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Jazz History For Dummies - 70's Sun Ra Funk/Fusion (1 Viewer)

It would be very tough for me to narrow down a list to 5, other than to say Kind Of Blue would be #1 with a bullet, and A Love Supreme by Coltrane would probably make the short list, I'd have to think about the rest.

More Blue Note highlights and seminal, historically important albums.

Horace Silver And The Jazz Messengers by Horace Silver (I think he passed away in 2014). This was kind of the big bang or epicenter of the Blakey/Silver Jazz Messengers (and therefore extremely important to the classic Blue Note sound as a label, and to the development of hard bop as a genre in general). This link is inexplicably missing the Preacher, the biggest hit on the album (reportedly its timeliness played an instrumental role in the survival of the label), but has most of the rest. Great work by Kenny Dorham on trumpet and Hank Mobley on tenor sax.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hjWcEPyHhk&list=PL49EA3C341BF92DFE

Song For My Father, also by Silver, a later hit that again played a role in the later success of the label (along with Moanin' by Art Blakey, after they split up). Steely Dan copped the opening bass line for Ricky, Don't Lose That Number.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWeXOm49kE0&list=PLTIb4fKCEAevCHtKwMTrTNs5CXzCE-zMg

The Real McCoy by McCoy Tyner. Generally cited as his greatest Blue Note album and leader date, period. Also, one of the last classics released prior to visionary founder Alfred Lion retiring due to health reasons. This is post-classic Coltrane quartet, and features fellow member and brilliant drummer, Elvin Jones.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CvmJHprG_Fg&list=PLvWstQhRav6tboRTlduTuwrXPtLq_gFMy

Alligator Boogaloo by Lou Donaldson. There were certainly incorporations of funk, soul and R & B into jazz prior to this (including some great acid/soul-jazz on Prestige, also recorded by the great Rudy Van Gelder), but this was a big hit at the time, with a genre-influencing sound (somewhat like Lee Morgan's earlier The Sidewinder). Donaldson was a great talent scout, and helped break artists like ace guitarist Grant Green and organist John Patton.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nO6j0zTWNLg&list=PL9B921BE8D0EBFA26

Black Byrd by Donald Byrd (with representative song Flight Time). Some view this period as a sell out, and crossing the line into the no man's land of smooth jazz/disco (especially situated within the career context of his previous album Ethiopian Knights, which had a nearly 20 minute long song called Little Rasti, similar to BB by Miles), but was a huge hit for Blue Note at the time. Byrd brought Herbie Hancock to the attention of Lion and Blue Note, and had told him it was a good idea to have a song/album balance between music with commercial potential as well as artistically challenging and satisfying. It was interesting that Byrd had what was his stylistic breakthrough, cross-over hit around the same time as Hancock did with the best selling jazz album in history at the time (breaking the previous mark of BB set by Miles?), The Headhunters. Black Byrd was Blue Notes biggest hit and best selling album ever at the time, in the early/mid-'70s.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2U04x_pm_E

A live performance of the title track from Black Byrd, from Montreaux in '73. You can see the Mizell Brothers (who I think were actually his students in college), and a key to Byrd's more commercially palatable sound from this era.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lB9Z-OQTSfs

Places And Spaces (title song around the 15:50 mark), which came shortly after, and another of Byrd's best from the Mizell bros.-influenced era. The string arrangements are prominent but tasteful, and make for a heady combo, locked inside the circa Shaft-era funk guitar backbeat groove.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGaNBubSKm0

In exploring Blue Note's deep and impressive back catalog, a few revelations were Bobby Hutcherson on vibes and Freddie Hubbard on trumpet.

