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"
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