Fresh Air - Nicolas Cage

Episode Date: December 21, 2023

Cage has been acting for almost 45 years, and has appeared in more than 100 films. Dream Scenario is one of five scripts he's encountered in his career that he knew, immediately upon reading, he had to take on. He spoke with Dave Davies about becoming a meme, changing his name from Coppola to Cage, and maybe breaking into TV. Also, jazz critic Kevin Whitehead remembers composer Carla Bley, who died this year.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Who's claiming power this election? What's happening in battleground states? And why do we still have the Electoral College? All this month, the ThruLine podcast is asking big questions about our democracy and going back in time to answer them. Listen now to the ThruLine podcast from NPR. This is Fresh Air. I'm Dave Davies. My guest, Nicholas Cage, has appeared in more than a hundred films. Depending on which ones you've seen, you might think of him as an action movie hero. He's done plenty of those. You might also remember him starring with Cher in the romantic comedy Moonstruck or playing the dim-witted but lovable criminal in the Coen brothers' Raising

Arizona. He won a Best Actor Oscar playing a writer drinking himself to death and leaving Las Vegas. In Adaptation, Cage played two characters, twin brothers, sometimes in conversation with each other in the same room. In Face Off, he and John Travolta's character trade physical identities through face transplants, so he has to morph into Travolta's character in the film. Cage grew up in California around moviemaking and is a student of film history. He's known for meticulous preparation for his characters and sometimes taking them to extremes in his performances. He's earned a Golden Globe nomination for his latest role, which is somewhat more subdued.

In the movie Dream Scenario, he plays a college professor who strangely finds he's appearing as a bystander in the dreams of his friends, his family, his students, and eventually millions of people who make the connection and make him famous for, well, nothing. Dream Scenario, written and directed by Christopher Borgli, is in theaters now. Nicholas Cage, welcome back to Fresh Air. It's been a while. It has been.

Thank you for having me back. Let's start by listening to a clip from the new film, Dream Scenario. In this scene, you're a college professor named Paul Matthews, and you're teaching a class where he now realizes that many of his students have seen him in their dreams, and he asks them about it. I'll just note that this is a visual clip. You obviously won't see that as a radio audience, but there are moments where there's some noise, and it's essentially two dreams where the students in question are dreaming about terrifying situations. So let's listen. Who's certain they've actually had a dream about me? Okay, let's explore this. This might get us somewhere interesting.

Does anyone want to share the content of their dream? Yes, you? Well, I'm in this forest, wandering around, eating these strange mushrooms. And I'm in like a full tuxedo for some reason. And there's other people also dressed up, but they're all scared, like frozen in fear. And then I realize it's because of this really tall man running towards me.

What? Are you talking to me? Light. Are you talking to me? Yes. Paul, he'll kill us. Paul. I've never seen these. Beautiful. That's all I remember.

Ah, interesting. So I'm looking at the mushrooms instead of helping. Oh, I suppose, yeah. Okay, let's hear another one. Anyone? Okay, so I'm just observing again. But that's funny. Interesting one. Anyone else?

And that's our guest, Nicolas Cage, in the new movie, Dream Scenario. You know, as I listen, the voice of your character there, Paul Matthews, seems a little higher than your conversational voice. Do you want to tell us about getting into this role physically? Well, I'm glad you noticed that. It was, a lot of thought went into trying to create a character that was as far away from my own presentation as I could get, and that required changing the register of my voice as well. I found that over the years I'm more recognized by my voice, my so-called Mojave drawl than anything else.

And when we were, Christopher and I, the director and I were designing the character, he wanted to change my look so that people wouldn't see so-called Nick Cage, but rather Paul Matthews. So he decided to change the shape of my nose and very minimally just modify it and then also remove the hair. We decided that would be a good look, a more perhaps professorial look. We added some weight to the character. I wanted to change the way I moved. I was more stooping or hunched over, walking slower. But it was a point that I made that we have to change the voice.

And so I thought I would raise it a bit and add a more adenoidal sound to Paul's delivery, his speaking delivery. You know, this is a character who longs for more recognition. You know, he sort of is an academic, but not all that successful and feels kind of resentful that other people may have taken his ideas and he can't quite get his book written. He's ambitious but never quite getting there. That was part of this too, I guess.

