#Carla bley heavy heart professional
#Carla bley heavy heart free

She arranged and composed music for Charlie Haden's Liberation Music Orchestra, and wrote A Genuine Tong Funeral for Gary Burton. Bley has collaborated with a number of other artists, including ,Robert Wyatt and Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason, whose 1981 solo album Fictitious Sports was a Carla Bley album in all but name. Bley and Mantler were pioneers in the development of independent artist-owned record labels and also started the now defunct New Music Distribution Service which specialized in small, independent labels that issued recordings of creative improvised music. Bley and Mantler followed with WATT records, which has issued their recordings exclusively since the early 1970s. With Mantler, she co-led the Jazz Composers' Orchestra and started the JCOA record label which issued a number of historic recordings by Clifford Thornton, Don Cherry and Roswell Rudd, as well as her own Escalator Over The Hill and Mantler's Jazz Composers' Orchestra LPs.

#Carla bley heavy heart professional

She then had a personal and professional relationship with Michael Mantler, with whom she had a daughter, Karen, now also a musician in her own right.

In 1964 she was involved in organising the Jazz Composers Guild which brought together the most innovative musicians in New York at the time. Her compositions were soon beginning to appear on record - for example, 'Bent Eagle' on George Russell's Stratusphunk in 1960, and then Ictus on Jimmy Giuffre's Thesis and Paul Bley's Barrage. After giving up the church to immerse herself in roller skating at the age of fourteen, she moved to New York at seventeen and became a cigarette girl at Birdland, where she met jazz pianist Bley, whom she married in 1957. Her father, a piano teacher and church choirmaster, encouraged her to sing and to learn to play the piano.

#Carla bley heavy heart free

An important figure in the free jazz movement of the 1960s, she is perhaps best known for her jazz opera Escalator Over The Hill (released as a triple LP set), as well as a book of compositions that have been performed by many other artists, including Gary Burton, Jimmy Giuffre, George Russell, Art Farmer and her ex-husband Paul Bley. Carla Bley (born Lovella May Borg, May 11, 1936) is an American jazz composer, pianist, organist and band leader.