{"id":303,"date":"2010-03-09T12:23:16","date_gmt":"2010-03-09T17:23:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/jazzbeyondjazz\/wp\/2010\/03\/happy_birthday_ornette_roots_a\/"},"modified":"2011-04-28T16:33:20","modified_gmt":"2011-04-28T20:33:20","slug":"happy_birthday_ornette_roots_a","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/jazzbeyondjazz\/2010\/03\/happy_birthday_ornette_roots_a.html","title":{"rendered":"Happy Birthday Ornette Coleman, roots avant-gardist"},"content":{"rendered":"


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Composer, conceptualist and multi-instrumentalist Ornette Coleman, b. March 9 1930, is widely known for “free jazz” — which is routinely depicted as the most abstract and daunting music to emerge from the U.S. But this overlooks Ornette’s deep roots in blues from the Southwest and his fealty to the freedom of expression, mobility and individuality that has made the U.S. great.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Coleman, who comes from
\nFort Worth, Texas, was a mostly self-taught saxophonist whose earliest
\nprofessional touring experience was with the “Silas Green from New
\nOrleans” tent show\/minstrel troupe (aka “Prof. Eph Williams’ Famous
\nTroubadours”) that did one-night stands throughout the south from 1885 to
\nthe late 1950s. Ornette’s unique sound (then on tenor sax) and his talent for
\ncomposition were evidently in place by the time he joined this outfit in 1949, though he played repertoire from the group’s longstanding book, which
\nincluded songs from pre-WWI, and got to solo usually on a blues.<\/span><\/p>\n

His horn style is
\nintense (so much so that he was attacked on at least one occasion after a gig
\nby roughnecks enraged by it) and has many qualities of vocalization — a
\nkeening cry, purposely cracked notes, hoarseness, multi-phonics that lend a
\nburr to pure pitch, licks that suggest laughter and babble. So he stood out
\nfrom more conventional horn players, though he was also known for having
\nabsorbed quite a lot of Charlie Parker’s ferociously virtuosic sax extensions
\n(as can be heard on his 1958 live recording
\nfrom the Hillcrest Club<\/span><\/a> of Bird’s composition “Klactoveedsedstene” in company of pianist Paul Bley and the
\nmusicians who would become known as Coleman’s first quartet ). In fact, according to John
\nLitweiler’s biography Ornette Coleman:
\nA Harmolodic Life<\/span><\/i><\/a>, Ornette was fired for angering the other
\nsaxophonist in the Green band by “trying to teach him bebop.” Coleman reportedly looked odd at that time, wearing his hair long, and he was an unhappy
\n19-year-old, distraught by the low-down quality of the places Silas Green
\nplayed as well as the distances traveled on his first trip away from home.<\/span><\/p>\n

Let go in Natchez,
\nColeman was lucky to get picked up by blues singer Clarence Samuels, and
\nluckier yet to have been asked by a man he met in a restaurant to come up with
\n“eight or nine songs” for a hastily organized recording date. He did
\nso, and apparently the date went down, but he was run out of town (just for being
\nweird) before the records were issued and he never found out what became of the
\ntapes. That music has never been released, but I’ve always wondered if it bore
\nany resemblance to the funkiest and most tightly formatted of Ornette’s albums, Of Human
\nFeelings<\/a>,<\/span><\/i> which he recorded with his highly charged band
\nPrime Time in the late ’80s (and which has not been reissued as a cd in the
\nU.S.).<\/span><\/p>\n

Ornette’s distinct sound
\nand personal style made him a pariah in Los Angeles music circles in the ’50s,
\nuntil Bley, Charlie Haden, Don Cherry and Billy Higgins convened to feature him
\nat the Hillcrest. He first sought a recording deal as a tunesmith, but Lester
\nKoenig of Contemporary Records would only sign Ornette if he played his tunes
\nhimself. OC’s first two records were Something Else!<\/i> (with
\nrelatively straightahead pianist Walter Norris) and Tomorrow Is The
\nQuestion<\/i> (with mainstream-progressive Shelly Manne on drums, Percy
\nHeath of the Modern Jazz Quartet and equally well-established Red Mitchell
\nswitching off on bass). Although both albums and Ornette’s subsequent, very
\nproductive recording stint with Atlantic Records feature the sax and front-line
\n(with Cherry playing pocket trumpet) sound and harmonically-untethered
\nimprovisational initiative that raised the hackles of many established jazz
\nmusicians in the late ’50s-early ’60s, the tunes themselves are melodic,
\ncatchy, hummable and often upbeat. They make reference to country music and
\nLatin music as well as jazz, all filtered through Ornette’s lively sonic
\nimagination. When Ornette arrived in New York City in 1959, his fellow Texan
\nsaxophonist King Curtis, then riding high as the<\/i> sax star of r&b, met him with a car at the train
\nstation. <\/span><\/p>\n

