![]() “Some people say that he’s the nicest person on Earth, and some people value his opinion when they ask him to listen to their records. “There’s so many things about Steve that really deserve an explanation,” Bley offers, prompting a good-natured guffaw from Swallow. When asked to sum the other up, there is no coyness, but each claims to be somewhat mystified by their partner in life and music. And I found it liberating, to find that Paul Chambers was no longer looking over my shoulder.” Mystified I picked up the electric bass and fell in love. It wasn’t something I did, it was something that happened to me. It’s an energising, revitalising thing, to discover a calling halfway through your life. “I came to the electric bass when I was 30 years old, and I’m glad of that. When he switched to electric bass in the early 1970s, he became one of the pioneers of that instrument in jazz, and, as well as being Carla’s resident bassist for the past four decades, has collaborated with some of the giants of modern jazz, including guitarist John Scofield and drummer Paul Motian. Originally an upright bass player, inspired by Charles Mingus and Wilbur Ware, he too was part of the febrile New York free scene in the early 1960s, and a vital member of groups led by Jimmy Giuffre, Stan Getz and Carla’s first husband, Paul Bley. Swallow is clearly the more gregarious of the pair. Steve Swallow, Carla Bley and Andy Sheppard: performing in the National Concert Hall in Dublin on Thursday May 25th as part of the Perspectives series “Yeh, I have no idea what I was doing,” says Bley, lapsing once more into silence. I don't know what you wanted to do – Anton Webern, maybe? "Well, in those days," prompts Swallow, "you were writing And Now The Queen. “I’m not going to give you that one,” says Bley cryptically. ![]() There’s a kind of danger now that the music has become a music of the academy, and people are treating it as an orthodoxy, but at the time, we were in our most formative years, the opposite was true. “I do think there was a special premium placed on making something up, on inventing yourself as a musician and as a person as well, and I think that comes and goes. It was a time when Ornette had arrived to play at the Five Spot, there were all kinds of winds blowing in the city at that time. That’s what was valued, and that may have been a special time in New York city. “When we – and I mean Carla and me, but also all of us who had come to New York in the late 1950s and early 1960s to be musicians – that was the idea, that you made it up, you thought of something that hadn’t been thought of before. “I beg to differ on that one,” returns Swallow. I don’t want to be original,” protests Bley, but without much conviction. ![]() I’m not trying to do it my own way, and I’ve never tried to do it my own way. I am trying to imitate the people that I love to listen to, and failing. “I failed a couple of times today already. She is forever trying, and failing, to sound like that Count Basie band of the mid-1950s. “I know from eavesdropping on Carla writing,” Swallow chimes in from the other room, “that that’s true. I have never succeeded in copying anything written by anyone who wrote for that band, but I keep trying.” Her most vivid memories of her time working at the famous midtown Manhattan club are of the Count Basie band.“That was my favourite band and it still is. If someone asked me for a pack of Luckies, I’d say, ‘No, wait until the intermission.’” I just stood there with the tray around my neck, listening to the music. “I got a job as a cigarette girl, and got to listen to everybody playing,” remembers Bley, “and never sold a pack of cigarettes. Over the decades her tunes have been recorded by major figures from George Russell and Jimmy Giuffre to Jaco Pastorius and her old friend Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra. They don’t own cell phones, Swallow proudly declares, and at first, it seems as if Bley in particular doesn’t like talking on phones of any description.īley emerged in the early 1960s as a starkly original composer, connected to the avant garde of Ornette Coleman and others, but following her own particular, even wayward muse. When I get them, the two are on phones in different parts of their hideaway home near Woodstock in upstate New York. Would they be prepared to do a joint interview? Yes, he says, I’d be happy to join in. Is that Steve Swallow, pioneer of the electric bass guitar, himself a great and distinctive compositional voice, and incidentally Bley’s life partner? Yes, Swallow admits in his reply, it is. When word comes through about an interview with Carla Bley, ahead of her appearance in the Perspectives series at the National Concert Hall, it comes via an email from her “agent”, a certain Stephen W Swallow.
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