Wax On Carla Bley

About this event

WAX ON is both a listening party, placing the needle in the groove of a collection of favourite jazz albums, as well as an intimate space for story-telling and reflections.

This WAX ON event will focus on the life and music of pianist and composer CARLA BLEY!

Carla Bley is an American jazz composer, pianist, organist and bandleader.

Bley emerged in the New York jazz scene in the early 1960s as a starkly original composer, connected to the avant garde of Ornette Coleman and others, but following her own particular, even wayward muse. Over the decades, her tunes have been recorded by major figures from George Russell and Jimmy Giuffre to Jaco Pastorius and her old friend Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra.

In 1964, with her second husband, trumpeter Michael Mantler, Bley formed the Jazz Composer's Guild Orchestra, which a year later became known simply as the Jazz Composer's Orchestra. Two years later, Bley helped found the Jazz Composer's Orchestra Association, a nonprofit organization designed to present, distribute, and produce unconventional forms of jazz.

She has always led her own groups, on piano or organ, releasing the results on her own ‘Watt’ label, but it is only in the last couple of decades that she began to concentrate on her own performance. She once described herself as “1 percent player, 99 percent composer”. Bley’s asymmetrical compositional structures subvert jazz formula to wonderful effect, and her unpredictable melodies are often as catchy as they are obscure. In the tradition of jazz's very finest composers and improvisers, Bley has developed a style of her very own, and the music as a whole is the better for it.

Moderated by Irish Times music critic Cormac Larkin, with a panel of jazz aficionados, Wax On brings the audience on an intimate journey through the life and recordings of some of the most influential and important artists of the jazz genre.