Carla Bley and Nick Mason's Fictitious Sports (Composer/Album analysis)

Carla Bley: Goddess of Progressive Rock and Jazz Fusion

Carla Bley is one of the most diverse and knowledgeable composers in the jazz composer canon. What is most fascinating is her work in writing, arranging and co-producing the album Nick Mason’s Fictitious Sports which came out in 1981. She blends themes of rock n’ roll, jazz, funk and soul music, and really utilizes her knowledge of the players in her band, and Nick Mason’s drum style. The album is completely arranged, written and performed by Bley and her band, with Nick Mason as a guest, and she blends his strengths displayed in his work with Pink Floyd and the jazz styles of her band to create a new jazz-fusion sound. I am really interested in the first few songs on this record as a way to examine the in-depth musical decisions that Carla Bley made both when writing the album, and producing it as well.

On the opening track of the album, “Can’t Get My Motor To Start” Bley and her band open the album with dissonant, distorted electric guitar and a simple snare pattern creating the general theme of the song. This theme immediately puts you in the mindset of a rock song, and then you are completely blindsided by the chromatic horn line and interesting “stops” in the guitar chords and melody. It’s also important to note that Karen Kraft’s and Robert Wyatt’s vocals have a very nice contrast of high and low voices, and Bley makes a lot of deliberate choices about whether they are singing while the other musicians are playing, or adding little lines about the story during the stops in the music to make them the center focus and add more to the overall theme. Kraft’s soft, head-resonator-dominant vocal position is effective in response to the heavy-set chest-dominant positions of the male singers on this song.These elements create an effective set up for the awesome solo at about 40 seconds into the song. This is a satisfying release of the tension that is set up in the first part of the song, by the crunchy (in both tone and harmony) guitar part, and the vocals that are almost spoken. The release of this solo is effective because it’s way more tonal than the verse, and has a consistent drum groove which is quite satisfying coming out of the very Frank Zappa-esque beginning of the song. The conversational end to this song is a perfect segway into the rest of the album, especially over the amazing drum groove from the solo section, and how we finally get to hear the horns play some solo licks while the song fades out. 

The second track of the album, “I Was Wrong” also includes an extremely funky, rock n’ roll drum groove, and interesting horn parts. The male vocals above this groove and the hits in the very beginning really remind me of Nick Mason’s Pink Floyd days, especially on the album Animals. This proves that Bley knows who she is writing for, a strength that shows a composer’s true bandwidth. The very beginning of this second song starts with horn-centric hits and cymbal washing, a perfectly composed intro to the more sparse verse of the song, that is very dominated by walking bass and vocals, as well as the drum groove. The drum part in this song really drives the verse, because Mason is playing the bass drum on the “A” of the beat, when you count 16th notes as “1 E & A”, which drives each beat into the next with lots of energy. The vocal melody in the verse is very deliberately centered around only about 3 or 4 notes, which sounds great on top of the more busy bass lines, and occasional slides in the guitar. After we finish the first verse we go into the same horn break in the beginning, and we realize that the horns are playing most of the same notes as the vocal melody, over a more harmonically dense background of more wash-based cymbals like the crash, and the guitar actually playing chords instead of slides. As well as most of the horns playing a layered pad. After another groovy verse with more ambient guitar sounds, we move into a super interesting chorus that shows Bley’s true talent for writing horn parts. The chorus in the song includes the popular songwriting technique of writing a word-heavy verse and a singular line, or very simple chorus. Robert Wyatt sings the line “I was wrong” and “I was so wrong” on a very simple 3 note melody, that is harmonized by the horns either doubling the melody or playing the same rhythm a third above and below. The song then builds up into a horn solo section over the verse bass groove and the same drum groove on the bass drum and snare, with Mason switching between the hi-hats and the ride cymbal, a very popular technique that rock drummers often use to give the soloist more harmonic space, and to not be washed out by the loud cymbals. As well as a way to show that the performer is soloing over a different part of the song.The solo section also includes hits on the 2 of each measure a few bars before the song goes back into the intro. This was a genius choice of Bley and Mason, because these hits, like the bass drum part, drive the song into the next section, and make it apparent to the listener that something is about to change without distracting the listener from the solo, or making anything too different from the other parts of the song. The song then transitions into a shorter version of the horn intro, and then another shorter verse, and then repeats that with similar lyrics to the first verse, which leads into the final double chorus. The double chorus was a great choice by Bley as well because so far in the song we’ve only heard that part one time, and to really solidify that part as the hook, she wrote it in two more times at the end and ended the song on an unresolved chord to really make it stick in your brain after listening!

