In return he was given his own first session as a leader, in a trio with Mingus on bass and Art Blakey on drums, the result released on Mingus’s own label, Debut. In 1953, while dividing his time between the two cities, he was invited by Charles Mingus to supervise a recording by the bassist’s 10-piece band. He co-founded the Montreal Jazz Workshop, some of whose shows were broadcast by the CBC, and at 18 he had the opportunity to accompany such giants as Lester Young and Charlie Parker.ĭuring his teens his mother had given him money and told him to go to New York to see if he liked it. Steeped from an early age in a love of jazz, at 16 he was invited by Oscar Peterson to deputise for him in a Montreal club. Many years later, Paul discovered that his childhood nanny, a young French-Canadian woman named Lucie, of whom he became very fond and from whom he was separated by the divorce, had been his birth mother, and that he was the product of his father’s affair.Įncouraged by his adoptive mother, he took piano lessons with a travelling teacher from the Paris Conservatory and subsequently studied at McGill University and the Quebec Conservatory. Each of them provided skeletal but highly suggestive frameworks – such as Carla Bley’s tunes Vashkar and Ida Lupino and Peacock’s Blood and Nothing Ever Was, Anyway – that he could explore time and again without ever exhausting their possibilities.īorn in Montreal, he was adopted in infancy by Joe Bley, who owned an embroidery factory, and his wife, Betty (nee Marcovitch). His repertoire depended heavily on the compositions of two of the women with whom he had strong relationships: Carla Bley, his first wife, and Annette Peacock. Himself influenced in his early days by the bebop master Bud Powell, Bley set off on a resolutely individual path that would lead him to collaborations with many leading figures and to participation in some of the pivotal groups of modern jazz. His lifelong rejection of overtly romantic, sentimental, dramatic or otherwise ingratiating gestures may have limited the size of his audience, but it made a profound impression on a generation of his fellow pianists, from the hugely successful Keith Jarrett to such figures of comparatively recent significance as Ethan Iverson and Aaron Parks.

“Anything you play twice is once too much,” he said, in one of the aphorisms that seemed to come to him as naturally as the endlessly varied keyboard phrases, each seemingly fresh-minted, that he created throughout a professional career that began when he was in his teens. If jazz is a music of constant change, then the Canadian pianist Paul Bley, who has died aged 83, was one of the most steadfast proponents of that demanding characteristic.

Carla bley rym