Carla Bley Trio/ethan Iversen - Mark Turner Duo Double Bill at Healdsburg Jazz Festival at Raven Performing Arts Theater

paradox of Carla Bley – 82 and going strong – is that while she is inimitable, she is also influential. The composer/arranger/pianist and NEA Jazz Master has been writing music since the late 1950s when her then-husband Paul Bley started performing her compositions on piano. These early tunes, according to ECM Records founder Manfred Eicher (who produced Carla’s two recent releases, Andando el Tiempo and Trios), are “each as well crafted as pieces by Satie or Mompou – or Thelonious Monk for that matter. Carla belongs in that tradition of radical originality.”

(Manfred, believe it or not, uttered those words to the pianist Ethan Iverson, who published the quote in a great article on Carla for the New Yorker...

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paradox of Carla Bley – 82 and going strong – is that while she is inimitable, she is also influential. The composer/arranger/pianist and NEA Jazz Master has been writing music since the late 1950s when her then-husband Paul Bley started performing her compositions on piano. These early tunes, according to ECM Records founder Manfred Eicher (who produced Carla’s two recent releases, Andando el Tiempo and Trios), are “each as well crafted as pieces by Satie or Mompou – or Thelonious Monk for that matter. Carla belongs in that tradition of radical originality.”

(Manfred, believe it or not, uttered those words to the pianist Ethan Iverson, who published the quote in a great article on Carla for the New Yorker. This is the same Ethan who is sharing the Raven Theater bill with Carla’s trio as part of the ECM 50th birthday celebrations at the Healdsburg Jazz Festival)

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