The music is basically just a prop for some irony and clever concept work. I think it actually reinforces my core point-the band is playing pretty mundane stuff, with the exception of Valente's solo (which is it's own kind of mannered, to be fair-but what isn't, and that's splitting hairs).
My assumption is that "Very Very Simple" is meant to serve as a counterexample to "Two Banana," since it's the same kind of blues shuffle feel and it's a lot less buttoned down. Keep in mind I don't feel as if she's under any obligation to do so, and I should also state that I feel as if Bley is a great artist in her own right-but as I (kind of) said above, I feel as if her genius resides in concept play and curation of genres rather than engaging with those genres in any really profound way. "Real" in that I seldom feel like she's tackling the musical content-with its contextual implications, the technical possibilities inherent in the material, the broader narrative of whatever culture on genre she's plugging into-on its own terms. And I get that a roller skating Nordic-American church girl probably starts life in the teenage jazz cigarette girl world with more than a little, shall we say."distancing" in the pump for the road trip ahead, but geez, what's not real about any of that? Now sure, Carly Bley is capable of arch irony, playful and deadly at the same time, and I get that hipsters have killed irony for the masses, but it wasn't always so. Carla Bley brings Carla Bley to the table, nobody else. How can you get more real than that? The interviews over the decades are just as much like that as are the records. I've never heard a Carla Bley record where it sounds like she's not aware of what choices she's making, the reasons seh'd making them, and what it means that she's making them.
Real? In what sense? I really don't get that. I always feel like Threadgill is being real with the audience and the performance Bley, much less so. And maybe I was wrong to imply that Bley's approach is somehow less personal, but I do maintain that there's an overriding dispassion and distance in so much of Bley's work that the remove begins to feel like a decision rather than an accident. I think it's up for debate whether these issues are merely a matter of choosing the "right" sidemen or something intrinsic to the music itself. When working with more recalcitrant players-like a Motian or Andrew Cyrille-the edges start showing, but it's almost in spite of the charts rather than because of them. The solos are relentlessly professional, the harmonies perfectly balanced and articulated, the timekeeping precise and unobtrusive. But-and this is important, at least to me-there's a kind of stiltedness when Bley mixes into the 6/8 thing that is just impossible to ignore. And the Threadgill example is and isn't paradigmatic Threadgill, since it's less inflected than a lot of the Sextett stuff.
Carla bley 2018 professional#
Professional ratings Review scoresĪll compositions by Carla Bley except where noted.In all fairness, there's a lot of harmonic meat in the second example that might be considered archetypal Bley (that nebulous-sounding descending octave line in the horns, for one).
The Penguin Guide to Jazz awarded it 3⅓ stars stating "The best Bley album since Fleur Carnivore? " The JazzTimes review by Willard Jenkins said "the music bears resemblance to what one might expect from an enlightened 21st century church service". Not quite as experimental as her earlier compositions, this album manages, regardless to be among her best work in the '90s". The Allmusic review by Stacia Proefrock awarded the album 4½ stars and stated " The Carla Bley Big Band Goes to Church is a perfect showcase for the forward-thinking compositions and arrangements of Carla Bley. The Carla Bley Big Band Goes to Church is a live album by American composer, bandleader and keyboardist Carla Bley recorded in Perugia, Italy as part of the Umbria Jazz Festival and released on the Watt/ECM label in 1996. Chiesa San Francesco Al Prato, Umbria Jazz, Perugia, Italy
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