The world of jazz is mourning the death of Carla Bley. On Tuesday, Bley’s longtime partner and musical collaborator Steve Swallow announced that the jazz musician died at the age of 87 due to complications with brain cancer.
Bley was diagnosed with brain cancer back in 2018. “Sometimes I don’t know the answer to a question, so I think they must have taken something out by mistake, because ever since the operation I no longer have perfect pitch,” she said at the time, per The Guardian.
Bley was born Lovella May Borg in Oakland, California in 1936, where she learned to play the piano at the age of three. She later moved to New York in the Fifties where she started off as a vendor at the Birdland jazz club. There, she met and married jazz pianist Paul Bley, with whom she toured for years and composed original works.
“I was the one who took a picture of you and your girlfriend at the table to commemorate your being there with someone who wasn’t your wife usually,” Bley once said, per The Guardian. “I hardly sold anything because I was listening to the music.”
In New York, she became a key figure in the city’s free jazz scene, joining the Jazz Composer’s Orchestra and its Guild.
Her album with Paul Haimes, Escalator Over the Hill, was named one of the “10 Weird Albums Rolling Stone Loved in the 1970s You’ve Never Heard.” Writer Gavin Edward described the project as a jazz-rock opera that included vocals from musicians like Jack Bruce, John McLaughlin, and Linda Ronstadt.
Bley also worked closely with Pink Floyd’s Nick Mason on Nick Mason’s Fictitious Sports, writing and co-producing it in its entirety. She also founded multiple record labels, including JCOA Records, and was awarded the Guggenheim fellowship for music composition in 1972.
She last released LP Life Goes On, alongside Steve Swallow and saxophonist Andy Sheppard, in 2020. Bley worked with Sheppard and Swallow on Andando El Tiempo in 2016 and Trios in 2013.