You know, they say this is a comedy, which, sure, there are very funny moments in the movie. But there is something tragic about Paul. He never really actively sought out a spotlight. And what's happening to him is happening inexplicably, that people are suddenly dreaming about him around the world and he's become famous. And I think he sees it more as an opportunity to be able to get his book published, a book about ants. It's called Antelligence. And he's frustrated because the person that was in class with him, not his own student, but a person that he was studying with, took one of his ideas and published a book. And that hurts him.

But it is Paul's fault because he has no follow through. I mean, he's I think he's a good professor. I think he his students do like his course, but he hasn't put pen to paper and written one word of his book. This is very much a movie about how technology can turn something, some occurrence into an internet meme and make it widely known. And the director here, Christopher Borgli, is Norwegian and a lot younger than a lot of the directors that you've worked with. Did – I don't know. Do you feel he had a different media sensibility? You know, see, this is an interesting question. Yes.

The other thing is I always knew – you know, I've been doing this for, I guess we're approaching almost 45 years, almost half a century. And, you know, I've made different kinds of movies, different genres and kept going at it. But I realized at some point that what I guess I would call the old guard, the keepers at the gate, had already made up their minds about me and that I wasn't going to get any vitality from that group. So I started actively seeking who would be the young filmmakers that are emerging that may have perhaps grown up with me and might want to try something with me and see what they can do with me. And I found that that approach,

looking at Sarnoski and Pig and now Christopher with Dream Scenario, has been incredibly rewarding because these are people that are so full of life. They're so full of imagination and they haven't had their dreams, if you will, whipped out of them yet by corporate thinking or the industry, and they're vital. They have life, and that keeps me fertile. And Christopher was, for me, someone that I had complete faith in. I read his script,

which was one of the five scripts in doing this for 45 years or however long, that I said, I have to make this movie. I didn't want to change a word. The other scripts were Vampire's Kiss, Leaving Las Vegas, Raising Arizona, and Adaptation, and now Dream Scenario. I don't want to give away too much, but what happens in this film is there's this weird thing where this professor appears in a sort of a passive bystander way in these people's dreams. And then there's a turn which in a way makes him a national villain as much as he was a sort of hero for doing this. And I don't know if we want to talk particularly about that.

But it made me think the fact that the internet could make him a monster. And it really kind of ruins his life. And I wonder if you identified at all with that as somebody who in this internet world finds their work just taken and exaggerated in ways that just aren't you. Well, it's a bit of a Pandora's box. Um, when I decided to be a film actor, uh, 1982, I think I started working professionally. I was thinking about people like Brando and James Dean and Bogart and Cagney. And, you know, I wanted to see what I could do with screen performance. But at that time, we didn't have the internet. I signed up to be a film actor. That I did. But I didn't sign up to be an internet meme. That was new.

We didn't have the internet when I started acting so many, many, many years ago. But I have subsequently made friends with it. You know, we all have to evolve. You know, I got to a place with film performance very quickly. You know, my heroes like the performances in Midnight Cowboy, they were always on my mind. But I felt that very early on, I had reached a kind of dead end, if you will, with naturalism in screen performance. Now, we've all been somewhat obsessed with a 1970s style of naturalism that has gone on ad infinitum, that this is what so-called good acting must be. man who was interested in all art forms, was even interested in what I called art synchronicity, meaning that what you can do in one art form, you can do in another art form.

If you can be impressionistic, surrealistic, cubist even in painting or in music, well, then why can't you be that in film performance? I was looking in the past of film performance, like the German Expressionistic performances of Max Schreck and Nosferatu or Fritz Lang, and I decided that this is what is choreo... I called it choreographed acting. But I found a lot of energy in that

and a lot of style in that, and so i wanted to like with vampire's kiss try to bring that back into a modern film and i could do it because the character sadly was losing his mind so i could do all these bizarre gestures and um subsequently while i was doing that the internet was kicking into high gear and they were cherry picking these sort of expressions, if you will, like the you don't say and what have you. And it became memified. I guess I coined a word with that memified. Now, that's OK, because it kept me in the conversation and I had it was an adjustment i had to get to

come to terms with it i didn't want everything to be reduced to just one image or one one one meltdown if you will or so-called cage rage but again the silver lining was it kept the memification kept me in the conversation but it wasn't what I signed up for. So, yes, I was stimulated by it. I was confused by it, and I was frustrated by it. But then along came dream scenario, and I was able to apply those feelings to what I thought was, as far out as Paul's experience is, similar. Well, you know, it's interesting. Until I was doing the research for this interview, I had never seen these internet montages, things like, you know, Nick Cage's ultimate freakouts. Right, right.

