Search - Carla Bley :: Tropic Appetites

This 1974 song cycle is a tightly compressed sequel to Carla Bley's previous collaboration with Paul Haines, the exhaustive Escalator over the Hill. Combining a series of poems Haines wrote during extended stays in India and Southeast Asia with Bley's taut compositions, Appetites is a journey into sounds and imagery that are often both grim and whimsical. The band is an octet, but Bley's writing and some judicious overdubbing create thick, dark textures with strings and Howard Johnson's low brass and reed doubling. Julie Tippetts's voice lends cutting-edge intensity to the lyrics, while the lighthearted "Funnybird Song," with vocals by Johnson and a very young Karen Mantler, is an effective change of mood. The level of musicianship is stellar, but even here some stand out, most notably Dave Holland on cello and electric and acoustic basses and Gato Barbieri, whose tenor playing could be at once corrosive and incandescent in this context. Haines's idiosyncratic syntax may make his work particularly adaptable to jazz phrasing, and Bley has a singular gift for turning those poems into modern-day art song. --Stuart Broomer