Ornette has always
\ninsisted on his own way — he is a true pioneer and a fearless one. His 1963
\nself-produced concert at Town Hall<\/span><\/a> seems
\nto be the first attempt to fold together classical musicians (a string trio),
\njazz and an r&b group (only half that concert was recorded, apparently; it is available as originally released by ESP disks). He received one of the first Guggenheim fellowships
\ngiven to a jazz musician and used the funding to compose a concerto grosso
\n(usually taken as a symphony), Skies of America<\/span><\/i><\/a>.
\nHe was among the first jazz musicians to pursue deep interests in music from
\nfar-away cultures, collaborating with the Master Musicians of Jajouka in
\nMorocco (as written about by Robert Palmer). He has been a provocative colleague and mentor to dozens of musicians
\nsince the ’60s, among them his son Denardo Coleman (his drummer and sometimes producer), poet-cultural critic-bandleader Jayne Cortez (Ornette’s ex-wife), Edward Blackwell, John Coltrane, Albert Ayler, Eric Dolphy, Freddie Hubbard, Scott Lafaro, Gunther Schuller, John Lewis, David Izenzon, Charles Moffett (and his son Charnett), Dewey Redman, Yoko Ono, Jamalaadeen Tacuma, James “Blood” Ulmer, Bern Nix, Tony Falanga, Albert McDowell, Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson, Jerry
\nGarcia, Howard Shore (on the brilliant soundtrack to the film Naked
\nLunch<\/i>), Joe Henry, Geri Allen, John Snyder, Ronald Shannon Jackson, Anthony Braxton and indeed the entire AACM-BAG-JCOA-Creative Music Studio-Studio Rivbea outreach, Wallace Roney, John Giordano, Wynton Marsalis, Kurt Masur — the list goes on and on.<\/span><\/p>\n

But what Ornette most
\nstands for through his music and fascinating, philosophical inquiries (several
\nof them are included in my book Miles Ornette
\nCecil – Jazz Beyond Jazz<\/span><\/i><\/a>) is humanism and essentialism that
\ndispenses with encrusted thinking. He is an idealist — and we need a few more
\nof those — who has inspired musicians and listeners alike get underneath
\nsuperficialities to discover the basics and basis of sound. He encourages
\npeople to connect with their creative powers regardless of formal training
\n(which is too often just training in formalities). He is a genuinely free
\nspirit — the kind of artist America produces every now and then who could
\nhardly come from anywhere else. He embraces new technologies but he does so
\nfirmly grounded in what humans have done since time immemorial. Don’t be put
\noff by his reputation — his music speaks to open-minded listeners very
\ndirectly, though it cannot be mistaken for being anyone else’s. He is extremely
\ngenerous with his gifts, without showing the least pretense about his art.<\/span><\/p>\n

The references above are not meant to diminish the genuinely paradigm-shifting nature of Ornette’s work. But Free Jazz<\/i>, his early shocker, today is revealed as a jubilant experience in collective improvisation, one of jazz’s earliest principles, and many of his ideas have become common processes for contemporary improvisers (not least of all his insistence on being oneself). Among his especially well-realized and totally uncompromised later albums (starting after Skies<\/i> in 1970) I count Science Fiction, Body Meta, Song X <\/i>(with Pat Metheny), In All Languages, Tone Dialing <\/i>and Sound Grammar, <\/i>for which he received the Pulitzer. Plus those aforementioned.<\/span><\/p>\n

I always feel happy to
\nbe in Ornette’s presence and to listen to his music. He is exemplary of what’s best
\nabout American culture — his music absorbing and reflecting everything
\nsurrounding it, completely in the moment, distinctly personal but offered
\nwithout any imposition to everybody. It may at first sound strange, but soon
\nseems natural, inevitable, just right. Happy birthday, Ornette!<\/span><\/p>\n


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