{"id":5139,"date":"2015-06-19T15:11:50","date_gmt":"2015-06-19T15:11:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.artinfo.com\/blunotes\/?p=5139"},"modified":"2015-06-19T15:11:50","modified_gmt":"2015-06-19T15:11:50","slug":"the-puzzle-ornette-coleman-left-us","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/larryblumenfeld.com\/index.php\/2015\/06\/19\/the-puzzle-ornette-coleman-left-us\/","title":{"rendered":"The Puzzle Ornette Coleman Left Us"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"20150617_Ornette1\"<\/a>
Ornette Coleman plays at a JVC Jazz Festival concert at Carnegie Hall, June 20, 2004. His son, Denardo Coleman (rear) plays drums. (Photo by Jack Vartoogian\/Getty Images)<\/figcaption><\/figure>
\nOn Saturday, June 27, at 11am, I’ll be at Manhattan’s Riverside Church for a funeral to celebrate the life, mourn the loss and revel in the spirit of Ornette Coleman.
\nColeman, who died at 85 on June 11, delivered on the promise of the title to his 1959 album, \u201cThe Shape of Jazz to Come.\u201d The flow of jazz ever since in fact has been redirected, its course widened and altered.
\nYet Coleman gave us no template or mold. Rather, he offered liberation from these things while suggesting\u2014no proving\u2014that such freedom did not mean forfeiture of aesthetic purpose or historical grounding. No one has or likely will make music quite like his, but few serious and searching jazz musicians have ignored the possibilities suggested by the doors he blew open.
\nIn a New York Times obituary<\/a>, which was as notable for its Page One placement as for its elegance and length, Ben Ratliff explained the most basic way that Coleman steered musicians:<\/p>\n

