Le riprese video effettuate tra il 1970 e il 1971 da Steve Gebhardt (1937-2015) durante la complessa realizzazione di Escalator Over The Hill sono ora pubblicate integralmente su YT. ...And It's Again!
Sulla genesi dell'opera disse a suo tempo Carla Bley: "In the beginning, around January 1967, Paul Haines, a friend who had written pieces for the back covers of many albums I had been involved in, sent me a poem. It fit mysteriously with a piece of music I was working on, Detective Writer Daughter. When I told him how amazing this was, we decided to write an opera together, or rather, apart, as he was then living in New Mexico and about to move to India. The term “opera” was used loosely from the start, an overstatement by two people who didn’t have to watch their words. We ended up calling it a chronotransduction, which was a word coined by Sherry Speeth, a scientist friend of Paul’s, although we still call it opera for short. Over the next three years we worked on it. Paul would send a batch of lyrics from India and I would put them on the piano and stare at them for hours. Sooner or later certain lines would seem to have a melody to them. Then it would just be a matter of working at it, with the form and rhythm of the words leading the way. Sometimes I would have to skip around or omit things as the musical viewpoint developed, but more often whole blocks of words would end up exactly in their original order with music to them. The possible meaning of the words didn’t matter to me. I just thought they were strange and wonderful. If I was stuck Paul would send me another batch and in it somewhere would be the solution. Through this process (I can only speak of my end of the work - God knows how Paul managed to write the words in the first place) we eventually accumulated about twelve major pieces of music, and I started thinking about Escalator Over The Hill (the title was there from the beginning) as a whole."
