I’ll be completely honest. Lately, it’s been getting harder to carve out time to write for this blog. After a long moment in time, I’ve finally found a degree of it to do other things that vie just as much for my attention. Yet, I still feel the need to share things with you. Maybe in the future such stories will be shorter or the music a bit more scattershot, but for this moment in time, you’re getting exactly more of what I have no bones in enjoying. With this in mind, Carla Bley’s Night-glo seems like the most appropriate album to kick off this temporary phase of FOND/SOUND. You see, I feel that Carla might have been on the same wavelength when she created Night-glo with her longtime music and romantic partner Steve Swallow.
A true giant of the free jazz movement, one wonders how American jazz music would have evolved if one Lovella May Borg hadn’t travelled from Oakland to NYC. Blazing the world of modern and experimental music with her iconic visage and chops. Numerous, infinitely numerous, is her trailblazing work as a composer, pianist, and songwriter. Whether it was her work with the pioneering Jazz Composers Guild, Don Cherry, Paul Bley, Gary Burton, Nick Mason and countless, many others (I could go on forever doing this) there was always something genuinely inviting about her take on whatever jazz music she was turning inside out.
So, you can imagine what the iconic ECM label must have thought when she showed up one day, in 1985, with the masters of Night-glo for her next release on WATT the sibling label she started with them. At that moment in time, Carla’s mind was on/in love. At that time, her recent venturing through latin jazz left her at an interesting fork. Standing somewhere in the middle was Steve Swallow. Somewhere, Manfred Eicher must have been wondering: “How in the hell am I going to market all this smooth jazz?”
Much like Maki Asakawa’s Nothing At All To Lose or Ulla’s nocturnal joint, the five songs Carla wrote for Night-glo are just permeating with love, seduction, and sex. Just a year before she had signaled on 1983’s Heavy Heart that her excursion into soulful latin jazz wasn’t some left field thing. Here we’d get to hear Carla thoroughly examine this opposite side of herself using the same crew and ideas hinted at then. Here though, they’d go even softer, really squeeze all that joy and slow-build out of “love”.
In the summer of 1985, Carla and Steve became more than just musical partners but romantic ones. Night-glo would treat us to musicians like Hiram Bullock, Paul McCandless, John Clark and a few others not known at all for such suave work (although Hiram would grow into that nicely) to do exactly that: let loose, go slow, and get sexy. Quiet storm jams like Steve Swallow’s silky bassline-dominated “Pretend You’re In Love” all strike at gorgeous urban music far from the icy lands of Europe. Mid-tempo funk, like the one on the title track, imagines the influence of fusion not entirely dapping itself into the weird overly technical era of the ‘80s but using that freedom to tone it back, keep it mellow. Through every track we hear Carla lace all sorts of burning synthetic atmosphere that just screams: “take this to the satin sheets”.
Someone at Discogs correctly points out how other musicians, not wayward jazz fans, understood what Carla and Steve did here. None other than Gavin Bryars gets pointed out for pointing out his love for this album comparing it (rightfully) to Bill Evans’ similarly once slacked off “cocktail jazz”. When you’re ready to go down for the pound, one tends to do so by spiriting away all that superfluous stuff holding you back.
Night-glo for 36-odd minutes takes the physicality of jazz and transports it to some island where two lovebirds do their dance together, then turn around and share that music for others to get there. Perhaps it’s our turn to shed some of our hang ups and become a little more sophisticated. For now, this one’s for him. (Don’t worry, he’ll return the favor later.) It’s up to you whether you want to leave on that red sweater, though.