Partly through his example in the late 1950s and early \u201960s, jazz became less beholden to the rules of harmony and rhythm while gaining more distance from the American songbook repertoire.
\nHis own music\u2026 embodied a new type of folk song: providing deceptively simple melodies for small groups with an intuitive, collective musical language and a strategy for playing without preconceived chord sequences.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The title of a 1960 Coleman album, \u201cChange of the Century,\u201d might now raise the question, \u201cWhich century?\u201d Within and beyond jazz, Coleman\u2019s best-known compositions, including the haunting \u201cLonely Woman,\u201d a ballad of sorts, and \u201cRamblin\u2019\u201d a blues that sounds like a simple folk song but is in fact deceptively complex, have grown in appeal and influence\u00a0over time. The ideas Coleman advanced\u2014most notably his rejection of standardized notions of\u00a0tonal, harmonic and rhythmic organization\u2014are no less radical than they were more than a half-century ago, and yet they have seeped into our bodies and lives\u00a0the way great art and real change\u00a0always does.
\nColeman\u2019s music changed not just jazz\u2019s shape, but also how jazz fit within its surrounding constructs in music, art, science and the humanities. It altered the context for jazz (and for all African American, and American, music) within the wider world.
\nIn 2007, Coleman won the Pulitzer Prize for composition. He was also in his later years awarded a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, two Guggenheim grants, and a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master honor.\u00a0Yet criticism and controversy have always clung to\u00a0Coleman\u2019s music. In his beginnings\u00a0as a musician, his unconventional playing and appearance led to physical abuse (he spoke of getting beaten up after an early gig). Even his breakthrough engagement, a November 1959 extended run\u00a0at Manhattan\u2019s Five Spot Caf\u00e9, brought, along with praise, harsh criticism and ridicule, including that of fellow musicians such as trumpeter Roy Eldridge, who notably said, \u201cI think he\u2019s jiving, baby.\u201d
\nColeman\u2019s approach to an ensemble harked back to early New Orleans jazz, critic Martin Williams suggested in the original liner notes to 1960\u2019s \u201cFree Jazz,\u201d for which Coleman combined two separate quartets; other critics heard only cacophony.\u00a0Depending upon who was listening, Coleman\u2019s tight and intuitive bond and shared sense of purpose with trumpeter Don Cherry in his classic quartet was either akin to the connection between saxophonist Charlie Parker and trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie at the dawn of bebop or a repudiation of what those bebop masters had accomplished.
\nPerhaps most divisive of all was what grounded but also elevated all of Coleman\u2019s music: The sound of his alto saxophone. Critic Gary Giddins put it well in a 2008 piece for The New Yorker<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Perhaps the chief impediment to greater popularity is the very quality that centers his achievement: the raw, rugged, vocalized, weirdly pitched sound of his alto saxophone. Considered uniquely, radiantly beautiful by fans, it is like no other sound in or out of jazz. Within the space of a few notes\u2014a crying glissando, say, or a chortling squeak\u2014Coleman\u2019s sound is as unmistakable as the voice of a loved one. Even now, in a far noisier and more dissonant world than 1959, listening to Coleman can be a bracing experience for the uninitiated. Coleman\u2019s attitude toward intonation is unconventional. The classical composer Hale Smith once spoke to me of Coleman\u2019s \u201cquarter-tone pitch,\u201d by which he meant that Coleman plays between the semitones of an ordinary chromatic scale. The core of Coleman\u2019s genius, Smith felt, is that, however sharp or flat he is from accepted pitch, he is consistent from note to note. Coleman hears so acutely that even when he is out of tune with the rest of the musical world he is always in tune with himself.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Coleman was his own man pursuing his own ideas from very early on, and doing whatever was needed to support that effort. During some formative time in Los Angeles, when few musicians would warm to his playing, he worked \u00a0in one department store while drummer Ed Blackwell, who shared his apartment, worked at another department store. (“I was the stock clerk and Ornette was the elevator operator,” Blackwell told Ted Panken during a WKCR-FM interview<\/a>. “So that\u2019s the way we would survive in order to pay the rent and just play every day.”) <\/span>
\nYet Coleman, like any musician, had his influences and, despite all the resistance thrown his way, some nurturing environments. He\u00a0was born in Fort Worth, Texas in 1930 and attended I.M. Terrell High School, which can also claim a surprising number of notable jazz, blues and R&B musicians (including three future Coleman bandmates \u2014 saxophonist Dewey Redman and drummers Charles Moffett and Ronald Shannon Jackson). Coleman’s first recording, 1958’s\u00a0\u201cSomething Else!!!! The Music of Ornette Coleman,\u201d\u00a0displays a clear internalization of Charlie Parker’s innovative style but also the stirrings of desire to break free of Parker’s pedagogy (in interviews, Coleman mentioned the example of\u00a0Red Connor, a bebop tenor saxophonist who, he\u00a0said, played ideas more so than patterns). Coleman’s<\/span>\u00a0connection to New Orleans is also more than aesthetic parallel. His arrival in New Orleans in 1949 and his brief tenure with\u00a0Silas Green From New Orleans, a popular traveling minstrel-show troupe, is often cited, as his his experiences in Baton Rouge, where he reportedly got roughed up for his playing. Beyond all that, Coleman’s experience\u00a0in New Orleans around that time was formative, and it represented an important moment of early encouragement and exposure to like-minded musicians.<\/span>
\nAs A.B. Spellman\u00a0wrote in “Four Lives in the Bebop Business”:<\/span><\/p>\n

It was during these six months in New Orleans that Ornette first had to deal with modern musicians walking off the stand when he approached it. Nevertheless, he thinks back on the period as being more positive than not, since he did get to work out some musical ideas with Lassiter and did receive encouragement from two musicians of obiously unusual talent\u2014Ed Blackwell and Alvin Batiste.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

By Lassiter, Spellman really meant cornetist Melvin Lastie, who was Coleman’s roommate in New Orleans. Blackwell, who would go on the play with distinction with Coleman, Batiste, pianist Ellis Marsalis and saxophonist\u00a0Harold Battiste (best known for his composing and arranging) were among the musicians who were drawn to Coleman’s playing\u2014enough to drive out to L.A. at Coleman’s invitation. Here<\/a>‘s how Alvin Batiste recalled that period, from another of Panken’s radio interviews:<\/span><\/p>\n

