Overview

Escalator Over the Hill seems simultaneously to assimilate and annihilate rock gestures, jazz harmonies, and classical structures. By nature of its absolute autonomy, it also thumbs its nose at all musical authorities and institutions, particularly the recording industry. In this sense, it is perhaps the quintessential anti-establishment statement of its time. - Amy C. Beal In January 1967, the jazz composer and pianist Carla Bley (1936–2023) received a poem in the mail from a writer-friend, Paul Haines. As she later said, it “fit mysteriously with a piece of music I was working on, Detective Writer Daughter. When I told [Paul] how amazing this was, we decided to write an opera together, an overstatement by two people who didn’t have to watch their words.” In 1971, the result of this collaboration—the more than two-hour “chronotransduction” (as Bley came to call it) Escalator Over the Hill—was released. Featuring over 50 musicians and 20 vocalists such as Don Cherry, Charlie Haden, Roswell Rudd, Gato Barbieri, John McLaughlin, Jack Bruce and Linda Ronstadt, Escalator was named Jazz Album of the Year by Melody Maker in 1972 and awarded the Grand Prix du Disque the year after that. Included with the LP was a catalogue of pictures of the musicians and recording sessions made by the photographers Tod Papageorge (who also sings on the album), Garry Winogrand and Paul McDonough. McDonough was also responsible for pasting the edited prints to paper boards and arranging the final layout of the catalogue. A selection of those photographs and boards, including design indications and notes, is highlighted in And It’s Again: Carla Bley’s Escalator Over the Hill, along with the composer’s extraordinary narrative-chronicle of the making and recording of the album, Accomplishing Escalator.

Full Product Details

9783969991367

Table of Contents

Reviews

Author Information

Tod Papageorge was born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in 1940, and began photographing during his last semester of college before graduating with a degree in English literature in 1962. In the 1970s he received two Guggenheim Fellowships and National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship Grants, and in 1979 he was named Walker Evans Professor at the Yale School of Art, where he was also Director of Graduate Studies of Photography until 2013. His work has been widely exhibited and is represented in over 30 major public collections. In 2009 Papageorge was a resident at the American Academy in Rome, and in 2010 he was awarded the Rome Commission in Photography. Steidl has published Papageorge’s Passing Through Eden. Photographs of Central Park (2007), Dr. Blankman’s New York (2018) and the forthcoming War and Peace in New York. Photographs 1966–1971. Born in 1928 in New York City, Garry Winogrand was a central figure in post-war American photography. Winogrand received numerous grants, including three Guggenheim Fellowships and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. His work has been the subject of many museum and gallery exhibitions, including “New Documents” (1967) at the Museum of Modern Art. His books include The Animals (1969), Public Relations (1977), Stock Photographs. The Fort Worth Fat Stock Show and Rodeo (1980) and 1964 (2002). Winogrand died in 1984. Paul McDonough was born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in 1941, and studied drawing and painting at the New England School of Art in Boston. In 1981 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship. McDonough is represented in a number of public and private collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the New York Public Library. His books include New York Photographs 1968–1978 (2010), Sight Seeing (2014), In the Studio: Photography and Drawings by Paul McDonough (2018) and Headed West (2021). McDonough lives and works in Brooklyn.

Tab Content 6

Countries Available