The composition studies of Lovella May Borg, as she was then known, didn’t properly recommence until she was 17. “ ‘That’s too many dots,’ ” says Bley, as her father. “ ‘Well, here’s a piece of paper, and you put in little dots, and that tells the player what notes to play.’ ”īley filled her paper with as many little dots as she could, “just like the stars in the sky”. “How do you do it? I want to write my notes, too,” she says, six years old again. “ ‘Well,’ ” Bley now takes on a patient, paternal tone, “ ‘a composer wrote them.’ ” She recalls staring at the sheet music of her father, a church organist, and asking him who had written the notes. Halfway around the world, on tour, in a city of “tall things: trees and buildings”, her early life still feels close by. As a little kid she’d bend her double-jointed fingers into witchy shapes to scare other children, crying, “Arrgh!” “And now they are stuck in that horrible position, like when your mother says” – she shifts her Californian lilt to a taunting singsong – “ ‘If you make that expression, your face is going to stay like that!’ ”
At 81, Carla Bley’s waterfall of electrified grey hair almost hides a face that’s remarkably unlined: it’s the composer’s hands that show her age. She reaches into the middle of the hotel’s deep velvet couch, thrusting her hand between the seat cushions, and runs her fingers back and forth as if the soft fabric is soothing.
CARLA BLEY INFLUENCED ON YOUNG ARTISTS FREE
Carla Bley’s song “Temporarily” from Jimmy Giufwas recorded by guitarist Neels Cline in 2018 on his Currents, Constellations, and guitarist Julian Lage recorded Giuffre’s “Trudgin’” from Fusion on his 2019 album Love Hurts, so I guess time is catching up with Giuffre who died in 2008.The free jazz pioneer, from the iconic Birdland to the Melbourne Jazz Festival. You can still hear the music of the Jimmy Giuffre trio played by other musicians. Someone who probably listened with interest to Giuffre’s music was Sonny Rollins, or was it just coincidence that he first hired Jim Hall after he had played with Giuffre, and then Paul Bley after he left Giuffre? They can be heard with Rollins on The Bridge (1962) and Sonny Meets Hawk! (1963) respectively. They mostly played with a bassist, but for a while they also played with trombonist Bob Brookmeyer. His first one was with guitarist Jim Hall in the end of the 1950s. The trio with Bley and Swallow was not the first one with unusual instrumentation that Giuffre had. Giuffre could hardly match their popularity. The label had some of the most popular jazz artists as Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk and Dave Brubeck.
The trio’s last album Free Fall was released by Columbia Records in 1963. Both Bley and Swallow has also recorded for ECM, so has pianist Carla Bley who wrote some of the repertoire for the Jimmy Giuffre trio. They have space and is musically advanced. Listening to it, it is easy to hear how important it has been to the aesthetics of the ECM label. They reunited in 1989 and recorded some new music.ĮCM records also reissued the two albums Fusion and Thesis that Giuffre recorded for Verve in 1961, as Jimmy Giuffre 3, 1961. That could have been the end of this band, but people had taken notice of them.
Giuffre started to make a living teaching music, and Bley and Swallow went on playing other music. His trio with Bley and Swallow toured in Europe in 1961 but split up shortly afterwards since they had a problem making a living on this music. Giuffre was associated with West Coast or cool jazz, and he had recorded with musicians like Chet Baker and Lee Konitz. Most of these bands played music that was more spectacular or easily accessible than the Jimmy Giuffre trio did. Eric Dolphy joined the John Coltrane quartet, Bill Evans recorded with his trio with bassist Scott LaFaro and drummer Paul Motian, Ornette Coleman recorded with his quartet with Don Cherry and Ed Blackwell, and Cecil Taylor formed his trio with Jimmy Lyons and Sunny Murray. Those years in jazz was amazing and there were a lot of artistic achievements. At times it sounds like modern chamber music, but it is still improvised Largely because of the unusual instrumentation without a drummer which leads these three musicians to work out their own dynamics. My own favorite recordings by clarinetist and saxophonist Jimmy Giuffre is the three trio albums he did with pianist Paul Bley and bassist Steve Swallow between 19. He explored a quiet side of free jazz and was important to the ECM sound. Jimmy Guiffre was born 100 years ago today.
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