I want to play just a little piece of one. Well, before you do that, I just want to say one thing. I think that there's something to be had here vicariously. I think that whatever path I was on spoke to people in a broad sense on the Internet. We have to confine to certain social standards understandably. You know, we want to be good members of society. But I think the id underneath all of us wants a point of expression. And I think the memification, if you will, gave folks that. Right, right. Well, this is just a little piece of one of these montages. And this is from the film Vampire's Kiss, where you play this,

I guess he's a literary agent in New York who has the swinging style, gets bitten by a woman, he convinces a vampire and kind of comes unraveled. And this is just a moment where he's talking to his psychiatrist about an issue at work. How could somebody mis-file something? What could be easier? It's all alphabetical. You just put it in the right file according to alphabetical order. A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, X, Y, Z!

Ha! That's from Vampire's Kitchen. One of my favorite recitations of the alphabet. Yeah, me too. I just think it's so funny. I love that scene. You grew up in California, went to Beverly Hill High School, right? If anybody was born to be in the movies, maybe it was you.

Your uncle was Francis Ford Coppola. Is it true that you were running around on the set of Godfather II when you were a kid? I was there in Lake Tahoe with my cousins. I adored my childhood with my cousins. We had so much fun together. And I do remember visiting the set, yes. Not surprising that you would be interested in this. You worked taking tickets in a movie theater.

What convinced you you wanted to pursue this? I think it began when I was very, very young. I was maybe four or five, and I was in front of the television set, and I thought the people inside the TV were so much more interesting than the people at home that I wanted to try and get inside the TV. You know, a lot of people think that this would be fun, then find out it's really not so easy. Did you find it difficult? I felt blessed that I was doing exactly what I was meant to do, that I'm in a job that I think my DNA was programmed for.

I feel that I'm lucky that I found it. I almost didn't. I had another path that I was going to take if it didn't happen. And, you know, I was going to do one more audition. And if that didn't work out, I was going to get on a boat and go fishing and write short stories. So the acting worked out. But I was thinking about a plan B. Yeah. What was the audition that rescued you? I think Valley Girl was really the time that I found my voice. And I have to give Martha Coolidge credit. Without her, Nicolas Cage would not exist. She was the one that empowered me,

guided me. She gave me a great direction. H hurt but not defeated in one of the scenes that I was playing. And I've used that ever since. And I think if Martha had not discovered me, I would be on the boat. And she really gave me the confidence, the belief in myself that I could do this. When did you change your name from Nick Coppola to Nicolas Cage? I mean, I gather that was so that you wouldn't be seen as, you know. Well, I had a shrewd reason. It wasn't just, you know, to try to avoid, you know, so-called nepotism. I changed my name the first time was on my audition for Valley Girl. I did it partly because on the set of Fast Times, it was a subject of teasing that I was a Coppola and I had no right to think that I could act simply because of my illustrious uncle. And happily, Martha, she did not know the connection. That's a true story.

And she cast me as Cage. It was the first time that I went into an audition with my new name, and I got the part. And that was hugely empowering for me to believe I could do it on my own steam. But the shrewd reason, and no one really talks about this, and I haven't brought it up before, is that I had the prescience to know that filmmakers are a very competitive and somewhat egocentric group, directors. And I didn't think that any director would want

another director's name, no less the name Coppola, above the title of their movie. So I was also thinking that in terms of business. You had a lot of real success early. I mean, you had Moonstruck and Raising Arizona before you were 25. You played with Cher in Moonstruck. It's a very memorable role. You know, I've talked to a lot of actors and many of them will look back at movies they did when they were in their 20s and just getting going and kind of, you know, wince. They say, well, I really didn't know what

