Lawns

"Lawns was conceived during a rehearsal at Larry Willis's house," Carla Bley said ... "It was how his mother, with a strong accent, pronounced Lawrence" ... So the tune with the greenest title in jazz is not about grass at all ... it is a pianist's first name, heard through his mother's voice, and kept ...

Bley was the architect of enormous things ... Escalator Over the Hill, the Liberation Music Orchestra, bands the size of a village ... By 1987 she was writing for six, on her own label, WATT, sent out into the world by ECM ... Sextet is the record, and Lawns is the ballad on it that other people kept playing for decades afterward, Larry Willis among them, which is the right fate for a tune named after him ...

She once said she likes chords that are very lush with all the lush parts taken out ... that is the whole method of this one ... a ballad built on rich, extended chords, then stripped back to the few intervals that matter, taken at a tempo so slow it needs Steve Swallow's bass and Victor Lewis's drums to keep it from drifting off the edge of the record ...

Lawrence, said by his mother, became Lawns ... Bley heard the better word and wrote it down ...