He was living across the street from the California Club.\u00a0 Even though he was living across the street, they didn\u2019t want him to play, because his playing was so contrasted to what was going on at that particular time.\u00a0 So we got into that, and so they wouldn\u2019t let us play either.\u00a0 So we played at Ornette\u2019s house, and we developed a rapport that I\u2019m thankful I had an opportunity to develop.\u00a0 Because when you hear the music now, so-called free-form, that was really a very important nucleus of that manifestation.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Last week, it came as some relief to me that I didn\u2019t end up writing a standard obituary on Coleman on a tight deadline. I was too torn up. I\u2019d been preparing myself for quite some time and in succession for the ideas that: we might not get any more new music from Coleman;\u00a0that I might not get to hear him in live performance again; and, finally, that he was getting old and frail. Anyone who writes about arts is fortunate to enter worlds beyond our imagination or capacity, some of which lead\u00a0further than we bargained for. Coleman welcomed me not just into his thinking but into his home and his life to a certain degree, and it was enough to change me well beyond my thoughts about harmony and rhythm.
\nI grew to\u00a0understand that Coleman\u2019s music was so powerful not simply\u00a0because he expressed himself in such singular and compelling fashion on his sax and not just\u00a0due to the fact that he had cast off about as much as a musician can regarding conventions of technique and style. It was also because that sound and those ideas governed his world. He didn\u2019t speak of notes; he talked about \u201ctones\u201d and \u201csound.\u201d He had no interest in style or genre; he referred to \u201clanguage\u201d and \u201cgrammar.\u201d (His Pulitzer Prize winning work was titled \u201cSound Grammar.\u201d) He spoke, walked and shot pool on the table in his Manhattan apartment in much the same way as he played his saxophone.
\nIn my sadness last week, I went back to a 1996 cover story I did for a world-music magazine, RhythmMusic, I was editing at the time. Coleman had just released \u201cTone Dialing,\u201d with which he had inaugurated his Harmolodic imprint within Polygram. (Back then, Polygram-France\u2019s Jean-Philippe Allard, who engineered that development, \u201cThe world has caught up with Ornette.\u201d) That album\u2019s edition of Coleman\u2019s Prime Time band, a group Coleman created in the 1970s to explore the possibilities of electric ensembles and to further this theory of \u201charmolodics,\u201d included tabla player Badal Roy, which was the central conceit of my placing Coleman on the front of a world-music publication.
\nNot that I wanted to slip him\u00a0into a category. Denardo Coleman, Ornette\u2019s son, who played drums on the saxophonist\u2019s 1966 album, \u201cThe Empty Foxhole,\u201d and thereafter anchored his Prime Time band, was helping him manage the label. Denardo had told me, \u201cHarmolodics is also a way of doing business. It means that you are not going to let someone else define who you are and what can be done.\u201d Along with the album and press released had come a jigsaw puzzle which, when assembled, contained only this phrase:<\/p>\n

\u201cRemove the caste system from sound.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Coleman was about the gentlest and warmest man I\u2019ve ever met. He was slight of build, spoke with a modest lisp and exuded the strangest but most persuasive air of self-confidence I\u2019ve witnessed. Like his playing, his statements in interviews and even casual conversation rarely formed conventional patterns; they were bold, but more so by suggestion or question than declaration. As with his music, some dismissed what Coleman said as illogical or illegitimate while others, including me, heard unabashed honesty and utter clarity. (At a certain point, I decided that, in interviews, Coleman, who rarely answered directly, was in fact answering the question I should have asked instead or the one that would naturally follow if we kept talking.)
\nMostly, as in his music, Coleman used narratives and explained\u00a0activating ideas. Here\u2019s some of what he told me in 1996:
\nOn his early conception of music:<\/p>\n

I was living at home with my mother, and I realized I had to analyze and get more information. To me, the piano was like a self-service restaurant. You can take what you want, order what you want, put it in your tray. But then I realized I could get rid of the piano and still get what I wanted.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

On his orchestral piece, \u201cSkies of America,\u201d which he recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra in 1972, and performed with the New York Philharmonic during the 2007 Lincoln Center Festival:<\/p>\n

I got interested in the way Indians prayed. They had a relationship with their own culture that anyone could relate to, if all you were interested in was relating to who you are as a human being. Here were a people \u2014 they weren\u2019t praying for forgiveness, they weren\u2019t asking for promises. They were praying about something they already knew \u2014 they were honoring. All the time I was growing up, people were telling me, \u201cIf you get out of this environment, you will understand how to be more religious and how to be more spiritual.\u201d There was always something you had to change to become better. And here were people who weren\u2019t concerned with that at all, yet they were in a much worse material position than us, if you looked at it. So, to make a long story short, I went home and started writing \u201cSkies of America.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

On \u201cLonely Woman\u201d:<\/p>\n

I was working as a department-store clerk in Texas. One day, at lunch, I came upon an art gallery. Someone had painted a beautiful woman, surrounded by all the comforts and luxuries you could imagine. But she was sitting there with the most painful expression you could imagine on her face. I thought to myself, \u2018You know, I\u2019m not in the position to judge the quality of this work, but I understand what this feeling is about.\u2019 I went home that night and wrote \u201cLonely Woman.\u201d From that point on, I began to understand how to be a human being first and an artist second. And I\u2019ve never forgotten that. When I wrote that song, I said, \u201cFrom this day on, I\u2019m going to support any artist I ever come upon.\u201d I realized the person that\u2019s called an artist is probably the only person who does something without worrying about the result.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

