Bley: Andando El Tiempo – Carla Bley

   in Piano International (Nov, 2016)
In a recent New York Times interview, Carla Bley revealed that back in the late 1950s, when she began to write music, her psychiatrist had ‘suggested electroshock treatment to get rid of this feeling that I was a composer’. (A few years earlier, Bud Powell was forcibly given ECT for similar ‘delusions of grandeur’.) Thankfully Bley declined the advice and became a celebrated jazz composer, arranger and bandleader, known particularly for her early jazz-rock opera Escalator over the Hill and her work with Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra. In recent years she’s focused more on smaller groups, and Andando el Tiempo, released to mark her 80th birthday last May, is her …