Creativity Quote by Carla Bley

Carla Bley isn’t bragging so much as taking attendance. Her line about living composers for big band being “very few and far between” points to a quiet cultural fact: the big band, once a mass medium, has become a niche ecosystem where nostalgia often crowds out new writing. In that landscape, composing isn’t just a skill; it’s a form of upkeep. Someone has to keep the machinery alive, to prove the format can still surprise rather than merely reenact.

The phrasing matters. “There are not a lot of them” is blunt, almost shrugging, like she’s stating the weather. Then comes the pivot: “I have a talent for doing it.” It lands with the clean confidence of a working musician who’s spent decades watching others romanticize the past while she does the actual labor of arranging, balancing sections, carving space for improvisers, and making 15-plus players sound like a single, mischievous organism.

“I am zeroing in on what I do best” is the real tell. It’s a refusal of the modern pressure to be everything at once: brand, performer, content engine. Bley frames specialization as liberation, not limitation. The subtext is pragmatic and slightly defiant: if the culture won’t reliably fund ambitious large-ensemble writing, then the composer who can do it has to claim that territory unapologetically. She’s staking out a lane that’s nearly empty, not because it’s easy, but because it’s worth occupying.