The Carla Bley Songbook
Posted in Shows on May 5th, 2008
Carla Bley is renowned today for her big-band writing and its wide-ranging use of musical and emotional elements, but it was small-group recordings of her work in the 1960s by musicians such as Jimmy Giuffre, Gary Burton, George Russell, and her husband Paul Bley that introduced her to the jazz world. In her teens Bley abandoned home, religion, and school, eventually making her way to New York City, where she worked as a hatcheck and cigarette girl in jazz clubs such as Basin Street and Birdland. She…
On this program we highlight the late-1980s acoustic quintet recordings of drummer Tony Williams. Williams was one of the great prodigies of jazz, playing with both Sam Rivers and Jackie McLean as a teenager before joining Miles Davis as part of the trumpeter’s great mid-1960s group. Williams also recorded two dates as a leader for Blue Note and went on to form the pioneering fusion trio Lifetime (with organist Larry Young and guitarist John McLaughlin). After a sabbatical in the early 1980s to hone his compositional skills, Williams came back to Blue Note…
In December 1962 Jackie McLean went to play a gig in Boston with a local rhythm section. That local section included a 17-year-old drummer named Tony Williams, who would return with McLean to New York a week later to begin a phenomenal career that would include a long stint with Miles Davis’ 1960s quintet. McLean also joined forces with Grachan Moncur, a trombonist who had played with both the Jazztet and Ray Charles…
In 1964 Miles Davis had a new rhythm section in place–Herbie Hancock on piano, Ron Carter on bass, Tony Williams on drums–but he was still searching for a tenor saxophonist. Since John Coltrane’s departure in 1960, Miles had gone through Sonny Stitt, Hank Mobley, Jimmy Heath, and George Coleman; he really wanted Wayne Shorter, but Shorter was still committed to Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers. In the meantime, the teenaged Tony Williams…
