It’s a challenging listen, mainly because Stuff didn’t really understand the aesthetic: later on Richard Tee told Carla he thought they were making backing tracks for a group of girl singers. The title is a reference to the idea of functional music espoused by Brian Eno. Carla fell in love and wrote an album around them. “Dinner Music” The funk supergroup Stuff played gigs in upstate New York close to WATT headquarters. It was a pleasure to go through everything and look for some of the masterpieces. Gavin Bryars makes the intriguing comment about her huge discography, “Each album, of course, contains a diverse set of pieces but each album too contains at least one masterpiece.” In the streaming era, all of Carla’s output is easy to hear. In time the tables were turned, and ECM became the distributor of WATT recordings. The first American distributor for ECM was New Music Distribution Service. “Ida Lupino” and “Jesus Maria” are in the bound volume “Songs Without Words (1961 – 1975),” for sale at WATT for fifteen dollars. Almost all of them were recorded by Paul Bley, beginning with what Paul claimed was his first worthy album, “Footloose,” but also on other now-canonical LPs like “Closer,” “Barrage,” and “Turning Point.” It contains fifteen avant-garde compositions familiar to anyone who loves the divergent currents of early 60s jazz. One can purchase the bound volume “Early Short Pieces (1958-1964)” from the WATT website for twelve dollars. There is a certain amount of unavoidable overlap between this page, the interview, and the Culture Desk. What follows are the best bits from the profile that didn’t make the final cut, including a listener’s guide to essentially every Carla Bley album after Escalator and 3/4 for Piano and Orchestra. However, I did include Fallen on my list of 50 ECM albums.) Certainly it had the most impact: I can sing along with most all of side A. (Even bursting the seams at 7000, somehow there wasn’t room for a mention of The Ballad of the Fallen, which for me is the greatest of the Liberation Music Orchestra albums. The first draft of “ A Lifetime of Carla Bley” was 7000 words it then was trimmed down to less than 3000. The WATT website designed by Karen Mantler is astonishing. Very, very special thanks to Steve Swallow, the point man for all things WATT related. However, as mentioned in the piece, once I settled down to really work, the biography Carla Bley by Amy C. Between them Rob and Gavin are unquestionably the “godfathers” of my recent Bley studies. Gavin Bryars’s Gramophone article can be found at Gavin’s website the moment where he tells me about 3/4 for Piano and Orchestra is in the DTM interview. Rob Schwimmer gave invaluable Bley guidance including loaning me scores to Escalator and Tropic Appetites. Special thanks to Wesley Stace, Victor Lewis, and Manfred Eicher for quotes in the New Yorker Culture Desk profile “A Lifetime of Carla Bley.” 2015 photo of Carla with “massive chain-link dinosaur made by Steve Heller at Fabulous Furniture, in nearby Boiceville” by Ruth Cameron
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