A link to the tracks from Happenings. Hutcherson was the second longest tenured Blue Note artist after Silver, this might be his best work. He was the greatest successor of Milt Jackson, and his broad musical taste enhanced an incredible range of settings.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKH5aGvoQl8&list=PL2E5BFB4C28421363

Oblique is another one of his best. Probably my favorite SONG by Hutcherson is Theme From Blow Up (Coincidentally on TCM Monday morning at 12:30 AM PST - Blow Out by Brian DePalma was kind of an homage). Herbie Hancock scored the movie, and plays on this album, with typically beautiful, lyrical work.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m18zaFKBwpU&list=PL6MYptby7EW0uTtxCPico0ti9D2qjFYh_

Components

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_DnRjV_tU9E&list=PLE0B0C43AD332C14E

Stick-Up!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdzTWHEdTLQ&list=PL75A0F152E4F61843

Total Eclipse (full)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MjI7gf-o_vg

Ready For Freddie by Hubbard, maybe his greatest Blue Note album, the song Weaver Of Dreams shows off his ballad chops.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NrP7KI6--2c&list=PL15243F255ACDA1EC

Hub-Tones (full)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTc0ybHUjeQ

* Non-Blue Note, but Miles, Kind Of Blue-related, pianist Bill Evans (recorded for the Riverside label). He has become my "new" favorite pianist. No wonder Kind of Blue landed at the top of the food chain when it comes to jazz, Davis was surrounded by a stellar supporting cast and surrounding talent, Coltrane, Adderly and Evans were to become accomplished leaders in their own right. In some ways, the Kind Of Blue sessions, despite Evans having previously left the group, were made with his sparse, introspective conception and playing style in mind (they were both acquainted with music theorist George Russell's ideas about improvising modally instead of based on chord changes like the bebop revolution ushered in by Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell and Thelonious Monk - Miles didn't have the technical fluency speed-wise and in the upper registers of Dizzy, and by necessity was forced to evolve a more understated, soulful and space conscious playing style).

Moonbeams (full).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gP3k-5hryb8

Explorations (full).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQw6RkZfHFI

Waltz For Debby (full - first song, My Foolish Heart), my favorite of this trio of titles, from the classic Evans trio of musicians. From the famous Complete Village Vanguard recordings and released separately, shortly before legendary bassist Scott LaFaro died in a car crash, emotionally and spiritually sidelining Evans for an extended period.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vExgBIQwEU&list=PLF877029072E5736C

** On the bonus plan, an interview of Michael Cuscuna, the most in-depth yet synoptic overview of the history of the Blue Note label I've run across. Great read, highly recommended.

http://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/secrets-of-the-blue-note-vault-michael-cuscuna-on-monk-blakey-and-the-one-that-got-away/

 
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Thanks, El Floppo.

:hifive:

Here is a cool version of Marvin Gaye's What's Goin On by drummer Bernard Purdie.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FP_1W4zmF3k

Purdie played on Home At Last, from Steely Dan's Aja. Below is the great hour long making of doc from VH1s Classic Albums series. The segment on that song, and his role with the "Purdie shuffle", starts at the 36:00 mark (also includes an interview with Larry Carlton, who played more than just a session player role at this time). Purdie comes on camera about the 38:45 mark, and it is hilarious listening to him reel off his musical resume. He doesn't lack for confidence, which Fagen alludes to in a funny anecdote to close the section (he showed up to a gig in the early 60's flanked by two signs - one noted, "You done it!", the other, "You done hired the hit maker, Bernard "Pretty" Purdie!" :) ). Elsewhere in the doc, it might have been the articulate guitarist Dean Parks, talked about how of paramount importance for Fagen and Becker (i.e. - Steely Dan), seemingly to the exclusion of everything else, was laying down a killer drum track first.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QA9ydTb_bM

Here is an 111 minute video from their concert DVD, my favorite song is the finale, Pretzel Logic (about the 1 hour, 35 minute mark).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OX5rlZl86K0

 
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TL/DR exec summary, and preview of a few takeaway points...

1) While A Love Supreme (Impulse! label) is deservedly oft-cited as Coltrane's most monumental work, a case can be made for Giant Steps (Atlantic) and Blue Train (Blue Note). Possibly My Favorite Things (Atlantic), and a few others on Impulse!

2) Maybe the greatest jazz album ever, Kind Of Blue (Columbia) had a direct sextet precursor on the same lable, titled Milestones, and along with Miles final works for the Prestige label (the quartet of albums - Cookin', Relaxin', Workin' and Steamin') and first with Columbia (the classic Round Midnight) with the First Great Quintet, all featured Coltrane, are highly recommended and imo worthy of exploring their connections further, including those with Coltrane's classic Giant Steps, which included several of the same players as on KOB, and was recorded within just one month later, approximately. Coltrane's Prestige leader dates Soultrane and the since retitled Traneing In (the latter co-led with Miles FGQ [[First Great Quintet]] bandmates, the Red Garland trio/rhythm section, also including Paul Chambers and "Philly Joe" Jones) can be added to that mix, as they were roughly contemporaneous with Milestones. If the chronology seems a little confusing, after Miles departed Prestige for the greener pastures of Columbia, FGQ members continued to record for Prestige as leaders in parallel with recordings for Columbia as sidemen for Miles.

