in New York, and he was on his last legs, was playing at a club, and I remember standing outside the club because I couldn’t get in because there were too many people, listening to his set. So that’s as close as I got to Charlie Parker. And so from that point on, I think I tended to like the people that I got to hear a lot or that I got to see a lot. I sort of put him on the back burner. God, I’m telling you these horrible things about myself. [laughs]
I didn’t like Bud Powell. He played too many notes. I saw him play once in New York, maybe Basin Street or maybe Birdland. But when I went to Europe later I got to see him a couple of times at clubs like in Paris and stuff, and I thought he was sort of mean. A mean person. He would turn his back and scratch his ass, just to say, you people listening to me, I don’t care if you like it or not, something like that. I though, oh god, he’s rude. But I really didn’t like his playing. I think maybe I’m still not graduated to liking him a lot. I find it impossible to keep my ears up to his fingers, where his fingers are. So: I am just a slow hearer.
EI: Thelonious Monk was more your speed?
CB: Well, there you go. That was perfect. I thought he should run everything, be named king of the world or something. Everything he did or said, the way he moved, the way he played, was perfect. He didn’t ever make any mistakes. That’s so weird. I never heard him like grumble, and stop playing or anything, which is something I do all the time. I thought he was another person in the galaxy of great jazz people. And I understood him from note one.
EI: Did you learn his tunes?
CB: Yeah, when I played with Roswell Rudd and Steve Lacy, I got a chance to learn all his tunes. Steve Swallow and I played in a band with the two horns, soprano and the trombone, and we played only Monk tunes.
And from the very end:
EI: To close, Carla, I’d like to ask about a few non-jazz names and see if something comes to your mind. I got about seven names. Ready? Here we go. Schoenberg.
CB: Not as much as Berg or Webern. Nope. I admire what he did. But I never got that mood, like I get from Berg or Webern.
EI: Stravinsky.
CB: My man. My man. I’d give up everything for him. Symphony of Psalms. Best piece ever written. I can hear it again and again and love every note. He’s all there is. Forget about everybody else.
EI: Bartók?
CB: The Fifth String Quartet is incredible. I’m not so sure about all of them, but I loved the Fifth. And there’s also the Shostakovich piece that I love, the Eighth String Quartet. Check that out. That’s pure everything. It’s wonderful.
EI: Brahms?
CB: I do Brahms every day. He’s my exercise man. I do the 51 Brahms exercises every day.
EI: Do you use a metronome?
CB: No. Steve tells me I should. He says, you never get any faster. You know these exercises. You know them by memory. You don’t read them. So all you have to do is start a metronome, and every day get a little bit faster. And I just can’t do it.
EI: You got a piece…
CB: …“More Brahms.” Steve named that. He said to me, “It’s all Brahms. Just more Brahms.” But no, I’m not much of a Brahms listener, otherwise.
EI: I read that you liked Charles Wuorinen.
CB: I still do. Maybe he’s Stravinsky but updated a little.
EI: I couldn’t believe when you spoke about “Blue Bamboula” because I thought I was the only person that loved this piece.
CB: Oh my god, I know one more person. Dave Douglas. We are the three. We have to start a club. Nobody else has ever heard it.
EI: That piece is very special, “Blue Bamboula.” Do you play it yourself on the piano?
CB: No, I wouldn’t even try. But I also just love Garrick Ohlsson so much. Whatever he plays.
EI: Here’s the last name: Carl Ruggles: You did his hymn “Exaltation.”
CB: Well, I loved the hymn.
EI: To me, that really sounds like a Carla Bley piece.
CB: Does it really? That’s why I like it, maybe. Wow. I think it’s perfect. I used that. We played the hymn live with my band, and that piece sounded so great.
EI: Well, I think that was it, Carla. Thank you for your time, and of course thank you for your music.
CB: That was very interesting, thinking of all those people in the past.
There's much more at the link.
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