The incomprehensible libretto and a good deal of the writing for big band amount to a textbook of avant-garde pretension. There is rock music, early synthesizer and ring modulator experiments, the obligatory Indian section, and repeated outbreaks of Weimar Republic cabaret in 3/4 time that both mock and revere European tradition. Carla Bley/Paul Haines/Jazz Composers Orchestra - Escalator Over The Hill (LP) (G-VG/G+) Format: Vinyl LP Album Cat No: JCOA Records Virgin JT4001 TVF Code. Carla Bley remembers: He was a writer of words, and I was a writer of notes. Also in attendance was one Paul Haines, a poet with no published work at the time who also wrote sleeve notes for jazz albums.
Bley and librettist Paul Haines called it a "chronotransduction," a term left undefined Haines called it essentially "an opera"' and jazz writers called it "jazz opera." Escalator is, however, very much of its time, a late-'60s attempt to let a thousand flowers bloom and indulge in every trendy influence that Bley could conceive. Paul Bley was in the piano player seat and Carla Bley was in the audience. At the time, Escalator Over the Hill was probably the longest jazz-generated work in existence (its length was later exceeded by pieces like Wynton Marsalis' Blood on the Fields), a massive, messy, all-encompassing all-star ego trip that nevertheless gave Carla Bley an immense cachet of good will among the avant-garde.
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