Ornette Coleman
|
Ornette Coleman at concert october 2005 in Ludwigshafen, Germany |
Ornette Coleman (born
March 19,
1930) is an American
jazz saxophonist and composer. He was one of the major innovators of the
free jazz movement of the
1960s.
Coleman was born and raised in
Fort Worth,
Texas, where he began performing
R&B and
bebop initially on tenor
saxophone. He later switched to alto, which has remained his primary
instrument. Coleman's
timbre is perhaps one of the most easily recognized in
jazz: his keening, crying sound draws heavily on
blues music. Part of the uniqueness of his sound came from his use of a plastic saxophone on his classic early recordings (Coleman claimed that it sounded drier, without the pinging sound of metal), though in more recent years he has played a metal saxophone.
Coleman moved to
Los Angeles in the early
1950s. He worked at various jobs, including as an
elevator operator, while pursuing his musical career.
Even from the beginning of Coleman's career, his music and playing were, in many ways rather unorthodox: Coleman was more concerned with
relative pitch than with "proper"
equal temperament; his sense of
harmony and
chord progression are not as rigid as most
swing music or
bebop performers', and were easily changed and often implied. Many
Los Angeles jazz musicians regarded Coleman's playing as out-of-tune, and he sometimes had difficulty finding like-minded musicians with whom to perform. Pianist
Paul Bley was an early supporter.
In
1958 Coleman led his first recording session for
Something Else! The Music of Ornette Coleman. The session also featured
trumpeter
Don Cherry,
drummer Billy Higgins, bassist
Don Payne and
Walter Norris on
piano. Norris was sympathetic to Coleman's ideas, but has been criticised for not quite grasping them (though, in fairness, it must be noted that few grasped Coleman's ideas this early on), and further, a piano tied Coleman to
equal temperament.
1959 found Coleman very busy: He abandoned the piano entirely for
Tomorrow is the Question! a quartet featuring
Shelly Manne on drums. Coleman encountered
double bassist
Charlie Haden – perhaps his most important collaborator – and formed a regular group with him, Cherry, and Higgins. They were an unlikely-looking fellowship – Coleman with his plastic alto saxophone, Cherry playing the pint-sized pocket trumpet, Haden honing his technique via his Missouri family's hillbilly band. This quartet recorded
The Shape of Jazz to Come in
1959, with
Atlantic Records, who had signed Coleman to a multi-album contract.
The Shape of Jazz to Come was, according to critic Steve Huey, "a watershed event in the genesis of
avant-garde jazz, profoundly steering its future course and throwing down a gauntlet that some still haven't come to grips with." [
1] While definitely – if somewhat loosely –
blues-based and often quite melodic, the
album's songs were harmonically unusual and unpredictable. Some musicians and critics saw Coleman as talentless hack; others regarded him as a genius.
Coleman's quartet received a lengthy – and sometimes controversial – engagement at
New York City's famed
Five Spot jazz club. Such notable figures as The
Modern Jazz Quartet,
Leonard Bernstein and
Lionel Hampton were favorably impressed, and offered encouragement. (Hampton was so impressed he reportedly asked to perform with the quartet; Bernstein later helped Haden obtain a composition grant from the
John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.) Opinion was, however, divided: trumpeter
Miles Davis famously declared Coleman was "all screwed up inside," and
Roy Eldridge stated he'd listened to Coleman
drunk and sober, but couldn't understand or enjoy his music either way.
On his best-known early recordings for the
Atlantic Records, Coleman led a
piano-less quartet with Cherry on
trumpet, usually
Charlie Haden, but sometimes
Scott LaFaro on
double bass and either
Billy Higgins or
Ed Blackwell on
drums. These recordings are collected in a
boxed set,
Beauty is a Rare Thing.
In
1960, Coleman recorded
Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation, which featured a double quartet, including Cherry and
Freddie Hubbard on
trumpet,
Eric Dolphy on
bass clarinet, Haden and LaFaro on bass, and both Higgins and Blackwell on drums. The record was recorded in
stereo, with a
reed/
brass/
bass/
drums quartet isolated in each stereo channel.
Free Jazz was, at nearly 40 minutes, the lengthiest jazz recording to date, and was instantly one of Coleman's most controversial albums. The music features a regular but complex pulse, one drummer playing "straight" while the other played double-time; the thematic material is a series of brief, dissonant fanfares; as is conventional in jazz, there are a series of solos features for each member of the band, but the other soloists are free to chime in as they wish, producing some extraordinary passages of collective improvisation by the full octet.
Coleman intended "Free Jazz" simply to be the album title, but his growing reputation placed him at the forefront of jazz innovation, and
free jazz was soon considered a new genre, though Coleman has expressed discomfort with the term.
Among the reasons Coleman may not have entirely approved of the term
free jazz is that his music contains a considerable amount of
composition. His
melodic material, although skeletal, strongly recalls the melodies that
Charlie Parker wrote over
standard harmonies, and in general the music is closer to the
bebop that came before it than is sometimes popularly imagined. (Several early tunes of his, for instance, are clearly based on favorite bop chord-changes like "Out of Nowhere" and "I Got Rhythm") Coleman very rarely played standards, concentrating on his own compositions, of which there seems to be an endless flow. There are exceptions, though, including a classic reading (virtually a recomposition) of "Embraceable You" for Atlantic, and an improvisation on
Thelonious Monk's "Criss-Cross" recorded with
Gunther Schuller.
