Carla bley4/8/2023 ![]() Skating rinks, bowling alleys, 75-cent dinners at the market. My excuse was to find music I liked and skate to it. I would skate in competitions, but I didn’t place very high. What did you do when you were younger in Oakland? But my father always reminded me that I bit her. ![]() I don’t have any unpleasant memories about her. Once my mother tried to give me a lesson and I bit her because I was so angry I couldn’t get my fingering correct. Even then, I knew I wasn’t playing for free. I would go around in the church singing songs like “This Little Light of Mine” with a cup in my hand and people would put coins in. My father was a pianist and church choir master. I lived about a mile away from the Oakland Airport, which then was just a little shack. You were born in Oakland, California on May 11, 1936. Steve’s downstairs, and he’s desperate to keep getting better. If you practice, you can’t help but get better. I love getting better instead of getting worse. ![]() That’s true, but right now I think I’m 2 percent. I’ve read that you consider yourself a 99 percent composer and a 1 percent pianist. Give them gigs, and they’re like putty in my hands. He tells me to get to the piano to make us some money. But Steve forces me to play and write every day. The playing part is not the part that I do best. I prefer not to play at all when I’m working on a piece. Before a tour, I’ll play for a couple of hours, and then I join Steve downstairs and we play for an hour and a half together. So, Qwest TV starts our meandering conversation on the same theme: Do you practice as much as Steve?Įvery single day when I’m home. ![]() As long as she’s occupied, I can go practice.” “If Steve’s with me when I talk to people, I usually ask him everything to make sure I’ve got it right,” she says, to which Steve replies, “I’m going downstairs to practice like a dog just like all good bass players should. The late jazz scribe Nat Hentoff once wrote that “her scores for jazz big bands are matched only by those of Duke Ellington and Charles Mingus for yearning lyricism, explosive exultation and other expressions of the human condition.”Ĭarla sits down at the kitchen table overseeing the brook as Steve takes his exit. This is where Carla’s culture of spontaneity resides-stylistically unpredictable music of playful mystery, soulful contemplation, humor and grace. I can’t go another season hauling the wood in here.” Carla pipes in, “It will still be in the stove but with fake logs.” She frowns at that move to modernity, even though the pair has yet to adapt to smartphones-which wouldn’t work anyway out here without the cell coverage to tap into. We’re switching to profane, doing the anti-eco thing. This is the last year we’ll be heating the house with wood fires. Woods surround the wooden structure on a dead-end street in an isolated sector of Willow, and there’s a stream down below that is quite active with a steady flow given this winter’s snowfall, still evident in pockets near the house where the sun has yet to peek into.Ĭarla says, “We’re amazed about everything in this place.” Steve concurs: “We try to notice how gorgeous it is. Before our conversation starts rolling, she engages with Steve about how their house in the deep woods in the Woodstock, New York, area is their refuge.
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