![]() And I understood him from note one.ĬB: Yeah, when I played with Roswell Rudd and Steve Lacy, I got a chance to learn all his tunes. I thought he was another person in the galaxy of great jazz people. I never heard him like grumble, and stop playing or anything, which is something I do all the time. Everything he did or said, the way he moved, the way he played, was perfect. I thought he should run everything, be named king of the world or something. So: I am just a slow hearer.ĬB: Well, there you go. I find it impossible to keep my ears up to his fingers, where his fingers are. I think maybe I’m still not graduated to liking him a lot. He would turn his back and scratch his ass, just to say, you people listening to me, I don’t care if you like it or not, something like that. But when I went to Europe later I got to see him a couple of times at clubs like in Paris and stuff, and I thought he was sort of mean. I saw him play once in New York, maybe Basin Street or maybe Birdland. God, I’m telling you these horrible things about myself. ![]() And so from that point on, I think I tended to like the people that I got to hear a lot or that I got to see a lot. So that’s as close as I got to Charlie Parker. I arrived in New York, and he was on his last legs, was playing at a club, and I remember standing outside the club because I couldn’t get in because there were too many people, listening to his set. I gave Charlie Parker all the credit anyone could, but I didn’t have an emotional reaction until many years later. I had trouble with Charlie Parker and Bud Powell at the beginning.ĬB: Those are recent discoveries for me too. I hated Cecil Taylor and all these guys I love now.ĮI: But this is pretty common process, I think. I didn’t like his sort of slippery ease with playing. And then I just loved him.ĬB: I didn’t like his sound. I didn’t like John Coltrane for about 20 years. I didn’t like a lot of the musicians at the beginning. But on the way to sounding even good, I’m in a terror. He just worked on a solo until he had it, and that was really freeing for a person like me, used to writing everything down. He told me he didn’t have that ethic that the rest of the musicians have, always coming up with something new, never repeating themselves. Every note, all the phrasing, is perfect. I, of course, revere him for the same reason as I revere Count Basie. He was a very nice person, nice to me, anyway. I thought that he lived on a cloud somewhere, in a palace, not in Queens. It was in the subway and he was with his wife, they were going home to Queens. I have a book on him, and I’m not even reading it, I just can’t quite get into it.ĬB: I actually met Louis Armstrong! That was really amazing. I didn’t know that at the time, so later I absolved him from his crime. Later I found out that even before Billy Strayhorn started writing music for the band, there was some great music in the earliest Duke bands. I didn’t see him a lot either, because he worked festivals and I worked clubs. But aside from that, I didn’t like his style of playing or talking to people. I thought he was stealing music from Billy Strayhorn, basically. I can’t hold myself to that standard, but I can appreciate it.ĬB: I never liked Duke Ellington. That’s the final arbiter of how to play two notes, the distance between them and the volume of them is perfect. That was really interesting.Īn early influence and still something to always answer to the question,”Who do I like as a piano player:” Count Basie. They’d all be sitting there in the audience and watching their husbands play with Count Basie. On Sundays at the Jazz Gallery there’d be family day, and every guy in the band could bring his wife and children to the gig. I just sort of wrapped myself in the atmosphere of a Basie gig. Neal Hefti got a lot of credit, but some of the other guys like Ernie Wilkins were more interesting to me. I was very impressed by him and the whole band, particularly all the arrangers and the fact that they weren’t getting any credit for it, as far as I thought, they weren’t. I sort of picked up on a lot of it and put it away for use later. That’s the kind of music I wanted to hear, and that’s what I learned. I got to hear him more than anyone else, and it was an education. Count Basie was playing at Birdland, Basin Street, and the Jazz Gallery when I was working as a cigarette girl. ![]() We could start with Count Basie.Ĭarla Bley: Okay, that would be a good one. Instead of going over a bunch of ground that’s already documented, I simply have list of names to ask you about to see if anything comes to mind. Beal, and you yourself have written about your own music quite a bit over the years. (From January 2018 and transcribed by Lysa Hale.)Įthan Iverson: Carla, you’ve been interviewed so much.
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