The latest stop in Carla Bley’s illustrious career is back where it all began.

“A long time ago, when I first came to New York—I was still a teenager—I worked at Birdland as a cigarette girl,” Carla Bley said in the dressing room of the New York jazz club, billed as “The Jazz Corner of the World.”
“And I didn’t sell many cigarettes, because I was standing in front of the bandstand just in awe of the music. Someone would say, ‘can I have a pack of Luckies?’” Here, Bley’s face erupts into a huge smile. “And I’d say, ‘NO! Wait until the tune is finished. Are you crazy?!’”
Today, the owner of the club greets her with a kiss on the hand. This is her first time appearing on Birdland’s stage, where most of the jazz greats, like Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, John Coltrane and Miles Davis (to name just a few), have performed at some point in their careers.
“Everything here is so different than it was originally. It means a lot to me to be on the stage,” Bley said. And certainly, it’s been a long road since those days selling cigarettes.
Bley was born in Oakland, Calif., to musician parents and was raised on a steady dose of church music. As soon as she was tall enough, she was sitting at the organ and piano in church. At age 15, she dropped out of school, and by 19 had journeyed to New York to find her place in the jazz world.
Soon after her arrival, she met pianist Paul Bley (whom she later married and divorced) and joined him and his band as they traveled around the country. She was inspired start playing the piano and also began writing her own compositions.
Listen to selections from three of Bley’s albums over the years, each a different version of her composition “Ad Infinitum.”Though her beginnings were modest, Bley soon was hailed as the “queen of the avant-garde” while appearing on dozens of albums. Ever since, she’s been pushing the boundaries of post-bebop jazz.
In the early 1970s, her career took off with an ambitious operatic album, Escalator Over the Hill, and a legendary collaboration with Charlie Haden’s critically acclaimed Liberation Music Orchestra.
Since then, she has been a part of projects ranging from big bands and orchestra recordings to intimate duets with her longtime partner, electric bassist Steve Swallow. Together, the two also run Watt/XtraWatt, a recording label that is distributed by the influential ECM Records.
Watch a live performance at Birdland of “Ad Infinitum” that is sprinkled with Bley’s reflections on a life in jazz.Constant recording and performing has taught Bley how to play minimalist jazz that still surprises, with each note tensely connected to the one before it. Witty, poetic and slightly asymmetrical, her compositions are finding their way into the book of jazz standards.
“If you hear a bird sing something incredible, you just tend to grab a pencil and write it down. And you don’t have to pay copyright royalties for anything.” She had found inspiration in everything from broken icebox motors to honking horns in traffic: “We tend to beg, borrow or steal everything we can.”
Surprisingly enough, her creative process relies on beverages. Bley insists she is unable to have any sort of drink without running to the desk to compose, from her morning coffee to her afternoon white wine spritzer. With a half-laugh, she remarked, “I would be really dehydrated if I weren’t writing music.”
Her latest album, The Lost Chords Find Paolo Fresu, features her idiosyncratically named “Banana Quintet” and a new version of “Ad Infinitum,” a song that she has recorded nine times. The album was named one of Slate’s top ten jazz albums of last year, and The New York Times called it “alive with patient intelligence.”
Although she sees herself as a composer first and foremost, she still relishes the chance to perform. “You don’t go to school to learn this stuff. You just end up playing how you play.”