I was doing then. I mean, your performances seem to hold up from when I look at those old movies. How do you feel about them? I don't go down memory lane unless I'm forced to. And I did a profile on Vanity Fair where I was looking at old movies and one of them was Moonstruck. But I do think that there was an energy to the early work that I'm happy with. And I think, again, that I felt that it made sense that I was an actor, that I was being able to or being invited to play these parts. And it was life-changing for me. It was in many ways cathartic, in many ways therapeutic. It was very, very helpful that I could do something constructive with all the energy that I had. We're going to take another break here. We are speaking with Nicholas Cage. He stars in the new film, Dream Scenario. He'll be back to talk more about his

life and career after the short break. I'm Dave Davies, and this is Fresh Air. This is Fresh Air. I'm Dave Davies. My guest is actor Nicolas Cage, who's appeared in more than a hundred films, among them Moonstruck, Raising Arizona, Con Air, Face Off, Adaptation, and Leaving Las Vegas, for which he won the Academy Award for Best Actor. He's earned a Golden Globe nomination for his latest role. He stars in the film Dream Scenario, in which he plays a college professor who role. He stars in the film Dream Scenario, in which he plays a college professor who mysteriously begins appearing in the dreams of millions of people. It's in theaters now. I do want to go back earlier to Raising Arizona, which is just a favorite of

so many. It's by the Coen brothers. I'll play a little scene here. I mean, you play this kind of wacky character, H.I. McDonough, who's a not bright but earnest criminal who robs convenience stores with an unloaded gun and eventually falls in love with and marries a policewoman, Ed, short for Edwina, played by Holly Hunter. He goes straight. They get married and discover they cannot have children. So they hatch this plot because they read about a furniture magnate named Nathan Arizona whose wife had five kids, quintuplets, after fertility treatment. So they figure they've got more than they can handle. Why don't we just take one? So you drive over and you shinny up a ladder and come down with a little baby.

And this is the scene where you've returned to the car and you are talking to your wife, played by Holly Hunter. Let's listen. Oh, he's beautiful. Oh, he's beautiful. Yeah, he's awful damn good. I think I got the best one. I bet they were all beautiful. All babies are beautiful.

This one's awful damn good, though. Don't you cuss around him. He's fine, he is. I think it's Nathan Jr. We are doing the right thing, aren't we, High? I mean, they had more than they could handle. Well, now, honey, we've been over this and over this, and there's what's right and there's what's right,

and never the twain shall meet. But don't you think his mama will be upset? I mean, overly? Well, of course she'll be upset, sugar, but she'll get over it. She's got four little babies, almost as good as this one. Just like when I was driving convenience stores.

I love him so much. I know you do, honey. I love him so much. I know you do. It's still funny. It is. And Holly Hunter is just magnificent in that movie, isn't she? Yeah, yeah. No, she is. They are great. I mean, they all are. John Goodman. They're all funny. And it has this crazy Coen Brothers sensibility.

The look. I mean, his hair is going like three different directions. He's got this weird look in his eye. What did you do to get the look and just the feel and the sound of this guy? So, again, this was one of the five best scripts I've ever read. And I knew right away I had to play the part. I thought the look kind of would be almost Looney Tunes, like Woody Woodpecker with the hair standing up. And I put a lot of thought into the delivery.

We worked on the accent together, Joel and I, and I sent him different tapes of how I was getting close to the sound, the sort of rural sound, try to get away from an urban sound, and we built it together. I still think it's my favorite Coen Brothers movie. I just think that movie really stands up the test of time. They're really careful with casting. Was it hard to get the role? I must have auditioned for that movie five or six times.

And I remember Joel saying, I'm laughing, but I don't know why I'm laughing. And I said, well, that's good, isn't it? I mean, I really wanted the part. And they were talking about a lot of other actors. But I fought for it. And I'm glad I did. I'm very, very happy with that movie. I wanted to ask about a film that you did with Werner Herzog, Bad Lieutenant, Port of Call, New Orleans. You play a dirty cop who's on drugs and alcohol. And I know that you studied German expressionist filmmaking and loved some of

