Bandleader, pianist, and composer Carla Bley’s prowess isn’t difficult to identify or appreciate. From the outset of her long career, she has created memorable tunes like “Ida Lupino”—a song that appeared on an early album by her onetime husband Paul Bley (and which also appeared on avant-guitarist Mary Halvorson’s recent set of covers). Though when it comes to her full-album statements, she's more difficult to pin down. Her humor can move between the slapstick and the wry. She may stage a straightforwardly goofy album cover, or else use musical quotations in performance in a manner that feels both knowing and politically sincere—as with her work in the late Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra.
That mixture of immediacy and mystery quickly earned Bley a following in the worlds of jazz and new composition, one that has remained ardent over the decades. On 2013’s Trios, Bley took the step of letting in an outside producer—Manfred Eicher, the head of ECM Records (which has distributed Bley’s independent label offerings). That album looked back at some of Bley’s past compositional work with a trio that included her longtime bassist and partner Steve Swallow, as well as saxophonist Andy Sheppard.
The same players and producer come together again for Andando el Tiempo, this time to tackle an all-new program of music by Bley, with most of the set devoted to the three-movement composition that gives the album its title. The pianist’s liner notes tell us that sections of this work each “represent stages of recovery from addiction.” Opening track “Sin Fin” finds Bley’s piano spiraling through abstracted tango riffs, her harmonic interplay with the other instruments occupying a frustrated-sounding middle ground, never sounding either totally ebullient or fully despondent. Keening, sorrowful phrases set the tone for a slower middle section, “Potación de Guaya.”
The third movement launches with a striking bit of contrast: a joyous sweep of the piano’s keys, suggesting a strutting exit from the world of addiction. (Bley writes that this bit represents a return to “a healthy and sustainable life”). But all is not automatically set to rights by virtue of the narrative arc; staggered bits of phrases, repeated with a stubbornness, suggest the effort that goes into Bley’s happy ending.
Not everything on the album is this weighty. When titling “Saints Alive!,” Bley says she was inspired by the “expression used by old ladies sitting on the porch in the cool of the evening when they exchanged especially juicy gossip.” The gently swaying piece doesn’t seem particularly scandalized—instead sounding warmly conversational (especially in the communion between Bley’s chords and Swallow’s tender, high-register bass playing). It seems like a song that might be destined to reach “jazz standard” status, alongside “Ida Lupino,” a few decades down the road. Even when she’s not throttling into avant-garde theatrics (as on her early-career highlight Escalator Over the Hill) or writing music for Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason, the casual strangeness of Bley’s aesthetic has been a constant. At 80 years of age, she remains an individual—and still composes like a born melodist, too.