3) Coltrane's final Atlantic album (Ole) and first for Impulse! (Africa Brass) were among his few orchestral works, had a similar lineup and were recorded within a few days of each other. Ole is overshadowed by the brilliant, more celebrated and popular Atlantic albums like Giant Steps and My Favorite Things, as is Africa/Brass by A Love Supreme on Impulse! (one of the top jazz albums ever), possibly among others. But they both contain outstanding music, and with the roughly contemporaneous, incendiary 4 disc live document, The Complete 1961 Live At The Village Vanguard Recordings, represent an incredibly rich and fertile period for him creatively, and key demarcation line/s in his development as an artist and the evolution of his sound. ___________________________________________________________________________________________

The Story Of A Love Supreme (NPR article and 12 minute audio), from 2012, but topical, because the album has its 50th anniversary in December, 2014.

http://www.npr.org/2000/10/23/148148986/a-love-supremesupremesupreme

John Coltrane: Jazz Icon (2008 two part NPR doc).

Pt. 1

http://www.npr.org/2008/06/18/91621422/john-coltrane-saxophone-icon-pt-1

Pt. 2

http://www.npr.org/2008/06/25/91859910/john-coltrane-saxophone-icon-pt-2

Another, brief NPR program, includes an article by author Ashley Kahn, who wrote a book about the album (also one on Kind Of Blue).

http://www.npr.org/2002/11/26/855350/john-coltranes-eternal-a-love-supreme

A 2002 interview of Kahn on the album and book about it.

http://www.jerryjazzmusician.com/2002/09/the-a-love-supreme-interviews-ashley-kahn-author-of-a-love-supreme-the-story-of-john-coltranes-signature-album/

A Love Supreme, the album (could be from the Deluxe Edition, with live versions and alternate takes).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=clC6cgoh1sU

The historic find concert, Monk's Quartet with Coltrane at Carnegie Hall (full album)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgq_QZ74VI0

Prestige era

Soultrane (one of a few leader dates for Prestige, made about the same time as the Miles Davis Columbia label album, Milestones). Milestones was somewhat of a precursor to Kind Of Blue, and may have been the first time the "First Great Quintet" (Miles, Trane, pianist Red Garland, bassist Paul Chambers and drummer Philly Joe Jones) was augmented by Cannonball Adderly on alto sax. This would be the instrumentation used on KOB, but I think the last time the Garland rhythm section recorded with Miles. So two thirds of the sextet heard on KOB are on Milestones, and sub Bill Evans (and Wyton Kelly on one song ) for Garland, and Jimmy Cobb for Jones on the later date.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMWPR1RwJ-0

Milestones (alternate take)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UKsjXhFGPLM

Miles last four Prestige albums (made with the First Great Quintet - as distinguished from the "Second Great Quintet" of the mid-late '60s: Miles, Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter and Tony Williams, there are excellent box sets on both great quintet lineups, highly recommended) were recorded in two marathon sessions about six months apart, and released over several years. They were to satisfy his contract, as Round Midnight had already been recorded and was in the can (his inaugural Columbia album), but couldn't be released until the escape clause obligation had been fulfilled, and that was the quickest, most painless and efficient way he could think of to extricate himself from the Prestige ASAP so he could move on to Columbia, which had far greater marketing resources, promotional machinery and sales clout. They are partly noteworthy in that they were virtually all first takes, and Miles was calling off songs like they did in clubs (as they were a working group), lending them as a whole somewhat the quality of a live in the studio informality and authenticity (some of Miles later work for Columbia was heavily edited, and engineer Teo Macero's work was almost like a performance in itself), one of the things most appreciated about Kind Of Blue. That is a similarity, a potential difference, supposedly the musicians didn't know the songs in advance on KOB (though that oft-cited anecdote, fueled by Bill Evans zen painting liner notes, was supposedly overstated, they had performed some of the songs before). The four albums (all with Coltrane) were, in order: Cookin', Relaxin', Workin' and Steamin'.