On categories:<\/p>\n

I used to go to Lincoln Center. Leonard Bernstein invited me to come to a rehearsal. It never dawned on me that there was a caste system in sound. I though it was just ability. If you had the ability to play the violin, you could play what you wanted. If you could sing the blues, you could sing any song. But the music community only allows you the territory that serves its ends. I can play music in any territory\u2014anywhere, with anybody. And that\u2019s what I\u2019ve opted to do.
\nLet\u2019s put it this way. On this planet, there is human expression, which has been related through art for many years. But this expression has not been free of categories or preconceptions. I think of myself as a composer. I could write music for any musician. I don’t think of someone I want to play with, I think of something I want to do musically and, if I can draw people to me who are interested, I\u2019ll do it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The list of musicians\u00a0drawn to Coleman\u2019s ideas is long and diverse. In interviews, some have shared with me the sense of validation they first felt in their connection.
\nBassist Charlie Haden, who was a member of Coleman\u2019s original quartet with trumpeter Don Cherry and drummer Billy Higgins:<\/p>\n

I first heard Ornette at this club on Wilshire Blvd called The Hang. I said to myself, \u201cThis guy plays music just like the way I hear it.” I had never thought that would happen.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Guitarist James \u201cBlood\u201d Ulmer, who was a central force in Coleman\u2019s Prime Time band:<\/p>\n

Me and Billy Higgins were playing in a studio in Brooklyn. He said, \u201cMan, I play with a guy that\u2019s got to hear you play.\u201d At the time, I had heard of Ornette but I had never met him. I didn\u2019t really know his music. Ornette tried to help me. He produced my first record. He kept me in his house for a year, free room and board. All I had to do was be myself, and do the same thing I was doing in Detroit, in Columbus, in Pittsburgh. He told me, \u201cThe way you play, that\u2019s exactly how I want you to play in my band. I play harmolodically, and you are a naturally harmolodic player.\u201d I\u2019ve always understood what Coleman was doing, and Coleman was the one who made me feel good about what I was doing. He had a name for what I was doing.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Other musicians felt empowered to change themselves as a result of playing with Coleman.\u00a0Pianist Geri Allen, one of the few pianists Coleman has recorded with, on his 1996 \u201cSound Museum,\u201d told me:<\/p>\n

