Karen Mantler Trio

Karen Mantler was raised on a stage. The singer, pianist, and organist always insisted she was conceived by her parents, Carla Bley and Michael Mantler, at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1965. Her mother generated international attention when she dropped her toddler at the coat check of another fest. So Bley got used to lounging beneath her mother’s piano on pillows and blankets during shows, Don Cherry often joining her there. But Mantler soon got to work, appearing on her mother’s landmark Escalator Over the Hill at age four and subsequently joining her mom’s ensembles and projects for decades to come. In her early 20s, Mantler emerged as a songwriter, too, making two captivating albums about her beautiful black and white cat, Arnold. With her chromatic harmonica playing, her songs found unexpected borderlands between blues and art-pop.

“I don’t know why I write about such negative things,” Mantler said in 1995, four years after Arnold died, “but that’s what amuses me. Maybe if you poke fun at yourself, you don’t take things so hard.” She has continued to do that for the last three decades, writing songs about boyfriends who disappeared, streams of income that have done likewise, and legal bills that won’t stop accumulating. She has long worked with an elemental and elegant trio, featuring bassist Kato Hideki and guitarist and clarinetist Doug Wieselman. Accomplished composers themselves, Hideki and Wieselman perfectly follow Mantler’s balancing act of seriousness and mirth. They’ll join her at Big Ears 2026 for a set of songs about our current moment.