Art & Creativity Quote by Carla Bley

Praise like this lands because it comes from someone who isn’t in the business of easy compliments. Carla Bley built a career on thorny, witty compositions that sit at the crossroads of jazz, contemporary classical, and sly satire. So when she singles out Art Farmer as the one performer whose band played her music “better than I could myself,” she’s not just being generous - she’s tipping her hand about what her work demands: interpretation, not obedience.

The line quietly dethrones the composer-as-final-authority myth. Bley is admitting that her charts are less like commandments and more like invitations. Farmer, a trumpet and flugelhorn player famous for lyricism and restraint, was the anti-showoff modernist: he made complexity feel inevitable, even tender. That’s the subtext of “better” here. Not more virtuosic, but more lucid - the kind of playing that clarifies a composer’s intent by refusing to clutter it with ego.

The specific name-checks matter. “Sing Me Softly of the Blues” already telegraphs Bley’s taste for undercutting grandeur with intimacy; “Ad Infinitum” suggests structure that can loop, expand, or tilt into the absurd. In the 60s and 70s, as jazz splintered into fusion, free, and post-bop camps, Bley’s compositions became a meeting ground for musicians who could handle irony and swing at the same time. Farmer’s band recording her work is the ideal outcome: a collaborator translating her unusual language into something that breathes, proving that the “best” version of a piece might be the one the composer can’t quite play herself.