Once Again Working on The Enigma off Ornette Coleman
February 28, 2024
By Kim Kleinman, Contributing Writer
When he invited me to this birthday party for Ornette Coleman, Fritz wrote, “…I’ve loved his music since I got the ears to hear it correctly, and now I’m convinced I’ve underestimated his brilliance and the sheer beauty of his music.”
“The ears to hear it correctly” captures my efforts too. I dutifully read Martin Williams as a new jazz fan in the late 1960s or early 1970s and saw that Ornette Coleman was not only NEW, but IMPORTANT. I think I snatched up the Atlantic Best of collection from the Columbia Record Club. It was new, important, but not really much fun. Still, it would come out for at least one side from time to time in those days of vinyl LPs as the soundtrack to underaged beer and the deep but tedious thoughts of young people trying to figure out the world. Like the world itself, this music was mysterious, challenging, and a little scary.
I kept returning to Coleman, though far more often than other avant-gardists, even late-era John Coltrane. There was brilliance and sheer beauty, plus a vulnerability that kept drawing me back. A.B. Spellman’s Four Jazz Lives showed Coleman to be shy and brave, thoughtful and enigmatic. Later I saw Shirley Clarke’s documentary “Ornette: Made In America,” which conveyed an overwhelming sense of loneliness. It was with that impression in mind that I walked into the green room after a 1981 concert with Prime Time when I began to get the ears to hear him correctly. Shy myself, I shook Coleman’s hand to say thanks, for that night and all the years before. It was easier to talk to bassist Jamaaldeen Tacuma, who asked what I played. We both heard me blurt, “Er, stereo.”
In 1981, over the two drums, two basses, and two guitars with the leader, I heard just how Ornette sang, not just on alto but on trumpet and violin. Somehow the lack of technical prowess on the latter instruments expressed that vocal element of his art. That’s what he’d been doing all along; I finally had the correct ears to hear him singing brilliantly and beautifully.
With that insight, I could go back to those early Atlantic albums and really hear them for the first time—the coherence and poignancy of the melodies, the rich interplay of the voices, the harmonies that are there even without a chordal instrument to frame them. The previously daunting “Free Jazz” had a logic and opportunities to triangulate Coleman’s music with the more familiar voices of Freddie Hubbard, Eric Dolphy, and Scott LaFaro, a chance to hear how they played this music.
Coleman composed some wonderful tunes—my favorites are among the obvious ones: “Ramblin’,” “Una Muy Bonita,” “Peace,” “Lonely Woman.” Other musicians have covered these and a few other gems, but they aren’t really part of the canon. Still, the lead sheets of his that I’ve seen in fake books are straightforward, but his highly personal concept of “harmolodics” was not widely developed by others. He certainly contributed to the shape of jazz that came along in the 1960s with terse snarling lines and swoops of sound, but to parse out the Coleman from the Shepp, the Ayler, the Dolphy, the Coltrane, in an adventurous young saxophonist of today is difficult.
Yet his sound is distinctive and I do revisit it often enough. Usually it’s the Atlantic albums from the early 1960s, though I have a selection from the late-sixties Blue Note sides and I paid attention to his work with pianist Geri Allen in the mid 1990s.
As part of the Jazz Spectrum birthday bash for Ornette, I once again have listened to those favorite early albums this time around, including the one standard that Coleman covered, which is included in this week’s Song of the Week segment, “Embraceable You.” It’s a chance to test his approach with a recognizable point of reference. In the same vein, I also returned to his contribution to “Sonnymoon for Two” from Sonny Rollins’s September 2010, 80th birthday concert at the Beacon Theater in Manhattan, which is collected on Road Shows, Vol. 2. It is, in the end, not all that good. For one, it is way too long, though to be fair Coleman doesn’t start playing until the nine-minute mark. They solo only serially in two- or three-minute segments over the remaining 12 minutes with little direct interplay. They certainly listen to one another but the interaction is passive. Coleman does invoke the theme at least tangentially in one solo, but more revealing is the way his improvisatory approach rooted in melody and theme has an affinity to Rollins’s and yet is so different. They each hear those intersections and lean into them.
It doesn’t quite work, but I am glad I listened. Coleman’s music does work, brilliantly and with sheer beauty. I am glad I have listened to it again and again and again.