After the Atlantic period and into the early part of the
1970s, Coleman's music became more angular and engaged fully with the jazz
avant-garde which had developed in part around Coleman's innovations.
His quartet dissolved, and Coleman formed a new trio with
David Izenzon on bass, and
Charles Moffett on drums. Coleman began to extend the sound-range of his music, introducing accompanying string players (though far from the territory of "Parker With Strings") and playing
trumpet and
violin himself; he initially had little conventional
technique, and used the instruments to make large, unrestrained gestures. His friendship with
Albert Ayler influenced Coleman's development on trumpet and violin. (Haden would later sometimes join this trio to form a two-bass quartet.)
Between
1965 and
1967 Coleman signed with legendary jazz record label
Blue Note Records and released a number of recordings starting with the influential recordings of the trio
At The Golden Circle in Stockholm.
In
1966, Coleman was criticised for recording
The Empty Foxhole, a trio with Haden, and Coleman's son
Denardo Coleman – who was ten years old. Some regarded this as perhaps an ill-advised publicity ploy on Coleman's part, and judged the move as a misstep. Others, however, noted that despite his youth, Denardo had studied drumming for several years, his technique – which, though unrefined, was respectable and enthusiastic – owed more to pulse-oriented
free jazz drummers like
Sunny Murray than to
bebop drumming. Denardo has matured into a respected musician, and has been his father's primary drummer since the late 1970s.
Coleman formed another quartet. A number of bassists and drummers (including Haden,
Jimmy Garrison and
Elvin Jones) appeared, and
Dewey Redman joined the group, usually on tenor
saxophone.
He also continued to explore his interest in string textures – from the
Town Hall concert in
1962, culminating in
Skies of America in
1972. (Sometimes this had a practical value, as it facilitated his group's appearance in the
UK in
1965, where jazz musicians were under a quota arrangement but classical performers were exempt.)
Later, however, Coleman, like
Miles Davis before him, took to playing with
electrified instruments. Albums like
Virgin Beauty and
Of Human Feelings used
rock and
funk rhythms, sometimes called
free funk. On the face of it, this could seem to be an adoption of the
jazz fusion mode fashionable at the time, but Ornette's first record with the group, which later became known as Prime Time (the
1976 Dancing in Your Head), was sufficiently different to have considerable shock value.
Electric guitars were prominent, but the music was, at heart, rather similar to his earlier work. These performances have the same angular melodies and simultaneous group
improvisations – what
Joe Zawinul referred to as "nobody solos, everybody solos" and what Coleman calls
harmolodics—and although the nature of the pulse has altered, Coleman's own rhythmic approach has not.
Some critics have suggested Coleman's frequent use of the vaguely-defined term
harmolodics is a musical
MacGuffin: a
red herring of sorts designed to occupy critics over-focused on Coleman's sometimes unorthodox compositional style.
Jerry Garcia played guitar on three tracks from Coleman's
Virgin Beauty (1988) - "Three Wishes," "Singing In The Shower," and "Desert Players." Twice in 1993, Coleman joined the
Grateful Dead on stage playing the band's "The Other One," "Wharf Rat," "Stella Blue," and covering
Bobby Bland's "Turn On Your Lovelight," among others. Another unexpected association was with guitarist
Pat Metheny, with whom Coleman recorded
Song X (1985); though released under Metheny's name Coleman was essentially co-leader (contributing all the compositions).
In 1991, Coleman played on the soundtrack for
David Cronenberg's
Naked Lunch; the orchestra was conducted by
Howard Shore. It is notable among other things for including a rare sighting of Coleman playing a jazz standard: Monk's blues line "Misterioso."
The mid-1990s saw a flurry of activity from Coleman: He released four records between 1995 and 1996, and for the first time in nearly forty years, Coleman worked regularly with
piano players (either
Geri Allen or
Joachim Kühn). Many critics noted that it took jazz piano nearly that long to catch up with Coleman's innovations.
Coleman has rarely performed on other musicians' records. Exceptions include extensive performances on albums by
Jackie McLean in
1967 (on which Coleman played trumpet), and
James Blood Ulmer in
1978, and cameo appearances on
Yoko Ono's
Plastic Ono Band album
1968,
Joe Henry's
Scar2001 and
Lou Reed's "The Raven"
2003.
Although now an elder statesman of jazz, Coleman continues to push himself into unusual playing situations, often with much younger musicians or musicians from radically different musical cultures, and continues to perform regularly. An increasing number of his compositions, while not ubiquitous, have become minor
jazz standards, including "Lonely Woman," "Peace," "Turnaround," "When Will the Blues Leave?" "The Blessing," and "Law Years," among others. He has influenced virtually every saxophonist of a modern disposition, and nearly every such jazz musician, of the generation that followed him. His songs have proven endlessly malleable: pianists such as Paul Bley and
Paul Plimley have managed to turn them to their purposes;
John Zorn recorded
Spy Vs Spy (1989), an album of radical thrash-metal versions of Coleman songs; and there have even been country-music versions of Coleman tunes (by
Richard Greene).
Recently, he has performed live with the popular trio
The Bad Plus, a group similarly committed to challenging jazz orthodoxy.
In September 2006 he plans to release a live album titled "Sound Grammar" with his newest quartet; his first album of new material in ten years.
Selected articles:
* Coleman, Ornette. Interview with Andy Hamilton.
A Question of Scale The Wire July 2005.
*
*
Official web site*
