For the sake of convenience as much as anything else, Carla Bley is almost always filed under jazz. But as University of California music professor Amy Beal finds in her account of the artist's life and work, Bley started her performance career in jazz and has consciously returned to this music, yet her roots began with the Protestant hymns of childhood, which continue to shape her compositions. She came of age with the jazz avant-garde of the 1960s, but was uncomfortable with some aspects of the movement. Bley went on to embrace European classical music as well as the Beatles and '60s soul, usually desiring to keep her music “simple and plain.” She defies any easy classification. Bley has been an improviser in love with notation, an earnestly humorous composer, traditional as well as an experimental. Carla Bley is a marvel of concision, packing biography, musicology and cogent, descriptive analysis of her major work in barely 100 pages.
