If you find the singer’s voice somewhat familiar you are indeed listening to a familiar voice, for the singer is none other than Jack Bruce. He sent me more writings, and I didn’t leave out one word, not even an ‘and’ or ‘if’ of ‘but.’ I used every word he sent.” Detective Writer Daughter It wasn’t very orderly, and it took a long time. Meanwhile he was corresponding to me from India. But Carla Bley liked it and asked for more of these magical words: “I wrote right back, and said the opera is beginning. Her father’s horse was something like a houseĪs you can guess from these lines, you need to approach this libretto with an open mind. That first piece of music written for Escalator Over the Hill (let’s use the acronym ETOH for the rest of this article) was Detective Writer Daughter. And his poem gave me the next phrase that I was missing.” It fit exactly, syllable by syllable, into what I was writing. He was living in Paris, and he sent me a poem. I had a piece I was working on for myself, and I was sitting at the piano. It really started without my knowledge or permission. Carla Bley remembers: “He was a writer of words, and I was a writer of notes. Also in attendance was one Paul Haines, a poet with no published work at the time who also wrote sleeve notes for jazz albums. Paul Bley was in the piano player seat and Carla Bley was in the audience. The roots of the opera started in the mid-1960s at a jazz club where Charles Mingus was performing. ![]() If I had to describe it, it is modern jazz and avant-garde meet wild psychedelic rock, free-form electronic freakouts and beautiful melodic ballads, all topped with bizarre stream-of-consciousness poetry. The album is unclassifiable, simply because nothing else sounds like it. The writing of the lyrics and music took three years and the recording sessions yielded 100 hours of material. This is the story of that album, with a few short audio samples to give you a taste.Įscalator Over The Hill features 20 vocalists and over 50 musicians. A serendipitous coincidence that ignited the creation of perhaps the most ambitious recorded experimental music project in history, the mammoth triple album Escalator Over The Hill. The musical endeavors of his musical partner as a child unbeknownst to him, he named the opera Escalator Over The Hill. ![]() Her collaborator was poet Paul Haines, who provided the libretto. The aspiring girl did not know it at the time, but 25 years later she would be working on an opera of a slightly bigger scope. As a very young child I assumed everyone was a musician.” She only had a couple of songs but she already knew how to call the opera – Over The Hill. ![]() Growing up in a musical house she remembers: “I began learning music before I was able to walk, and I was surrounded by music at home from as early as I can remember. 5 Escalator Over the Hill, by Carla BleyĪt the tender age of nine Carla Bley started writing her first opera.
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