Song Sung Long
Jul 15th, 2008 by oldfogey
Carla Bley from here “Live” album 1981. As Old Fogey, this sort of music oughtn’t to be on my radar. But I heard the Humphrey Lyttelton band play one of her numbers at a concert several years ago, which sent me back to the original. Some of her longer pieces outstay their welcome and she doesn’t always avoid tricksiness or pretentiousness. But at her best, as in Song Sung Long, her music is exciting in the visceral way jazz used to be, before the intellectuals started to make it into an ‘artform’. The trombone player is the magnificent Gary Valente.
There is a fuller appreciation of this album on my other blog here.











