Carla Bley & Paul Haines
Escalator Over the Hill

They call it the short century, the 20th century, but one must not forget Hobsbawm's irony in designating what is likely the century most dense with crucial events for the history of humanity, perhaps alongside the Renaissance and the classical era. 100 years, but even just the first 50 could suffice, and do suffice, for endless novels and films; it makes you reflect on the fact that we prefer to set many of our stories in the last century, as if there weren’t already more than enough to discuss and narrate about these years. Perhaps narrating today is too difficult for the modern writer, from a technical point of view. It seems clear that they can’t handle the absence of absence caused by technology, if I may cite the first thing that comes to mind. In short, the '900 remains etched in our imagination, particularly as the source of today’s world – since no one can object that if we are indeed quite distant from the '70s and '80s (I still can’t comprehend how the generation born between '50 and '60 can tolerate today’s politics having had the past to vote for. At least let us young people also experience what it means to have a governing class, beasts!), as I was saying, even if we are distant, I say as a 20-30-year-old of today, already from the boomer generation (forgive me this propensity), and if we often find ourselves almost incommunicado with our grandparents, unless we talk about football or other trivialities, what can be said about what we would feel when faced with the proverbial farmer from the deep Parma countryside of the late 1800s, however reenacted and thus fake, kindly offered to us by Grandpa Bertolucci in his commendable *Novecento* (by the way, it’s available in good definition on Raiplay, without ads; take advantage of this holiday to lounge and enjoy an afternoon of happiness)? And what Italian would we speak with that real 19th-century farmer? Just the act of communicating would already be a problem.

So many things in the last century. And so many are found on this album, an extraordinary summation of an entire world that has long since disappeared – not many years, but still on the threshold of 2020, now well past. Carla Bley is still alive, but she is like a 19th-century farmer polishing in the dimness of her apartment some of her old chairs hand-built in her youth, speaking a doubly old and lost language. In this LP everything evokes a certain imagery, from the cover, a translucent golden hue like the kitsch of labels of some national liqueur that wants to delude that it’s not bar sport stuff. A joint effort by Carl Bley's wife along with the lyrics of the poet Heines (not to mention the production of a certain Michael Mantler) that magically and greatly surpasses the capabilities of all the individuals involved to become a meeting place of so many things, each dragging along an additional array of things.

Firstly, of course, Jazz, with its already burdensome history at the time, from the origins up to the big band era, when whites adorned it with jackets and ties (first track of the album, which would have seen a peck planted on the forehead from Benny Goodman), American music entirely 20th-century, now confined to colleges, to the metastasis of the intellectualization process that started years and years ago and seems finally completely sterilized. Today at most you hear Kamasi. Jazz, a black music here very white but in a style that blacks at the time frequented willingly hand in hand with whites, a framework that only in those years lent itself to maximalist projects like this, Jazz in the hands of a lengthy line-up trying to articulate statements which precisely pushed the audience, desperate, to flee. A machine designed for other purposes, forced into an ungrateful task, but at this height, the adhesive still holds and everything still spins, and people see it passing in the sun, this checkered Jazz.

There's the classical, a minefield for me. It’s definitely here; there's an attempt to incorporate all the discourse on dodecaphony from Schönberg, Webern, Berg, etc., another alien humanity, still with a frontier to explore, boots tightly fastened and a climbing axe held firmly, proud gaze and staff paper filled, above all, with studies and theories. The self-destruction of white music, which has a decadent and self-satisfied air to its manners, is here a necessary ingredient (necessary for the sake of my discourse) for a matter of aura, of aesthetics, primarily, and then pedigree.

There’s that elusive affair of theater. Obvious is the presence of opera, first of all, hosted and held by the hand and led in this latest fanfare. And here too, endless connections with the lost civilization of the great capitals at the beginning of the century, when cinema was really small and scrutinized from top to bottom. There's, I feel, also Brecht, and therefore yet another checkmark on a certain kind of literature that goes back and back to the exhausted imperial metropolises that at the century’s dawn spewed avant-gardes, Expressionisms, and all their then still social energy (how much water has flowed under the bridges). And with companion Weill, they also draw from true white folk, the frosty bad songs of stern Mitteleuropa, besides cabaret, etc.

Rock couldn’t be absent, but this album came out late enough (1971) to incorporate its most evolved form, thus semi-progressive-style hard rock (Businessmen) with references to Blues that I won’t even mention, as they are obviously consequential. Less predictable is the presence of psychedelia, which peeks out in the long pieces, the raspberry to serial music, ignored, fascinations for the musical, conceptual juggling, and all the hippie armament that enters the jam with its electric guitars. There’s even no lack of Indian music, the ragas, that fascination for the East which is the last thing here incomprehensible before the arrival of the '80s, for us the first starting square of today, those indeed comprehensible, even terribly drinkable.

If the concept of idea is taken literally, say Hegelianly, as a representation of a concept, here lies a possible idea of the 20th century. Or otherwise, you can skip all the fuss and simply start the first track and watch an old Humphrey Bogart struggle with buckets of style to unravel the mysteries of the Big Sleep, amidst beautiful women, quality cigarettes, drinks, raised eyebrows, smiles, chiaroscuros, guns, and that eternal, mysterious night, the chaotic and Gordian History of our past, knotted to a nightmare.