Cookin' (full album)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OcIiu1kQMx0

Relaxin' (full album)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vNreXKw2Qw

Steamin' (full album)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUB1oTNGg7E

Blue Note

Blue Train (full album), his only Blue Note leader date, arguably Coltrane's best, and one of the best jazz albums ever, period.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lr1r9_9VxQA

Atlantic label/period classics

Giant Steps (Deluxe Edition with bonus tracks), you could also make a strong case that this was Coltrane's greatest album (the title song solo is almost superhuman in technical facility and instrument fluency - this was the height of what Ira Gitler called his "sheets of sound" phase, which many didn't get at the time, but in retrospect, this has achieved consensus critical acclaim and acknowledgement as one of his masterpieces - NOBODY worked harder at becoming a great jazz musician than Coltrane, and all the hard work was really beginning to pay off, he was making virtuosic breakthroughs (reportedly being fired by Miles for nodding off on stage and working in Monk's band during part of the interim before quitting cold turkey and rejoining Miles, played an integral part in the accelerated growth and development of his musical conception at this time, Monk was one of the giants in terms of jazz architecture/composition), he wasn't a giant for nothing, and made several classics, besides A Love Supreme. Just as Soultrane was made around the same time as Milestones, this was made about one month after Kind of Blue, and Coltrane is similarly ON FIRE. This album was a composite with three different pianists and drummers, but Chambers, an all time jazz bass great, was the only other constant (last song, Mr. P.C. was dedicated to him). One song, Naima (one of his greatest ballads, with After The Rain and many others) featured pianist Kelly and drummer Cobb, from KOB. Basically, good and bad news comparing Giant Steps to Kind Of Blue. Bad news, just one horn compared to three (no Miles or Cannonball, though Davis did guest on Adderly's sole Blue Note leader date, the great Somethin' Else - Bill Evans, another key Kind Of Blue alumni, guested on another outstanding Adderly album, Know What I Mean?, highly recommended). The good news? Coltrane got to stretch out as the sole soloing horn voice (though the other musicians got to solo, too).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nSncwffAB7k

Know What I Mean? (full album), Adderly leader date with Evans.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmFfy56nSzY

My Favorite Things (full album), see comments on Giant Steps. This arrangement of the song from The Sound Of Music musical might be his best known and most popular song? It kind of reintroduced the soprano sax into the jazz idiom. The way he played it, it had an almost Middle Eastern flair, and this was one of the first long form songs (15+ minutes album version?), that created a kind of trance-inducing/friendly repetition.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHVarQbNAwU

Ole (full album), his last work while he was still in the employ of Atlantic (they released much more after he left for Impulse!, especially once his stature rose, as did the Prestige label). The title track clocks in at 18 minutes, at that time his longest song on record (later he might solo on one song for more than an hour live). It has a Spanish influence, this was released about a year after Miles popular Sketches Of Spain, the third and most popular of three orchestral collaborations with Gil Evans, after Miles Ahead and Porgy And Bess, and maybe his second most popular album (after KOB). Porgy And Bess might have been the most successful integration of the band with orchestra, Adderly played on it, as well as Chambers, Jones and Cobb. Coltrane didn't do a lot of orchestral work, Ole and and his next, Africa/Brass (see below) were among the few. One later date (after A Love Supreme), which was somewhat orchestral, was Ascension. Dolphy and Freddie Hubbard on trumpet were the only horns to play on both Ole and Africa/Brass (Dolphy also was an integral part of the Village Vanguard recordings - see below, they also played together earlier on Ornette Coleman's Free Jazz, fronting the second half of the "double quartet"), and the latter was on Ascension, too. Coltrane's Atlantic period, and particularly how the end ties into the beginning of his legendary Impulse! phase (which would last until his death), has been a revelation for me. I knew his Impulse body of work best, primarily A Love Supreme, Ballads and Africa/Brass. I knew of Giant Steps and My Favorite Things, but wasn't that familiar with his Atlantic body of work (or with fantastic Impulse! titles like Village Vanguard, Coltrane and Crescent). Ole and Africa/Brass have powerful rhythmic grooves driven by McCoy Tyner on piano and Elvin Jones on drums. I don't think Jimmy Garrison (who completed the "Classic Quartet" lineup) was in place yet, but Coltrane used two bass players at the same time in some passages. Somewhat mirroring Miles already having Round Midnight in the can for future label Columbia before recording his final Prestige albums (but even closer together time-wise), the final Atlantic date Ole was two days AFTER the Africa/Brass sessions, which was his Impulse! debut recording. Given similar instrumentation, orchestration, principal musicians and the proximity in time, the similar sound between the two (somewhat neglected?) classic albums isn't that surprising. If you listen to either of the studio dates and like it, chances are you will like the doppleganger. Checking them out back to back is even more informative and interesting for comparison purposes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wr5BotYA3U8

