Icon: Ornette Coleman
You can count the people who changed the language of jazz on one hand: Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker, (some would include Dizzy Gillespie here) and last, but not least, Ornette Coleman.
As happened when Parker, Gillespie, Monk and others broke through with bebop in the 1940s, Coleman’s then-revolutionary music at the close of the 1950s polarized listeners by challenging them to listen to jazz with fewer preconceptions. Derided as noise by many and defended under the banner of “free jazz” by others, Coleman’s impact on the genre has been so pervasive that it is hard now to understand what all the fuss was about.
Coleman himself hasn’t been that helpful, eventually naming his approach “harmolodics.” But the definition, like the music itself, requires as much intuition as intellect to fully grasp. Put simply, Coleman allowed harmony to extend naturally from melody, doing away with rigid bar lines and predetermined chord changes.
But none of these words are nearly as informative as just listening to the music itself. It’s different alright, floating and darting in surprising ways, but it’s ultimately far more amiable and user-friendly than its prickly reputation would suggest. And it is changing. Although he hasn’t recorded any new music since Sound Grammar, taken from a live performance in 2005, Coleman, on the cusp of 80, still plays a handful of concerts and special events each year. Ideas are resurrected, re-examined and reshaped. Sometimes he covers songs from his protean, prolific period from 1958-62, when jazz was given a new way to communicate. It still speaks with refreshing wisdom and artistry.
Roots of a Revolution
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According to John Litweiler's informative (and criminally out-of-print) bio, Ornette Coleman, A Harmolodic Life, by early 1958, Coleman was so distraught over his failing marriage and lack of musical opportunities that he'd wired his mother asking for a bus ticket back home to Fort Worth from Los Angeles. The day that bus ticket arrived, Coleman received a call from the owner of Contemporary Records, asking him to come in and audition some of his songs. With his already steadfast partner, trumpeter Don Cherry, in tow, Coleman sold seven songs and earned his first proper recording dates out of that audition. The sessions were hastily assembled, compelling Coleman to enlist a pianist, which became a rarity in his ensembles because it provided an unnecessary, and occasionally disruptive, conduit for the chord changes, rather than letting the horn players heed their own instincts on what directions to take the tunes. Coleman also told Litweiler that most of the songs on this and his other Contemporary label release, Tomorrow Is The Question, were written years before, and were structured around "the regular bebop changes that most guys played." But Something Else!!!! is still a far cry from "regular bebop," with its irregular bar lines and disregard for "proper" pitch. A mere portent of what Coleman later dubbed his "harmolodic" approach, its reforms seem benign to modern ears and the controversy it generated more than a half-century ago seems far less relevant than the thrill of hearing Coleman's trademark pulsating bleats burst into the jazz lexicon. The way he charges out of the gate with his plastic alto blazing on "Invisible," "Chippie" and "Alpha" reminds us that the emotional immediacy of his horn work deserves more space in the spotlight beside his genre-shaking musical theories. Cherry's trumpet solos show him to be more of a counterpuncher, but the two have already initiated their uncanny telepathy and harmony-melody cross-pollination, as evidenced on the unison lines of "The Sphinx," a song Ornette was dropping into his set lists as late as the summer of 2009. Something Else!!!! is more of a snazzy bop-Coleman hybrid than the harmolodic Holy Grail. But the freshness of the tunes and the bold, swinging horns (especially Coleman's) justify at least one of those exclamation points.
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In a naive attempt to boost sales, Contemporary put their most popular rhythm section, drummer Shelly Manne and bassist Red Mitchell, in the arena with Coleman and Cherry, resulting in a beguilingly bifurcated quartet. You can hear not only the good intentions but the intuition and expertise out of the old guard Manne in particular is hip (in a good, late '50s way) and attenuated but they just don't have the same organic affinity as the two horn players for Coleman's approach. Unsatisfied, Coleman replaced Mitchell with Percy Heath of the Modern Jazz Quartet, who is busier and less concerned with melody on his six tracks (the first half dozen presented here), presaging some of what Charlie Haden would later provide. But Mitchell's tracks (the final three here) actually seem less taut and more experimental, especially "Lorraine" (in honor of pianist Lorraine Geller), the sort of oblong blues tune that is a Coleman specialty. Tomorrow is also notable for the increasing confidence of Don Cherry, who is closer to becoming a true peer of Coleman's on the front line. It's revealing to hear how Cherry's first solo on "Tears Inside" (a favorite of Coleman die-hards) compels Coleman to dig deeper on his second alto solo. The unison passages and baton-passing chemistry between the two continued to become more fascinating and acute.