Herzog's work. How did you get that role? What was it like working with him? Well, Werner called and wanted me to have a go with Bad Lieutenant, which was done beautifully before with Harvey Keitel. But he was creating a completely different interpretation, and I don't think he had even seen the original film. So I was interested in Werner Herzog. I do think he's in the pantheon of the greatest filmmakers, and I wanted to work with him. I thought it was an exciting thing to do because at that time I was largely making adventure films,

and I had wanted to get back to a more independent and expressionistic style. It is kind of an unnerving performance as you in that film. You know, you're clean-shaven. You had a beard in a lot of movies, and you're thin. It seems to me like your teeth are maybe a little clenched together, like you're just kind of gritting your way through all of this and something's going on in your head. Yeah. Well, that's my idea of what cocaine would do to somebody. There always seems to be like a clenched jaw or something.

I thought I'd play with that in the performance. Yeah. There was a story at one point at which you were getting ready for one of these scenes and Herzog himself got a little rattled by what you were up to. Am I right about this? Yeah, you are. Well, I was snorting something called inositol, which is like saccharin. But I was trying to do that to get some kind of expressionistic recall of what cocaine might do. And so you do that as a kind of hook, the inositol, but also you apply that with a little imagination and start really amping up

in terms of the character and psyching myself up for the performance. And Werner said, now, Nicholas, what is in that vial? And I was like, oh, man, really? I mean, I did all this prep and now you're asking me what's in the vial? I think he really thought I was on cocaine, which would be ridiculous. I don't do drugs and I sure as heck wouldn't do drugs while making a movie. And what happened? He backed off, and we got the scene, and then he put lizards in the shot,

and he started doing close-ups of iguanas and whatnot, and I think he was trying to get to the same frequency that his lead actor was on. There are a couple of places where reptiles make appearances in that film that are like, what is this? Well, I'll tell you why. I mean, I'll tell you what happened. It's no secret that I had purchased a two-headed snake. And we had a party. I was living in the Lurie Mansion, which is the most haunted mansion in America. In New Orleans, right?

In New Orleans. And I invited Ed Pressman over and Werner and the cast and we all had a big party. And then I pulled out the, I went into the room and got the two-headed snake. And he said, I have to put that in the movie. I said, no, you can't put this in the movie. It's personal. And then he just started putting alligators and iguanas and snakes in the movie, but he never got the two-headed snake. We're going to take another break here. We are speaking with Nicolas Cage.

He stars in the new movie, Dream Scenario. We'll continue our conversation in a moment. This is Fresh Air. This is Fresh Air, and we're speaking with actor Nicolas Cage. He's made more than 100 films. His latest is Dream Scenario. It's in theaters now. I wanted to talk about Leaving Las Vegas, which I guess was made in 1995. Again, relatively early in your career. You play an alcoholic screenwriter whose life has fallen apart, I guess due to his drinking. So he sells

everything he owns, moves to Las Vegas to drink himself to death where he connects with a prosperous sex worker played by Elizabeth Shue. And here's a scene in which she's invited him to leave the cheap hotel he's been staying at and move into her apartment. Let's listen. Before we proceed onwards, there's something I have to say, okay? Okay. I've come this far. Here I am in your house. I want you to let me pay this month's rent.

No. All right? Why? Because, because it's better for me that way, okay? Okay. I'll tell you right now. I'm in love with you. But be that as it may, I am not here to force my twisted soul into your life. I know that.

We both know I'm a drunk. And I know you're a hooker. I hope you understand that I'm a person who is totally at ease with this, which is not to say that I'm indifferent or I don't care. I do. It simply means I trust and accept your judgment. And that is our guest, Nicholas Cage, with Elizabeth Shue in the film Leaving Las Vegas. You won an Oscar for Best Actor for that role. I think that's one of the films you say was one of the best screenplays you ever read. Yes.

What interested you in the character? Well, I read the script, and right away I thought it was the, well, for lack of a better word, the coolest relationship, romantic relationship I've ever read in a screenplay. These two severely injured people find true love, and to me it was a very moving and hopeful love story, as tragic and dark as it got. I mean, at the time, you know, I wanted to find a drama that I could really express myself in.

And along comes this script by Mike Figgis, and I just fell in love with it immediately. You know, did you find yourself, as you read the script, rooting for this guy to turn around and reverse his decision to drink himself to death? I don't know that I was rooting for him. I was feeling for him.