I\u2019m still internalizing the impact of that time, and the things I learned about how I can play piano. But more than any musical idea was the experience of hearing his sound in such close promixity; it\u2019s this voice, really, that lets you truly hear who this person is as a human being, without apology without any resistance. That seemed like a goal worth aiming for.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I recall hearing the edition of Coleman\u2019s band that included Allen (along with bassist Charnett Moffett and Denardo Coleman on drums) at the San Francisco Jazz Festival in 1993, on double bill with new incarnation of Prime Time. During the intermission, there were a series of performance artists, including a long display of body piercing to the beats of a tabla drum. Some audience members cheered, some groaned, some walked out in disapproval or disgust.
\nA few days later, Denardo Coleman told me. \u201cThat was part of the show, and it was Ornette\u2019s idea. Ornette has always studied and read about other cultures. He had gotten fascinated by a people in Malaysia who used body piercing as a ritual and a way of enlightenment.\u201d
\nAt the 2004 JVC Jazz Festival in Manhattan, Coleman surprised the Carnegie Hall audience before playing a note: Billed to perform in a trio with Denardo and bassist Tony Falanga, Mr. Coleman ambled onstage with a second bassist, Greg Cohen, in tow. Coleman had added Cohen to the group just a month earlier, and his reconfigured quartet hinted at exciting possibilities. A year later and back at Carnegie, that group delivered further on that promise, infusing his compositions with fresh textures and energizing Coleman into his most fluid and affecting playing in years. He had been writing furiously, it appeared. With one exception, he played new compositions, some created in the week leading up to this concert. From the stage, he alerted the crowd to the concert-program listings of 10 new pieces, saying, “Usually the titles represent a state of thinking.”
\nBy 2010, it was unclear just how many more times we\u2019d get to see and hear Coleman in concert again. One brief but gleaming and unexpected chance came during a Sonny Rollins concert at Manhattan\u2019s Beacon Theater in celebration of the tenor saxophonist\u2019s 80th<\/sup> birthday. The night was filled with stellar guest artists but word had been spread about an unbilled star. Late in the program Rollins played in a trio with bassist Christian McBride and drummer Roy Haynes. Their trio section began with Duke Ellington\u2019s \u201cIn My Solitude,\u201d which Rollins essayed with all sorts of harmonic license at a stately pace until Haynes jumped in for a solo, the brilliant bombast of which erased any thought that, at 85, he had lost any degree of vigor or daring. The three began Rollins\u2019 \u201cSonnymoon for Two.\u201d Rollins stepped up to the mic and said, \u201cThere\u2019s someone backstage who\u2019s got his horn, and he wants to wish me a happy birthday.\u201d I was guessing tenor saxophonist Jimmy Heath, who I\u2019d seen in the audience earlier. The band vamped, facing stage left. No one. Pregnant pause. Finally, out strode Coleman. He bowed gently to Rollins, then listened intently as Rollins messed masterfully with both the key and meter of the 12-bar blues.
\nColeman eased in with almost otherworldly gentleness and little formal relationship to what had come before. Yet it all fit and flowed. Haynes changed up his rhythm and flashed an excited smile. McBride seemed momentarily flustered, then found his footing. Soon,\u00a0Rollins began to play. Coleman had played his version of Rollins, and now Rollins offered up Sonny playing Ornette playing Sonny. Something like that, anyway. Rollins had entered the key-less space of Coleman\u2019s music, fully free of the blues form of his tune. He played in something close to Coleman\u2019s ineluctable dialect, yet through his own familiar voice.
\nDays later cornetist Graham Haynes, Roy\u2019s son, gave me his analysis. \u201cSonny and Roy and Christian were pushing the 12-bar blues to its furthest abstraction,\u201d he said. \u201cMy dad and Sonny both have ways of opening up rhythmic possibilities that seem to defy time and space. They do this on a regular basis. That\u2019s where they live. But Ornette is going to play Ornette. Melodically, harmonically, he opened things up to the point where what they had been doing was neutralized. It became something else. The rhythms were not covered up, but they become illusory. The most fascinating thing about that episode is that someone could have recorded it, and it would sound great, but it would never approach what actually happened. It was a metaphysical experience, not a musical experience. You had to be there.\u201d (In fact it was recorded, and was released in 2011 on Rollins\u2019 \u201cRoad Shows, Vol. 2.\u201d; worthy listening, yet Haynes has a point.)
\nFinally, a year ago, during the Celebrate Brooklyn! series in Prospect Park, Denardo Coleman honored his father by gathering musicians that somewhat sketched the contours of his influence\u2014among others, saxophonists Henry Threadgill, David Murray and John Zorn; Flea, the bassist from the Red Hot Chili Peppers; Patti Smith, Laurie Anderson, and two members of the Moroccan brotherhood, Master Musicians of Jajouka, who recorded with Coleman decades ago, and with an opening invocation, Rollins.
\nRollins didn\u2019t play, but Coleman did. Seated onstage, wearing a purple silk suit, he issued soft but firm threads of blues and more abstract phrases that urged the musicians onstage into compositions of his\u2014\u201cBlues Connotations\u201d and \u201cTurnaround,\u201d among others. Yet Coleman never actually voiced those melodies. He kept playing what he\u2019d been playing, as if these tones had either preceding the song or naturally followed from it.
\nI remember back in 1996, after I\u2019d turned the tape recorder off to end our interview, Ornette Coleman asked, \u201cDid you get the puzzle?\u201d He might simply had been checking to see if the record company did\u00a0its job.
\nI now hear that question as more profound.
\nYes. We\u2019re all still working on it, Ornette, thanks to the pieces you gave us.
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On Saturday, June 27, at 11am, I’ll be at Manhattan’s Riverside Church for a funeral to celebrate the life, mourn the loss and revel in the spirit of Ornette Coleman. Coleman, who died at 85 on June 11, delivered on the promise of the title to his 1959 album, \u201cThe Shape of Jazz to Come.\u201d … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “The Puzzle Ornette Coleman Left Us”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5143,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[25,43,290,14,28],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/larryblumenfeld.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5139"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/larryblumenfeld.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/larryblumenfeld.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/larryblumenfeld.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/larryblumenfeld.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5139"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/larryblumenfeld.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5139\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/larryblumenfeld.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/larryblumenfeld.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5139"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/larryblumenfeld.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5139"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/larryblumenfeld.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5139"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}