About Carly
Carly Bates is a musician, educator, and artistic collaborator born and grown in Phoenix, AZ. With a background in classical, jazz, and popular styles of music, her multi-threaded music lineage mirrors that of her cultural heritage. A student of middle spaces, Carly is drawn to the multiplicity of structure and flow, of genre, of language. An avid jack of all trades, her curiosities deliver her to interdisciplinary collaborations with poets, dancers, and theatre artists: improvising music to a poet’s reading, composing and underscoring a work of theatre, or co-creating with movers. She relates to music as a tool to imagine and a practice of possibility making: not only is music a medium of expression and liberation but one of discipline and rigor.
At the culmination of her studies, Carly embarked upon a year-long auto-ethnographical performance process exploring the intersections of race and gender and producing a one-woman narrative performance called “French Vanilla.” Collecting a series of personal stories about biracial identity set to stage, she went on to perform an excerpt at the Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference in 2017 and submit work to various online and print publications.
In 2016, Carly graduated from ASU pursuing a career in arts administration, working as the Associate Managing Director of Essential Theatre and the Creative Aging Coordinator at the Arizona Commission on the Arts. Throughout an interim of balancing administrative roles with various performance and teaching opportunities, in 2018, Carly committed to pursuing life as a freelance musician and teaching artist. In addition to building a robust roster of private students and teaching at Prestige Music Academy, Carly was regularly performing and gigging with Solomon Trio, a improvisation-based ensemble, and Hyperbella, an intergalactic neo-soul band which released an eight-song album and toured 11 U.S. cities.
Carly’s artistic collaborations flourished in this time. Among these collaborations include: Rising Youth Theatre’s production of Light Rail Plays (2018-2019); Urban Bush Women’s Summer Leadership Institute (2019); Music Directing “For Colored Girls Who Consider Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf” by Ntozake Shange (2019).
Post-pandemic, as we each reimagine and rebuild our lives, Carly finds herself studying songwriting, session work, musical collaborations, and innovating her teaching practice. From 2020-2023, Carly held a position as a Faculty Associate at the Popular Music Program at Arizona State University and continues to teach private piano lessons with students of all ages. Her most active music collaborations include writing and recording with two original projects: Hyperbella, and Pariah Pete and the Mercuries. Carly writes and performs her own original music and is in the process of recording these songs. She has been a musician and administrator in Playback Arizona, a local theatre company since 2018.
From her first piano lesson at age 7, Carly has been developing a relationship to her instrument, one that has been facilitated by teachers and mentors, including Dr. Lynne Haesler, Erika Tazawa, Walter Cosand, Zachary Wiggins, and Charles Lewis. Intending to deepen her artistic studies, she attended Arizona School for the Arts where she learned to play the clarinet. It was then, sitting with a woodwind on her lap, when she could practice what she heard Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Ella Fitzgerald playing. Learning about jazz harmony, swing, and improvisation was a necessary complement to her study of Bach, Ravel, and Mendelssohn. Upon graduating high school, Carly decided to pursue a Bachelor of Arts in Music at Arizona State University, allowing her to follow a similar trajectory: to weave both classical and jazz piano into her experience at the collegiate level.