This is the first comprehensive treatment of the remarkable music and influence of Carla Bley, a highly innovative American jazz composer, pianist, organist, band leader, and activist. With fastidious attention to Bley's diverse compositions over the last fifty years spanning critical moments in jazz and experimental music history, Amy C. Beal tenders a long-overdue representation of a major figure in American music.

Best known for her jazz opera "Escalator over the Hill," her role in the Free Jazz movement of the 1960s, and her collaborations with artists such as Jack Bruce, Don Cherry, Robert Wyatt, and Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason, Bley has successfully maneuvered the field of jazz from highly accessible, tradition-based contexts to commercially unviable, avant-garde works. Beal details the staggering variety in Bley's work as well as her use of parody, quotations, and contradictions, examining the vocabulary Bley has developed throughout her career and highlighting the compositional and cultural significance of her experimentalism.

Beal also points to Bley's professional and managerial work as a pioneer in the development of artist-owned record labels, the cofounder and manager of WATT Records, and the cofounder of New Music Distribution Service. Showing her to be not just an artist but an activist who has maintained musical independence and professional control amid the profit-driven, corporation-dominated world of commercial jazz, Beal's straightforward discussion of Bley's life and career will stimulate deeper examinations of her work.

| Cover Title Page CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Introduction: "Like a Mockingbird" 1. Walking Woman: Oakland, New York, Los Angeles, New York 2. Sing Me Softly of the Blues: Early Short Pieces and Songs without Words 3. Social Studies: The Jazz Composers Guild and the Jazz Composers Orchestra 4. "Mad at Jazz": A Genuine Tong Funderal 5. Escalator over the Hill: Jazz Opera as Fusion 6. Copyright Royalties: New Music Distribution Service 7. Big Band Theory: The Carla Bley Band and Other Projects 8. The Lone Arranger: History and Hilarity 9. End of Vienna: Fancy Chamber Music 10. Dreams So Real: "Jazz Is Really Where My Heart Now Lies" NOTES SUGGESTED LISTENING SOURCES INDEX | "Beal's prose is often lyrical and always dynamic, she instantly finds the appropriate pacing for the narrative and, just as quickly, demonstrates deep knowledge of and affection for her subject."—Popmatters

"Amy C. Beal responds with alacrity and intellectual force to the challenge of contextualizing the work of this uniquely important, yet academically underexplored twentieth-century American composer-performer. An important and salutary work that greatly enriches the field of jazz studies."

—George E. Lewis, author of A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music

"Accurate and kind, Carla Bley reveals with remarkable effectiveness the anatomy of the successive moments of Bley's musical life."—Clarin
|Amy C. Beal is a professor of music at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the author of New Music, New Allies: American Experimental Music in West Germany from the Zero Hour to Reunification.