Subscribe to theThe Carla Bley Songbook
Original Airdate: May 5th, 2008
Carla Bley is renowned today for her big-band writing and its wide-ranging use of musical and emotional elements, but it was small-group recordings of her work in the 1960s by musicians such as Jimmy Giuffre, Gary Burton, George Russell, and her husband Paul Bley that introduced her to the jazz world. In her teens Bley abandoned home, religion, and school, eventually making her way to New York City, where she worked as a hatcheck and cigarette girl in jazz clubs such as Basin Street and Birdland. She…
Last week I was working on the Night Lights schedule for the rest of the year and ran into what I thought might be a bit of a snag. Show topics are usually plotted well into the future (right now we have programs slated through the end of February 2008), but I’d realized that a certain sequence was going to bring a lot of 
