Carla bley on twitter1/17/2024 ![]() ![]() Information: 865-1028.Carla Bley (born Lovella May Borg May 11, 1936) is an American jazz composer, pianist, organist and bandleader. Vocalist-keyboardist Karen Mantler and percussionist Michael Evans will perform at 9 p.m. It should be released in April in Europe, and later in the states.” … We will have distribution in the states, too. Europeans like things that are more sophisticated and quirky. Finally, a label called Enja from Germany called. … So I was sending out tapes to lots of companies. “We thought it was not the right label for (our) type of music. She’s leaving her mother’s label, which released her first two albums. “We’re doing a lot of overdubbing, so it sounds more like a band,” Mantler says. She and Evans are about to record a new disc. It is a challenge to be able to whittle it down and get your song across without all of the extra frills.”įor now, Mantler has nothing to complain about. Now it’s just Mantler on keyboards and vocals and Michael Evans, a percussionist who works with unusual sound sources, including homemade instruments and found objects.Įvans, who has played with God is my Co-Pilot, the Young Snakes and Combustible Edison, “plays in more of a free jazz style, and that influenced me to write my songs in a freer style,” says Mantler. Arnold was sort of a larger-than-life character my family created. “It’s not like I have little kitty statues in my room and cat rugs. “I have a new cat, but there will never be another band named after my cat,” she says. She had an eight-piece band with a horn section, which she named after - that’s right - her now-deceased cat Arnold. Solo!’ ‘I am!,’ I screamed back.”īut she did meet musicians such as Eric Mingus (a son of the late jazz bassist Charles Mingus) and Jonathan Sanborn (a son of saxophonist David Sanborn), who she recruited for her two albums. I remember being interrupted during a solo in an ensemble class by an instructor yelling, ‘It’s your solo Karen. ![]() I had my own weird style, which I probably inherited from my father. Mantler went to school at the Berklee School of Music in Boston where she says, “I learned virtually nothing. When she got old enough to sing and play glockenspiel and various other instruments, her mother recruited her for the Carla Bley Band. This is probably why I feel most at home on the stage.” Don Cherry, a member of Ornette Coleman’s original quintet who died just a few weeks ago, played trumpet with my parents, and he would always go under the piano with me. “We had silk rugs and pillows and stuff under the piano. The press was horrified.”Īfter that, her parents kept her under the piano on stage during a show. At the Berlin Jazz Festival, my mother got in this big scandal that was in all the newspapers there when she checked me in with the coat check lady. “When I was born, I was immediately swept into the musician’s life on the road. “I was conceived at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1965,” she says. Maybe if you poke fun at yourself, you don’t take things so hard.”īut Mantler insisted on pursuing music, which she insists is in her blood. “I don’t know why I write about such negative things, but that’s what amuses me. “I don’t mean to be defeatist,” says Mantler in a telephone interview promoting her show tomorrow night at Diamonz in Bethlehem. Her songs complain about birthdays, bad-guy boyfriends, green beans, influenza, and even Christmas (“More suicides are committed then,” and “They make you eat moldy fruitcake”). Mantler was reduced to playing piano at a restaurant in exchange for free meals, and she even took some waitressing gigs.įortunately, adversity is a main ingredient in Mantler’s music. Money was tight and the IRS was after her. And although diverse publications such as Billboard, Rolling Stone, Down Beat and The Boston Phoenix and public radio stations praised her albums, apparently the record-buying public didn’t believe them. ![]() On April 25, 1991, her cat Arnold died - on her 25th birthday, no less. Karen Mantler has had a lot to gripe about since recording “My Cat Arnold” (XtraWatt) in 1987 and “Karen Mantler and Her Cat Arnold Get the Flu” (XtraWatt) in 1990. ![]()
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