So here's a question not often tossed around in the mind of a typical music fan: What's more expressive...the artist's music, or the artist's face?

OK, I'll admit it's a bizarre thought to be flashing by. In the case of Carla Bley though, I just can't help it. To make matters worse, Steve Swallow, her long time partner and (superb) bass player, also falls into that category of, uhm....funny-faced jazzer?

Seriously though, Bley does tend to build compositions that are loaded with both creativity and quirks. I mean, come on, the woman built a twenty-plus minute meditation based on "The Star Spangled Banner" (see Looking For America for Carla's take on Americana.)

The Lost Chords gives us Bley and Swallow along with Billy Drummond on drums and Andy Sheppard on soprano and tenor saxes. The music is what I've come to expect from Bley: it somehow manages to be introspective and effusive, serious and funny, swinging and funked out.

The title track suite is best explained by the composer:

I had come across the sheet music for a piece called "The Lost Chord", by Sir Arthur Bliss when I was a child. With great excitement I'd played the piece on the piano, hoping to discover a chord that was more beautiful than any I had ever heard. Unfortunately, the harmonies were rather ordinary, and the memory of that disappointment must have stuck with me longer than I could have imagined.

(I tell you, it does warm my heart to see that there are other creative types out there whose past experiences influence the present in surprising ways.) She goes on to explain...

For maybe the first time, the title for one of my pieces preceded its musical content. There was a dressing room piano at the last concert of the summer 2002 big band tour and, while everyone packed up,I decided to get a head start on my next project. I sat there and picked out some inspired, lost-sounding chords. I had to spell out their notes with a blunt pencil on the back of a program, since I had no manuscript paper. When I got home I couldn't find the program. Those seminal chords were truly and appropriately lost. But I managed to remember some aspects of them and immediately began work on the piece that was to become "Lost Chords"

So do the chords sound "lost". Well...yea. In a film-noirish sorta way. And if you want to hear what I think is the signature Steve Swallow thing, move on to Part II, wherein Steve lays down a blistering and slithery walking bassline.

The funny on this record comes in two doses. First, "Blind Mice", a Bley deconstruction/reconfiguration of the first thing she ever learned to play as a child. Second: "Red". What gives here? "Red" is named after "a chicken I had befriended".

For funked out please turn to "Hip Hop". It's a rompin' tune that makes me think of Monk in his best mood.

The Lost Chords was recorded live in October of 2003 during a tour of Europe. For more insight into the mind of Carla Bley, check out the Lost Chords tour journal on her equally wacky website.

Though Carla Bley does indeed sport an 'expressive' face, I'd have to give the nod to her music.

Expressive is an understatement.

(First posted on Mark Is Cranky)