The third track on the album is called “Siam” also has a really interesting intro, and really utilizes the power of auxiliary percussion. The intro to this song includes the slightly distorted guitar we’ve heard before, as well as the bass player Steve Swallow playing up in the higher register, complementing the guitar part before they both go back to their more normal registers in the verse of the song, with the bass at almost the bottom of its range, and the guitar, with a more clean tone, in the middle of its register which again compliments the vocals on this track. The percussion in this beginning part is playing a simple melody similar to what the guitar and bass are about to play in the verse, which goes really well with the intro bass solo part, since it’s upso high in it’s register. In the verses, the bass and guitar are playing the same 16th note rhythm, which goes very well with the slower, quarter notes and half notes rhythms in the vocals, with Wyatt’s reverb-drenched, washy tone. This was a great producing choice by Bley and Mason, as the rhythms in the guitar, bass and drums are all very tight, clean, and sparse, creating the perfect harmonic basis for the vocals to simply float atop of. The vocals are more able to float atop this song because Wyatt is singing in a comfortable tenor range for his voice which allows him to get pretty high up in his register on the held notes on the word “Siam”. Which pulls the word to the front of the harmonic layered cake, and reminds us that this is the title. This is a great vocal contrast to the more masculine tone of “Can’t Get My Motor to Start” and shows great versatility from him as a performer and Bley as a vocal composer. The repeated “Siam, Siam” at the end of the song is a super cool ending because we are no longer focusing on the vocal elements of the word, but more of its purpose in the song as the rest of the instruments are improving a little, and we hear the piano part and the percussion parts which we haven’t heard much before this. Using a part of the song the listener knows quite well while introducing new parts was a great way for Bley to change the song a lot while the listener barely notices.

Lastly, I want to touch on the fourth song on the record “Hot River”. This tune is a great middle of the album song. It’s slower, more rock n’ roll groove, creepy vocals and epic opening guitar solo are just some of the elements that make this tune one of the best on the record. The opening intro is a very Pink Floyd-esque guitar solo, with a slow ride cymbal beat from Mason, and a descending guitar riff in the rhythm guitar that sets up the more creepy elements of the song. When Wyatt’s vocals come in, and the guitar and bass continue the descending line from the intro, we are immediately placed in the storybook-like atmosphere of this song. Karen Kraft is back on this song as well, with some especially scary vocals, and as she trades off with Wyatt, it makes you imagine them as the main characters in this story. When they finally join together in harmony as a lead up to the guitar solo, it feels like they have finally met after watching both of their story lines. Creepily and satisfyingly we are lead into another short guitar solo, followed by an extremely interesting bass solo (!) over a piano part that hasn’t been apparent in the rest of the tune so far. This solo section brings to light these two parts that we haven’t really heard on their own yet, and now for the rest of the song, you hear them differently. In the last part of the song we hear Karen Kraft riffing over the chord progression, which almost immediately made me think of “Great Gig in the Sky” by Pink Floyd, as female vocals over a male-dominated vocal song brings a powerful feminine energy to both of these rock ballads, that makes the emotion of the song all the more compelling, and Bley definitely did this on purpose.

The first four songs on this album are just the beginning of all of the interesting, incredible songwriting that Carla Bley displays on her collaborations with talented artists and performers. I also would like to note that Bley also co-produced this record, which really brings to light her deliberate compositional choices that she wants the listener to latch on to, and it’s important to say that she produced this record because we are hearing all of the elements in the way she wants us to, which is a luxury that few composers have, and she has all of the knowledge in order to do this.

Lastly, these few tunes only show a fraction of what Carla Bley is able to do, even just on these 30-something minutes of music on this record. Her work for other artists and genres, as well as her record label and the Jazz Composers Orchestra all influence her writing that really shines through in this insane, progressive rock, jazz fusion funk album. What a composer!!!