The following is jazz journalist Morgan Enos’ review of the U.S. premiere of Carla Bley’s Escalator Over the Hill, at the New School in New York City, on May 2.
Despite the event being more than a half-century in the making – and herself being based upstate – Karen Mantler didn’t attend the U.S. premiere of Carla Bley’s Escalator Over the Hill, at the Tishman Auditorium at Manhattan’s New School. Her absence, though, is completely understandable, and speaks volumes.
For one, the pianist, singer, composer, and daughter of its co-creator (and trumpeter and composer Michael Mantler) was heavily involved in all of its following live performances, copying out parts for musicians, organising rehearsals, and rehearsing singers. Mantler even appeared on the original 1971 album, at age four, murmuring “Riding uneasily” on the title track. She’s played in the Escalator band three separate times. “I really have lived this piece,” she tells UK Jazz News. (There’s footage of her slamming the piano lid on her mother’s hand, she explains.)
It cuts deeper: in 2023, Carla Bley, the composer, pianist, organist, and leading light of avant-garde jazz, died from brain cancer at 87. “I had a gig in the city the week before, and it just took a lot out of me,” Mantler explains. “Also, I wasn’t really sure I was ready to see it without Carla. I’m still recovering from her death.”
Fortunately Mantler, alongside Bley’s decades-long creative and romantic partner, the bassist and composer Steve Swallow, have been picking up the pieces and staying busy – “trying to go on, like we know that she would want us to.” As this typically, cruelly goes, the maestro is only now fully getting her flowers, from the other side of the veil, with tributes like 2025’s Mundoagua: Celebrating Carla Bley, by the pianist, composer, and bandleader Arturo O’Farrill, discovered by Bley when he was just 19.
“Her name should be used with the same reverence and deference we use when we speak of Duke Ellington, Aaron Copland, Gil Evans, Charles Mingus, and even Chico O’Farrill,” the son of the latter artist – an Afro-Cuban jazz legend – declared in Mundoagua’s press materials.
This bore out during Escalator’s very, very belated stateside premiere featuring the New School Studio Orchestra and Vocal Ensemble, Music Director and Conductor Keller Coker, Vocal Ensemble Conductor Aubrey Johnson, guitarist Steve Cardenas, electric sitarist and droner Dirk Freymuth, percussionist Matt Wilson, and pianist O’Farrill.
Sometimes described as a jazz opera – or a ‘chronotransduction‘, as per Bley and her collaborator and wordsmith, Paul Haines – Escalator Over the Hill obliterates any attendant notion of academic dryness. Instead, across an impenetrable-seeming two hours and 27 tracks, it’s charged with a freewheeling, rock ‘n’ roll spirit, and not just because Cream bassist Jack Bruce and famed singer Linda Ronstadt also appear on it.
Careening through styles, genres, and textures – warning us of “talented teams of onions,” “the giggling fly,” and “bullfrogs having their throats cut” – Escalator, to this day, is thrilling and inspiring. There’s DNA of Tom Waits’ Rain Dogs, of Zappa, of endless, brilliant examples of downtown art music. But this cracked masterwork mostly serves as a reminder of Bley’s singular mind.
“They really grasped the gravity of what they were doing,” Wilson says of the New School students onstage. “I didn’t even feel the idea that students were involved,” expresses Cardenas. “It just felt like everybody was a solid musician, and everybody was so into it.”
Escalator Over the Hill remains not just a part of jazz history, but, in a sense, rock history. So why was it not performed in the U.S. until 2025? “Well, it’s just a very expensive thing to put on – 24 musicians,” Mantler says. “And I think that the U.S. has never really given much funding to experimental music, anything outside of the normal. I’m not surprised it never happened.”
For his part, Wilson chalks up the delay to everything from academic realities to budgets to Bley’s creative restlessness. “There are a lot of factors, but I’m glad now that the visibility is there for it, and that perhaps we can revisit it,” he says. Despite the somewhat staid atmosphere of a music school auditorium, this version of Escalator climbed high. From ‘This is Here…’ to ‘Song for Anything that Moves’ to ‘…And It’s Again’, the student band was locked in, enthusiastic. They impressively embodied Bley’s gonzo vision, while rarely feeling overly cold or clinical in execution.
“It was overwhelming at first, when I saw the score and listened to the music, and tried to figure it out,” says Johnson. “But after spending several hours with it, it started to make sense. I got really into it, and it didn’t feel totally foreign to me. I’ve done free stuff before, but this was my first time leading singers through that process.” (Despite not being previously familiar with Escalator, she cites ‘Little Pony Soldier’ as one of her favourites.)
From sepulchral drones to uneasy fanfares, this was a worthy and deeply enjoyable ride on Escalator Over the Hill, and a historic moment to boot. But it’s hard to love anything in a sterile space like this; only appreciation can occur there. Driving back from a separate concert I was working in Tarrytown, under a full moon, I finally fell in love with Escalator, even though I’d just witnessed it in the flesh, for the first time.
More than ever, it felt like a massive fuck-you to any normative sense of reality: a glorious release from a bona fide weirdo genius. As one critic put it, “It is literally whatever you want to make of it. It is devoid of every quality which you might assume would qualify it to be the greatest of all records. And yet it is that tabula rasa in its heart, the blank space which may well exist at the very heart of all music.”
“I’m really glad that it went well. That’s all I need,” Mantler says. “It didn’t matter if I saw it. It’s just that everybody really enjoyed it. Hopefully, it’s the first of many more performances to come.”
Hopefully, there will be more U.S. performances and a visit to the UK. Until then, know that Bley deserved far more recognition than she knew in her life. And if you’re reading this, and feeling unacquainted with or intimidated by the avant-garde jazz world – well, it rides right over that hill.