More Impulse! label/period classics (with A Love Supreme)

Africa/Brass (full album), first for the label. The word Brass in the title referred to the fact that Dolphy was one of the few other reeds (with Coltrane) on this and the preceding Ole date. The tuba, and unusual low brass instruments were what Dolphy used to orchestrate the sound Coltrane described as "hearing in his head", he was looking for the power of that particular tonal orchestration to add to his pallette at this time. Some passages definitely have a big, epic kind of sound. The distinctive backing orchestration stands out as sounding not exactly like anything else I've ever heard, and I mean that in a good way. Ole and Africa Brass are the closest Coltrane got to the foundational Davis/Evans orchestral collaborations such as Porgy And Bess and Sketches Of Spain. This featured the standard Greensleeves (harking back to his hit My Favorite Things, also featuring the soprano sax here, I think).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XjltzYpd4RM

Live At The Village Vanguard (first CD of four). Ole, Africa/Brass and these live recording can almost be viewed as one continuous body of work (though these four nights/CDs didn't have the larger orchestration, but they did have augmented lineups). There is a lot of repetition, several songs are played three and even four times over the four nights. One thing of interest, is hearing how they were played by two different sets of bassists/drummers (between matinee and evening concerts). A lot of long form, transcendent, ecstatic, trance-inducing material, where he stretched out at times even more than on the studio albums.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqcPdL9M7Pw

Coltrane (full album), not to be confused with the earlier Prestige title (first as a leader?).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umQzImpzVYo

Crescent (full album), the only other album recorded (released/both?) in the same year as A Love Supreme.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VHEv110bHUA

Ballads (full Album), self-descriptive title, one of the overall most lyrical, evocative and hauntingly beautiful albums in his body of work. Two other recs in this vein are Duke Ellington & John Coltrane, and the great later Impulse! compilation, The Gentle Side Of John Coltrane. His producer at Impulse!, Joel Dorn, somewhat controversially, reportedly recommended that he balance out some of his increasingly avant garde leanings with albums that were more commercially palatable, and by design intended to cast a wider net and reach a potentially larger audience (though Coltrane seemed very open musically, and I think was not only congnizant of and sympathetic towards the commercial implications, but appreciated the challenge of trying to attain greatness in THAT style/genre, in which early influences such as Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins and Ben Webster were masters of).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rOMV0A5jd0

* VIDEO

10 minutes of My Favorite Things from Jazz Icons, with the brilliant but tragically short lived multi-instrumentalist Eric Dolphy (solo starts just after the four minute mark) who played a key role in the Ole and Africa/Brass studio sessions, and the seminal Village Vanguard live recording.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zH3JpqhpkXg

From the same brilliant Jazz Icons video (this has become one of my favorites), Coltrane and the Wynton Kelly trio, with Paul Chambers and Jimmy Cobb. They all played on Miles Kind Of Blue for Columbia (and Coltrane's Giant Steps for Atlantic). The Lester Young-influenced Stan Getz guests.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8egSzCBCie0

Approx 25 minutes of Coltrane performing on Ralph Gleason's Jazz Casual.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ry3_wiiH4Pc

One hour, an excellent biopic, The World According To John Coltrane. Highly recommended.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOJj4YXWPLI

** There is an authoritative podcast with 30+ episodes that runs 4+ hours, titled Traneumentary.

*** BONUS

Reportedly the only reason Coltrane got the Miles gig at the time was because Miles first choice, Sonny Rollins, turned it down. Coltrane was a Philly local product/ringer recommended by Philly Joe Jones, he wasn't a star yet - Miles was a star maker for Coltrane, as he was for many other musicians. Certainly he was a great judge of talent, and it helped that all he had to do was snap his fingers and have his pick of virtually anybody, but many alumni have described the experience of being in the band and playing with Miles (both studio gigs and live performances) in transformative terms, as a kind of heightened state crucible in which their playing grew and developed.

