Escalator Over the Hill
There's no easy way to describeEscalator over the Hill, one of the most ambitious works in 20th century music and one that seems to sum up much of the creative energy that was loose between 1968 and 1972, when it was conceived, composed, and recorded. Beginning with a collection of Paul Haines's distinctive poems--brief, wittily surreal, sometimes aphoristic or elliptical--Carla Bley set out to arrange them as a continuous musical-theater piece, giving specific characters to them as well as melodies. In the process, she drew on available musical genres fromKurt Weill's theater music to free jazz and rock to create her own style, dispensing pieces among several instrumental groupings, from jazz orchestra to "hotel lobby band" to an electronic "phantom band." Bley then drew on an extraordinary collection of singers and musicians to realize the score, castingJack BruceandLinda Ronstadtas the lead voices, with appearances by jazz singersSheila JordanandJeanne Lee. The soloists includeDon Cherry,Gato Barbieri,Roswell Rudd, andCharlie Haden, while the fusion-oriented "Jack's traveling band" features Bruce andJohn McLaughlin. Bley's closing comment in the notes--"Anything not told, wasn't yet known"--is a fitting summary.Escalator's accomplishment is even more remarkable than its ambitions, creating syntheses of music and language that hadn't appeared before (and haven't since), and blazing a trail that few have had the creativity or energy to imagine following. As durable as it is visionary, its first public performances took place on European tours mounted in the late 1990s.--Stuart Broomer