(Her second husband trumpeter Mike Mantler was the other joint leader.) With this band and in her other work of the time she was playing very free jazz, but by 1967 had moved towards writing more formal compositions, and A Genuine Tong Funeral (recorded by Gary Burton) was her first great masterpiece. She wrote for and played in small groups in the early 1960s, and then in 1964 became co-leader of the Jazz Composers' Orchestra. She moved to New York in 1957, where she married pianist Paul Bley, and began composing. She grew up on the West Coast of the USA, where her father was a church organist and pianist, but although he gave her early lessons, she was largely self-taught. One of the most distinctive and unusual composers in jazz, Carla Bley currently leads an international jazz orchestra that is the culmination of a long career that has mingled playing with bandleading and composing.
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