Ornette Coleman Long Rally tribute show + notes
On today’s Long Rally, three hours of Ornette Coleman in tribute and gratitude. http://wfmu.org/playlists/shows/61238
And some notes (reprinted from last week's e-news):
To Whom Who Keeps a Record. Ornette Coleman's conception of music, before he even put reed to mouth, was something else, a perfectly round silver ball; he could clearly envision it with its elegant curves.
Whenever Ornette spoke about the "absolute democracy" of harmolodics, the framework he developed to buttress his concepts, the language frequently dissolved into gibberish. I'm not a musician so it's possible that I simply lack the foundational understanding or basic intellect. But I believe that like a Zen koan Ornette's concepts defy rational explanation. Ornette's work is not supernatural, but it is a direct insight into the nature of reality.
Before he even arrived on the scene in New York in 1959, Ornette had developed a reputation as the next sensation, an extension of Charlie Parker, the one whom everyone would soon be following. John Lewis from the Modern Jazz Quartet, as recalled in A.B. Spellman's Four Lives in the Bebop Business, told an Italian jazz journalist before Ornette's arrival:
There are two young people I met in California--an alto player named Ornette Coleman and a trumpet player named Don Cherry. I've never heard anything like them before. Ornette is the driving force of the two. They're almost like twins; they play together like I've never hard anybody play together. It's not any ensemble that I've ever heard, and I can't figure out what it's all about yet. Ornette is, in a sense, an extension of Charlie Parker, and the first I've ever heard. This is the real need I think has to take place, to extend the basic ideas of Bird until they are not playing an imitation but actually something new. I think that they may have come up with something, not perfect yet, and it's still in the early stages, but nevertheless very fresh and interesting.
And so John Lewis's prophecy came to pass. Can you imagine the weight of being Ornette? Shouldering that expectation to change the very trajectory of music and then going out and doing it?
It's impossible for me to hear the radicalness now because it has seeped into all the music that followed and become the norm. When I go back and listen to the original quartet recordings the overwhelming impression is how up for it Don Cherry is. The word devotional comes to mind, in the way Jimmy Lyons was devoted to Cecil, or John Gilmore to Sun Ra. Ornette was a person whose ideas and force were so magnetic that a musician of Don Cherry's calibre would abandon his own musical syntax (at least for a spell) to study and develop another's.
The recordings burst with positive energy; their twin lines exploding in patterns, twists and snaking trails, communication-in-improvisation defined. And it is there on display on album after early album, recorded in light speed succession, this skittering brotherhood, even as the 'tune' becomes less important, the themes more and more brief before being all but abandoned. Listening to Ornette and Don Cherry now, trying and trying with fresh ears, I'm still moved, consumed by the punch of emotion. The music is generated with such lunatic urgency, as serious as your life.
When you listen to the outtakes collection To Whom Who Keeps a Record, for example, recorded during the Atlantic sessions in 1959 and 1960, and eventually included in the Beauty is a Rare Thing box, you can feel the burn and the blues or the burn of the blues.
The songs were titled prior to the album's release in 1975, to spell out a basic Ornette axiom: "Music always brings goodness to us all. Unless one has some other motive for its use." Haden is so lyrically methodic, a bulwark, and Blackwell antithetically slippery, accentuating odd rhythms or no-rhythms or suspect time signatures at opportune moments. This is the band that cements Ornette's legacy as one of the greats.
But here's what Ornette is primarily esteemed for: unmooring the harmonic structure that began to feel like a floating jail to all those players in the early '60s. He's revered, perhaps reductively, as an American genius for developing free jazz, the method of playing improvisational music without attachment to any harmonic or rhythmic structures, and then for his subsequent musical reinventions over the ensuing decades from the blazing Golden Circle concerts to the stilted no-wave of Body Meta to his remarkable collaboration with the Master Musicians of Jajouka to jamming with the Grateful Dead to the electrified Prime Time band and beyond.
One of the primary aspects of "genius," I imagine, is longevity and especially regular reinvention, there again violently flaunting the expectations of the public and one's peers. It's this kind of artistic conviction, sometimes viewed as insanity, that is the only real reward of a true artist's lifetime. The way one's work is perceived--insanity or genius, take your pick--is completely out of an artist's control; the only gift is a kind of heroic and sad perseverance, work for its own sake, work because it's the only damn choice. Beauty is a rare thing indeed.
From Ornette's Harmolodic Manifesto:
Chords are just the name for sounds, which really need no names at all, as names are sometimes confusing.
There is a music that has the quality to preserve life.
Blow what you feel — anything. Play the thought, the idea in your mind — Break away from the convention and stagnation — escape!
My music doesn’t have any real time, no metric time. It has time, but not in the sense that you can time it. It’s more like breathing — a natural, freer time. People have forgotten how beautiful it is to be natural. Even in love.
When we were on relief during the Depression, they’d give us dried-up old cheese and dried milk and we’d get ourselves all filled up and we’d kept this thing going, singing and dancing. I remember that when I play. You have to stick to your roots. Sometimes I play happy. Sometimes I play sad. But the condition of being alive is what I play all the time.
I was out at Margaret Mead’s school and was teaching some kids how to play instantly. I asked the question, ‘How many kids would like to play music and have fun?’ And all the little kids raised up their hands. And I asked,’Well, how do you do that?’ And one little girl said, ‘You just apply your feelings to sound.’ She was right – if you apply your feelings to sound, regardless of what instrument you have, you’ll probably make good music.
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