Changing The Shape of Jazz
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The title of this album spoke the truth. As the first recording of Coleman's working, simpatico quartet, it unlocks the treasure trove of what he would later call harmolodics, and the possibilities for jazz were permanently expanded. The first song, "Lonely Woman," is Coleman's most popular composition, and the way Coleman and Cherry wend their way around and through its voluptuous melody is an intuitive, aesthetic and technical triumph, cementing their place alongside Parker-Gillespie and Reinhardt-Grappelli in the pantheon of pioneering jazz partnerships. Shape is also where Charlie Haden introduces himself as the father of "free" jazz bass, bulldozing preconceived obstacles regarding bar structure while goading rather than anchoring the beat rarely has a timekeeper been so content, and so wise, hanging his toes over the edge. With Haden and drummer Billy Higgins behind Coleman and Cherry, Coleman finally had an ensemble that could collectively roam with a purpose. The interplay is bristling and electric Coleman's alto whinnies like a horse on "Eventually," as Haden spurs him forward, and the internal duets Coleman and Cherry, Coleman and Haden, Cherry and Haden on "Congeniality" add resonance to the title. If you can't afford Beauty Is A Rare Thing: The Complete Atlantic Recordings, this is single disc you want.
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While Coleman's music was more organized and scholastic than narrow-minded critics could comprehend, Ornette's trust in the small group of musicians who intimately and intuitively grasped what he was up to afforded them extraordinary freedom and influence on the music. Hence, the quartet was a different animal with Ed Blackwell replacing Billy Higgins on the drums. Coleman culled the seven songs for This Is Our Music out of three prolific sessions over a two-week period in July-August 1960 that ultimately yielded the bulk of three other records, a half-dozen tracks released on the complete Atlantic recordings box, Beauty Is A Rare Thing, and untold others lost in a fire. Blackwell best puts his signature on the group as he and Ornette burst through the door with instruments blazing on the "Kaleidoscope," a song of unabated tension, at once impatient and unrestrained. Raised in New Orleans, Blackwell fused the martial beats and second-line rhythmic accents of the Crescent City with a remarkable ability to float time in multiple places, like a guy simultaneously juggling balls and spinning dishes on sticks. His beats are more buoyant and spongy than Higgins's and with the aggressive Haden, the quartet truly became a bruising band of equals. Among the many highlights are "Blues Connotation" which bends tones and swings madly with Haden strumming up a storm; "Embraceable You," the only cover song in Coleman's entire catalog, with a blatantly faithful (mocking?) intro and a beautiful duet passage between Coleman and Haden; and the splendid lament, "Beauty Is A Rare Thing," in which the spacious mix, creaking horns, quavering bass and Blackwell's ingenious variety of roiling rolls make it a forerunner to the Art Ensemble of Chicago and other like-minded "free jazz" innovators.
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Ornette Coleman's catalogue on Atlantic, like Louis Armstrong's Hot Fives and Hot Sevens output on Okeh, or the Charlie Parker master recordings on Dial, capture a moment when jazz became something different than it once was, a change that reverberated through the hundreds and thousands of musicians that followed. This boxed set of six-CDs, recorded in a 22-month period between May 22, 1959, and March 22, 1961, contains not only the two picks from this section and the two albums reviewed in the next section, but the resplendent material from Change of the Century, which many regard not only as the companion but the peer of The Shape of Jazz To Come, and the bevy of other titles arrayed below. The quality control is extraordinarily high, especially for such intrepid, experimental music.
