Appearing Nightly is a live big band album by Carla Bley, recorded over two nights at the New Morning in Paris in July 2006 and released in 2008. The cover bills the group as Carla Bley and Her Remarkable Big Band. The music looks back at the nightclub bands of the 1950s that Bley heard as a young woman in New York. At the time she sold cigarettes at Birdland and checked coats at Basin Street. In her own words, "we couldn't bring back the past, but this was a chance to pay our respects".
The seventeen-piece band has four trumpets, four trombones, five reeds, organ, bass and drums, with Bley at the piano and conducting. Steve Swallow on bass and Billy Drummond on drums form its core, and the soloists include Andy Sheppard on tenor and Lew Soloff on trumpet. Bley hired Gérard de Haro of La Buissonne to record the concerts of 17 and 18 July, and he turned the club's dressing room into a control room. With no separation between instruments nothing could be fixed, but the result had the intimate, smoky sound she wanted. Bley and Swallow produced the album.
The 25-minute title suite was commissioned by the Monterey Jazz Festival in 2005. Bley named it after The Black Orchid, a Monterey club where she played piano at seventeen. Its four sections are titled like a night out: 40 On/20 Off, Second Round, What Would You Like To Hear? and Last Call. Greasy Gravy and Awful Coffee were written for the Orchestra Jazz della Sardegna. In one chorus of the second she quotes six songs about food, from Salt Peanuts to Tea for Two. Someone to Watch grew around an unplanned two-bar Gershwin quote, and the closing track is her arrangement of Ray Noble's I Hadn't Anyone Till You.
Nate Chinen wrote in The New York Times that the album "retrofits an image of old-fashioned nightclub glamour with flickers of good-natured irony." In Jazzwise, Duncan Heining praised how Bley builds tunes "to almighty crescendos" while lending them sardonic wit. Manfred Papst, in the NZZ am Sonntag, heard an ideal way into her world for anyone who had missed Dinner Music (1977). Will Layman of PopMatters (2009) found some passages aimless, but heard the band at its melodic best.
This is the CD edition on WATT, catalogue WATT/33 (172 5516), released on 22 August 2008 in a jewel case with an eight-page booklet.
