Escalator Over the Hill: A Chronotransduction by Carla Bley & Paul Haines

Pianist and composer Carla Bley’s earliest leader projects were under the auspices of the Jazz Composer’s Orchestra, a unit she cofounded in 1965 with trumpeter and then-husband Michael Mantler. Her Mantler-produced 1971 epic Escalator Over the Hill is like nothing else of the period: An abstract jazz opera with libretto by poet and lyricist Paul Haines, and a cast including giants of free improvisation, fusion and what came to be called world music. The vocal line-up grabs one’s attention, featuring Jack Bruce (of Cream and The Tony Williams Lifetime) in one of the most prominent roles; Linda Ronstadt as the character Ginger, singing “Why” and “Doctor Why”; Don Preston (of The Mothers of Invention) on “Like Animals” and “End of Animals”; the great vocal improviser Jeanne Lee on “End of Rawalpindi”; the exploratory bebop-rooted virtuoso Sheila Jordan on “Holiday in Risk”; and even Bley and Mantler’s then four-year-old daughter, Karen Mantler, on the title track. (The kid, growing up fast, returned to sing “Funnybird Song” on the smaller-scale 1974 follow-up Tropic Appetites, another work with Haines.) Five different line-ups are heard in this “chronotransduction”, as Bley and Haines termed it, including the Hotel Lobby Band, Jack’s Travelling Band, the Desert Band, the Original Hotel Amateur Band and a trio playing “Phantom Music”. The orchestration is texturally rich and ever-changing, with soloists including the Argentinian tenor shredder Gato Barbieri; violinist and AACM visionary Leroy Jenkins; guitar hero John McLaughlin (of Miles Davis and the Mahavishnu Orchestra) destroying on “Rawalpindi Blues”; trumpeter Don Cherry (of Ornette Coleman fame) on “A.I.R. All India Radio”; Italian trumpet master Enrico Rava; and the iconic rhythm partners Charlie Haden and Paul Motian on bass and drums—with Motian doubling on the Egyptian dumbek, or goblet drum. The quasi-burlesque, absurdist atmosphere of the piece doesn’t take away from its beauty. Escalator Over the Hill did much to establish Bley as a unique and prescient voice in American music.