Carla Bley discusses her musical ability.

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Carla Bley discusses the screening process for distribution.

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Carla Bley discusses the 'music business'.

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Q: “With the distribution service, do you have any particular standards of your own? If I were to bring you a record that I wanted distributed, would you listen to it and say no, or would you say yes off the bat and not care what was on it?”

A: “Oh, you would never listen to it. That's completely against our policy. We don't pass any judgment whatsoever on the records we distribute. Because the reason we had to start this in the first place is that people pass judgment on us and the answer was no. Before we started this, we tried to go to the commercial record companies with Escalator Over the Hill. Nobody was interested in it. A lot of people did this simultaneously. It wasn't just me. And finally, we had to start our own system or absolutely cease surviving. Now, because we were forced into this situation, we wanted to protect the ‘us-es’ of us that now exist by not passing that kind of judgment on their music. I mean, perhaps there is something happening now that we can no longer understand. Perhaps our minds have become closed to the music that follows us. As the people who have preceded us’ minds became close to us. So in order to prevent this happening, we distribute any record within the category of new music that comes to us and don't listen to it if the artist says, "This is..." You can tell by the letters. You can tell by the people, by the musicians on it, what kind of music it is, and if it's basically something that's difficult for the average ear to listen to or something that the commercial companies have no interest in and nobody could make a lot of bucks from, we distribute it and that's about it.”