Looking for America

Carla Bley

Product Details

• Audio CD (May 13, 2003)
• Original Release Date: May 13, 2003
• Number of Discs: 1
• Label: Ecm Records
• ASIN: B000093I4N
• In-Print Editions: MP3 Download
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #254,619 in Music (See Bestsellers in Music)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com

For over forty years, Carla Bley has written music that infuses jazz traditions with her own personality. She continues to lead a variety of ensembles, from small combos to large-scale big bands. With Looking for America, Bley returns to the big band format. Totaling 18 pieces, the group is a rich blend of 13 horns, two keyboards, and a rhythm section. She has worked with many of the featured musicians for decades, and Bley consequently composes and arranges with their individual voices in mind. Here she returns to a theme she's visited before, most notably on her European Tour 1977 album (with the piece "Spangled Banner Minor and Other Patriotic Songs"). Touching on the whole of the North American continent, there are nods to Mexico ("Tijuana Traffics") and Canada ("O Canada"). Once again, Carla Bley excels at deconstructing the familiar. --David Greenberger

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Irony & (/or?) patriotism, July 7, 2003

By	N. Dorward "obsessive reviewer" (Toronto, ON Canada) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

As Carla Bley herself says, "The timing couldn't have been worse." 21 minutes of this (59-minute) album are taken up by a suite based around "The Star Spangled Banner"; the album was actually released as US forces assailed Iraq, not exactly a great time to be flagwaving, even with a dose of Carla Bley's characteristic irony. In the event the suite is a rather unsettling mix of cheerfully jaunty grooves & some darker sequences, notably the moody setpiece for Andy Sheppard's tenor & the following free-jazz uproar which leads to a rather mystifying interpolation of "O Canada". The piece ends fittingly on an ambiguous & downbeat moment: a rousing & mostly "straight" (though mildly harmonically tweaked) statement of the national anthem is interrupted by a very dark response led by Gary Valente's trombone, & the piece then completely deflates, the final phrase of the national anthem delivered in a barely-audible pianissimo. I imagine that the interpretation of the piece's import & success will vary wildly with each listener, which is as it should be.

The rest of the album is something of a grab bag of snippets & finished items from Bley's workshop--four lovely miniatures that are all that remains of a failed attempt at a large-scale work, "The Mother"; bits & pieces from various commissions that didn't pan out (e.g. an album of traditional & children's songs that never came to fruition--the result is a peppy setting of "Old Macdonald Had a Farm"); a bop workout called "Fast Lane"; a nice Latin ballad, & a weird takeoff of Mexican music called "Tijuana Traffic" (which has a startlingly dissonant interlude in the middle which is neither prepared for nor resolved, simply starts & stops; the rest is merry south-of-the-border pastiche). It's all worth hearing, but somehow this strikes me as too bitty an album, & too dependent on the listener's being attuned to Bley's musical & ironic sensibility, to rank with her strongest work. Still, definitely worth a listen, not least for the memorably weird reworking of the national anthem.