I was feeling the poignancy of his situation. And I felt that I could play it. I cared about him. And when I read the novel by John O'Brien, I felt even more. And it's interesting because his family came on the set and there were little things that I would choose for the character that turned out to be actually his choices, the kind of watch he wore, the kind of car he drove.

And they were kind of amazed, the family. I don't know how it happened. I don't want to get too metaphysical about it, but it seemed like a doorway had opened and I was feeling John. You know, in this movie, you're drunk in, I think, probably every scene. There are a lot of ways to play a drunk and it's easy to overdo it. I'm wondering, did you prepare much? How did you prepare to do this and do it in an authentic way? Well, I had seen different alcoholic performances. And the one that really stood

out to me as genuinely drunk was Albert Finney in Under the Volcano. Within the first two minutes of him walking through the streets of Mexico, I said, that guy's really drunk. And Figgis, who directed Leaving Las Vegas, had worked with Albert. And I asked Mike, was Albert drinking? And so Mike asked Albert. And Albert said, no, you tell Nick that I would just take a swig and I'd spit it out just so I could get the feeling of it, the recall of it. And so I tried that. And the only time I was ever really loaded was, again, the casino scene. to dangerously, a high-risk experiment, I wanted to try to get a blackout on camera because I thought that would get to that level of believability that Albert had in Under the Volcano.

And that was a scary thing to do. And I said, we're only going to do this once, so make sure you get it because I'm not doing it again. But I'm happy with the results. I would never do that again. I do think that if the movie had gone on longer, like if it had gone on for four months, then it would have been a disaster. But the fact that it was only a four-week shoot and it moved very quickly, it didn't have any lasting impact. Wow. I want to make sure I get this right. As I recall in that scene, you're at a blackjack table and you pull the table over and the chips go everywhere and I think the waitress behind you falls down. Did you actually pass out? No, I didn't pass out. But none of that was choreographed and the security came in.

It was a mess. But that's exactly what I wanted for the scene. I wanted that shocking reality. I was looking for the most real expression of the dangers of alcoholism. And when you say security came in, you mean not actors, but the actual casino security? They were in the scene. They came in. That's all on camera. Those weren't actors. Okay. Everybody calmed down. And they asked you not to film there anymore, I imagine.

Something like that happened. I don't know all the cleanup that Mike Figgis had to do. But, you know, he admitted he was angry about it, but he also admitted that it worked. I read that you said when you were talking about this film that you never thought you would win an Oscar. And I didn't know if you meant by that that you never thought you would win it for that performance or that you'd never win one at all. At all. I meant at all. I did Leaving Las Vegas because nobody else wanted to do it. It was the darkest script in town.

No studio would touch it. And they were all afraid of it because of the material. And I thought, well, heck, I'm not going to win an Oscar anyway for anything. So let's do it. And then lo and behold, when you're not looking for something, it comes to you. You know, we haven't talked about your personal life much, and I don't know if you want to or not. But, you know, it's been widely reported that you had, at a certain point, a lot of debts, some to the IRS. And I gather this was from purchasing some expensive, far-flung homes, which then the market crashed and you couldn't get out of them easily.

I mean, you have had five marriages. I mean, those are a lot of commitments. I'm wondering, you ever thought you had an issue with impulse control? Probably. I mean, you know, you live and learn. And, you know, I started very young and, you know, thankfully I've paid everybody back and I've worked my way out of it. I believed I could work my way out of it and I did. And I'm proud of that. Yeah. Didn't file for bankruptcy. It's some urge you to do. Yeah. What's next for you? Do you want to give us anything to look for? Well, right now I'm enjoying Dream Scenario. I'm very happy with this movie. You know, Dave, I don't really know. I'm at this point, you know, I'm looking at what I've already to say. I think I might explore a new format.