Beyond His Control
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Modern Jazz Quartet composer-pianist John Lewis and "Third Stream" composer Gunther Schuller were among the earliest and most important champions of Coleman's work. In the summer of 1959 after Something Else!!!! had been released and Tomorrow Is The Question and The Shape Of Jazz To Come were recorded but not yet available to the public Lewis (with Schuller's vigorous support) invited Coleman and Cherry to attend The School of Jazz in the Berkshire Mountains of western Massachusetts, technically as students, but more to expose the august and influential faculty to Coleman's music. Four tangible benefits came from the experience. According to John Litweiler's bio of Coleman, Schuller relates how excited Coleman became when Schuller exposed him to large doses of Jelly Roll Morton, Bessie Smith and other seminal blues-jazz performers. Coleman was able to play a recital with both large and small ensembles of the students at the school, including "The Sphinx" from Something Else!!!!. As Lewis and Schuller had hoped, the resultant buzz around Coleman led to an extended engagement of his ensemble at the Five Spot in New York, which proved to be, while initially polarizing, and enormous boost to his career. And finally, Coleman subsequently participated in sessions for Jazz Abstractions in December. Coleman played on two of the tracks, the seven-minute "Abstraction" and the 15-minute, four-part "Variants on a Theme Of Thelonious Monk (Criss-Cross). His beseeching alto is most evident out front and backing up bass clarinetist Eric Dolphy on "Variant I" and again on "Variant IV." But what is most striking are the similarities between Ornette's nascent, pre-Atlantic albums, and Schuller's Third Stream music (so-called because it was trying to forge a third path between Euro-classical and jazz traditions), especially in the bifurcation between the adventurous horns and the comparatively staid rhythm section (which included the Bill Evans Trio). In turn, Schuller's use of The Contemporary String Quartet obviously influenced Coleman, who wrote a song for string quartet that would appear on Live At Town Hall 1962 less than two years later. He also began pursuing the violin as an instrument of personal expression in the mid-Sixties, a proclivity which continues to this day.
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A day after participating in the Schuller sessions for Jazz Abstractions, Coleman convened what he called a "double quartet" to create a record that would help define, perhaps inaccurately, the musical movement he was so influential in promoting during the 1960s. You probably don't want to listen to this 37-minute "collective improvisation" or even the similar 17-minute "First Take" from the same session that appears on Twins, which proves not everything was improvised or unstructured every day. But its ample rewards are akin to what you get after knocking off one of those fat Russian novels: As you familiarize yourself with all the characters, the initially daunting chaos eventually yields to detailed relationships and plot lines that are both powerfully dramatic and, due to the long-form context, marvelously subtle. Obviously, by the very nature of its design and title Free Jazz Coleman couldn't impose his vision on this landmark experiment. But it was a canny conceit for him to juxtapose the double quartet via the two stereo speakers, and to give each of the eight daring, accomplished musicians (only Freddie Hubbard lacked significant avant-garde credibility) a counterpart on his instrument. Some of these interactions create unique sparks (especially the bassists Charlie Haden and Scott LaFaro and the reed players Ornette Coleman on alto and Eric Dolphy on bass clarinet). There is plenty of "solo" or feature space, but the kibbutzing in the crevices can be just as riveting and witty. A logical expansion and loosening of the strictures that shaped Coleman's landmark quartet records, Free Jazz may function better as a concept and a symbol of the wild and woolly new jazz frontier at the onset of the '60s (which would become wilder and more entropic in certain lofts and artist collectives) than as a recipe for peak vitality or creativity. And yet, as with nearly everything Coleman plays, the music is sooner or later more accessible than advertised.
Coleman On Columbia
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Coleman's brief stay on the Columbia label is most notable for this sprawling, audacious compendium, which can now be viewed as a rich period of transition from the elemental avant-garde of his acoustic period and the raucous rock-jazz to come with his band Prime Time. Recorded in 1971 and '72, Science Fiction is what you might expect from a then-middle-aged renegade absorbing the cultural chaos of the '60s: Part summation of his own chaotic bona fides, part quest and yearning for new vistas. It is Coleman revisiting his radical roots, experimenting with ordinary song forms and basically fulfilling the album's title by concocting his own alien but plausible space-aged future. A few tracks ("Street Woman," "Civilization Day," "Country Town Blues") reunite the quartet from The Shape of Jazz To Come, and it's striking how mainstream these angled interchanges and spangled unison passages sounded just a dozen years later. Ditto the quintet numbers ("Law Years," "School Work") where tenor Dewey Redman sits in, trumpeter Don Cherry is swapped out for Bobby Bradford and drummer Billy Higgins is replaced by Ed Blackwell tap-dancing on the snares. (Coleman and bassist Charlie Haden are the holdovers.) Then there are the experiments, like the cacophonous title track with its maelstrom of sampled wailing babies pockmarking Coleman's signature human cries on alto sax, rampaging through a poem recited with exacting deliberation. There's "Rock The Block," with Coleman on trumpet and violin, Redman on musette, and Haden plumbing the funk with wah-wah electronics. There are two songs ("What Reason Could I Give" and "All My Life") with Indian vocalist Asha Puthli crooning over a septet that includes Higgins's cavernous tympani beside Blackwell's drums. And there's the melodic vamp of "School Work" that would reemerge later in the '70s on the debut of Ornette's electric ensemble Prime Time, the breakthrough, "harmolodic" record, Dancing In Your Head. Put simply, Science Fiction is easily Coleman's most stylistically diverse collection. The music may get thorny, the ambiance lonely or bleak, but the effect is never dark nor belabored. Such an amiable pioneer is a rare and beautiful thing.
