Carla Bley with Steve Swallow – Night-glo

Even in recent Carla Bley retrospectives, this album still gets the short shrift. Extremely smooth, but in a deceptive way, slick but slippery. Bley is playing with the tropes of early '80s "lite" jazz in her own inimitable thorny manner.

I love this album. Though I have heard it described as a "rare, critical miscue" and not "wild" enough for some tastes, its polish and atmosphere are quite wonderful to me and neither make the music any less complex. Gavin Bryars has written about Carla Bley as his favorite composer and he explains it much more eloquently than I. With credit to Mr. Bryars, here are his words, "Many people were dismayed - and Manfred Eicher was one of them - when this band evolved into the sextet (electric guitar, bass guitar, organ, piano, drums and percussion) via a couple of transitional albums: Heavy Heart 1983 and Night-glo of 1985, which had the magical yet prosaically-named track Rut. Ironically, some record stores, especially those with eccentric classification systems such as the FNAC chain in France, started to place her work at this time in the "fusion" section because of the music's mellifluous façade and its superficial resemblance to that genre. But this is a similar mistake to that which was made in the early 1960's when some writers almost dismissed the Bill Evans trio as "cocktail music". Beneath the deceptively smooth surface, in both cases, is a music of great toughness and rhythmic subtlety (even at very slow tempi)."

So there you have it. Randos on Amazon, "serious" jazz folks, and merchandisers trying to package music for easy sale...just digest Mr. Bryars words a bit and you will begin to appreciate this album more.