I might try television. I've never done that. My son introduced me to Breaking Bad, and I was very impressed with Cranston in that series. And maybe that's something I should look at. Okay. Well, we will look forward to it if it happens. Nicholas Cage, I've enjoyed it. Thank you so much for speaking with us. Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Nicolas Cage stars in the new film Dream Scenario. Coming up, jazz critic Kevin Whitehead remembers the career of innovative composer Carla Bley, who died earlier this year. This is Fresh Air. This is Fresh Air. Composer Carla Bley died in October at the age of 87. She led her own large and small touring bands from the 1970s until a few years ago. But jazz musicians had been playing her enigmatic compositions long before that. Today, jazz critic Kevin Whitehead traces Carla Blais' development as a composer. ¶¶ Carla Blais' Jesus Maria, played by clarinetist Jimmy Drewfree with Paul Blais on piano in 1961.

The tune shows Carla's knack for building a piece around one or two barely mutating phrases, giving improvisers shapes to develop and a mood to maintain. She'd been making up songs since she was small. While married to Paul Blay, he encouraged her to write tunes for him. Soon more folks were playing them. Pianist Steve Kuhn played another deceptively simple-sounding early Carla Blay tune,

Ida Lupino, with the Jew-Free Trio's Steve Swallow again on bass. That melody ends with a whisper, an uncommon move. Carla Blais heard the value in being understated, where some 60s jazz was all testosterone. In 1967, she wrote and arranged the album A Genuine Tongue Funeral for vibraphonist Gary Burton. Her tune Grave Train evoked Nina Roda's music for Fellini Films. Howard Johnson on tuba, Jimmy Knepper on trombone, and once more Steve Swallow on bass. In 1969, Blay organized bassist Charlie Hayden's Liberation Music Orchestra,

which played her arrangements of Latin American revolutionary songs and a bit of her own droll music. She was learning to deal with larger forces and a light comic touch. ¶¶ Kurt Weill's German theater songs sound like an influence there. Blay's inspirations came from all over. Eric Satie's reductive piano music is in there, alongside Duke Ellington's reliance on key soloists. By the late 60s, Carla Blay was busy with a three-year project that was the opposite of understated. The guest star-drenched, multifarious, triple-album Escalator Over the Hill, with a huge cast including jazz luminaries and rock singers Linda Ronstadt and Jack Bruce. their hair don't care if the horse is locked, the house

still there. It doesn't seem to matter to them the traces of horses and whatever they're choosing for many ingredients

is in the soup. No. ingredient in the soup No room for us blue Carla Blay worked well with a few rock musicians

from NRBQ's Terry Adams to Pink Floyd's Nick Mason. She disparaged her own piano and organ playing, but a short stint in a 1970s Jack Bruce band gave her a taste for the road. She put together a little big band of nine or ten pieces, booked her own tours, and put out her own LPs. Blaise's 1980 classic Social Studies had a few splendid tunes she'd revisit later. This is Reactionary Tango with Gary Valenti on trombone and old ally Steve Swallow now on bass guitar. Thank you. Carla Blais wrote lovely charts, but there was often something tongue-in-cheek about them, like that Dance Academy tango beat. It's as if she worried we'd think she took it all too seriously. The orchestra kept growing till she was calling it her very big

band. Then she scaled back to eight pieces, then four or five, finally two or three. By the 1990s, she and Steve Swallow were an item and toured as a duo, sometimes joined by saxophonist Andy Shepard. Now understated Carla came back, playing some early tunes and new ones echoing old conundrums. It was as if her music had come full circle, but now with more humor. Carla Bley died in October of 1987, one of the great and singular jazz composers of our time. ¶¶ Kevin Whitehead is the author of the books Play the Way You Feel, The Essential Guide to Jazz Stories on Film, Why Jazz, and New Dutch Swing. If you'd like to catch up on interviews you've missed, like our interview with Andre Brouwer, who died last week,

or Terry's conversation with Andre Brouwer, who died last week, or Terry's conversation with David Byrne, who shares some of his favorite Christmas music, check out our podcast. You'll find lots of Fresh Air interviews. To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram at NPR Fresh Air. And for a look behind the scenes at the show, subscribe to our newsletter at whyy.org. Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Amy Sallet, Phyllis Myers, Roberta

Shorrock, Anne-Marie Baldonado, Sam Brigger, Lauren Krenzel, Heidi Saman, Teresa Madden, Seth Kelly, and Susan Yakundi. Our digital media producer is Molly C.V. Nesper. Thea Challoner directed today's show. For Terry Gross and Tanya Mosley, I'm Dave Davies.