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This is Coleman's only full-length symphonic work, and the obstacles thrown in his way make it understandable why he hasn't tried to write another one. Recorded with conductor David Measham and the London Symphony, Coleman's plans to rehearse it with his quartet in concert and then have the ensemble play with the orchestra ran afoul of British musician's union regulations. Then, according to Ornette, Columbia only gave him budget enough to record 40 minutes of what a subsequent, unrecorded performance indicates was at least a 54-minute opus. For those reasons, and perhaps because of the newness and the magnitude of the form, Skies of America is not more than the sum of its 21 parts. But there is plenty of wit, beauty and grandeur here. "Birthdays and Funerals" does indeed pull off the tricky blend of dirge and celebration, and there is a slight delirium to "Holiday For Heroes" that is its own form of social commentary. Ornette's alto makes its first major appearance on "Artists In America," blowing over processional drum rolls that are just catchy enough to make one wonder what Coleman's inventive regular drummer Ed Blackwell could have done with the song. "Place In Space" (a sideways tribute to Sun Ra's "Space Is The Place"?) is a bit too dense and sonically undifferentiated, but Ornette's horn is again put to good use on a rustling "The Men Who Live In The White House." "Love Life" is lighter, of course, with Ornette quoting "I'm In The Mood For Love" at one point. Coleman said he wrote "Skies of America" in part to transcend the racism he experienced growing up in Texas, by describing the beauty he saw in the sky, a place "that has no territory" and thus would "not have it be racial." Someday it would be fitting to honor his optimism by ensuring that his entire vision for the symphony be properly staged and recorded.
Shape-shifting
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After Skies in America, Coleman went to Morocco to play with the Master Musicians of Joujouka, an experience that may have pushed him toward his next phase, the formation of the electric, guitar-centric Prime Time ensemble. With dynamic drummer Ronald Shannon Jackson propelling the pace, Prime Time ironically jolted many of those who had embraced the innovations of Coleman's Atlantic label output. The Ken Burns collection closes with a strong representation of the band, "Theme From A Symphony (Variation Two)," from the album Dancing In Your Head, which also features two field recordings from that trip to Joujouka, Morocco. For those wishing to have samples of Coleman's early career chosen for them, the Burns collection also offers a fairly incisive overview.
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Coleman's first record in a decade and his last one going on five years now, Sound Grammar can handle the scrutiny in isolation as a formidable and fitting testimonial to the questing nature and ongoing innovation of Ornette's late-period music. Whereas Prime Time variously boasted a pair of extroverted guitarists and two drummers, a fulcrum of his latest ensemble is the interplay of two bassists; one (Tony Falanga) bowing and lowing like a deeper-toned cellist, the other (Greg Cohen from John Zorn's Masada band) gymnastically plucking forth globular notes and furious clusters. When they mutually escalate the intensity, as on the lead track, "Jordan," it provides a perfect matte for any shadings or splashings of color Ornette and his son, drummer Denardo Coleman, want to provide. Ornette uses bits of trumpet to contrast his alto on "Jordan" and "Call To Duty," and deploys violin near the end of "Song X," a song he previously recorded with guitarist Pat Metheny. He also revisits "Sleep Talking," from his album Of Human Feelings, a song with a theme partially cribbed from Stravinsky. But the instrumentation and the intuition make each version sound new. The conversational texture of the bassists, Denardo's idiosyncratic time-keeping (he really is his father's son) and Ornette's talismanic human bleats on the alto create music that is fascinating in its industry, and yet allows itself room to breathe. "Emotion changes sound," Ornette told Nate Chinen in Jazz Times, shortly after Sound Grammar was released. Maybe that's why this gentle-natured man can blow with such unfettered passion and sound so beautifully serene.
