21. 3/4 for Piano and Orchestra

Carla Bley (Watt, 1975);
composed by Carla Bley

Carla Bley wrote her only full-on classical piece when, feeling misplaced, she had temporarily “renounced jazz.” Dennis Russell Davies conducted the 1974 Lincoln Center premiere of this piano concerto – entirely in waltz time (thus the title) with a theme reminiscent of Charles Mingus’s “Meditations On Integration,” but not all that much like it. However, Bley had already soured the piece’s future when the Times quoted her comments on the musicians: “When I'm conducting the people I've been playing with for 10 years, ... they add a personal dimension to the music ... but when I got with The Ensemble, I realized I must be a jazz musician because they phrase so differently from the way I do.” The version she recorded the following year puts this dialectic into relief. Featured soloist Ursula Oppens does not improvise, as such – she plays a cadenza. But there is nothing lockstep about the free floating rhythmic feel of the chamber ensemble, which Bley’s signature voicings make seem three times larger than it is, even when down to near-silence, underneath the unbelievably melancholy one-handed figure that anchors from the beginning to the end. Jazz - whatever it is - could not renounce her.

Note: 25 secular essays about 25 songs, each one exactly 200 words long, appearing one per day during Advent (approximately).