Check the solo on the final track, Blue 7 (track starts at the 28:46 mark). This is one of the greatest albums of the '50s, one of the greatest jazz albums of all time, and arguably the greatest sax album ever (you're welcome :) ).

Saxaphone Colossus (full album)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5lWE65FVb4A

 
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Exec summary/Reader's Digest synopsis:

Moanin' (by Mingus, from Blues & Roots). Check the collective, simultaneous impovisation by the band. Perhaps much of this is scored and orchestrated, at any rate, this is some of the most powerful and beautiful jazz I've ever heard, in any idiom.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__OSyznVDOY

Atlantic had an impressive roster of jazz artists, tending towards the avant garde. I'll get to artists like Ornette Coleman and (Rashaan) Roland Kirk later.

Charles Mingus (played in the bands of Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and Charlie Parker, don't get much better jazz provenance than that, as far as his curriculum vitae and formative influences).

VIDEO - From the Jazz Icons DVD, including three European concerts (some with the multi-instrumental great, Eric Dolphy - in his tragically short life, he seemingly played on a disproportionate number of seminal avant garde albums from the 60's, including Ole, Africa/Brass and Live At The Village Vanguard by Coltrane, Blues And The Abstract Truth by Oliver Nelson, Free Jazz by Coleman and Point Of Departure by Andrew Hill, as well as being in the band of Mingus for a time, and making the excellent Out To Lunch! in a rare leader date [[also did a few good ones for Prestige]], a Blue Note classic).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2phw7eXrmCM

Atlantic

Pithecantropus Erectus

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3Ltp6U1IJU

Blues & Roots

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9KcMfQhn6w

Oh Yeah

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaM-XSA_m0s

The Clown

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qnFXg0ZWQqk

Columbia

Ah Um (maybe his masterpiece, though his musical, instrumental, compositional and band-leading genius was protean, represented by multiple great works)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JY3hJc4sKqs

The Black Saint And The Sinner Lady

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFA0FYQo0Gg

 
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great googly, bob!

always been a big fan of Coltrane. felt like he was more of a Bach in a world of Jazz Mozarts.... something about the way he attacked melodies. dunno. :shrug:

 
An articulate article by Richard Brody of the New Yorker, on the recently discovered John Coltrane recording from a legendary concert at Temple University, Offering* (the most significant find in about a decade, since the Monk Quartet With Coltrane At Carnegie Hall?), situating it historically in his body of work, in the context of his latter shift to more free forms of structure and expression.

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/coltranes-free-jazz-awesome

"The discovery and release of a previously unknown recording by the saxophonist John Coltrane, who died at the age of forty in 1967, is cause for rejoicing—and I’m rejoicing in “Offering: Live at Temple University,” the release of a tape, made for the school’s radio station, of a concert that Coltrane and his band gave on November 11, 1966, a mere nine months before his death.


I knew and already loved this concert, on the basis of a bootleg of three of its five numbers. But the legitimate release offers much better sound and contains the pièce de résistance: a climactic performance of “My Favorite Things,” the Richard Rodgers tune that Coltrane turned into a jazz classic in 1960. Yet this 1966 performance of it is very different from that of 1960, and, indeed, even from Coltrane recordings from a year or two before the Temple concert. In the intervening years, Coltrane’s musical conception had shifted toward what can conveniently be called “free jazz.”

The term started as the name of an album by one of the form’s key artists, Ornette Coleman, from 1960, even though that recording only hinted at the further extremes of free jazz, some of which were in evidence in Coltrane’s final two years. The idea, roughly, involves playing without a set harmonic structure (the framework of chords that lasts a pre-set number of bars and gives jazz performances a sense of sentences and paragraphs), without a foot-tapping beat, and sometimes even without the notion of solos, allowing musicians to join in or lay out as the spirit moves them. Lacking beat, harmony, and tonality, free jazz cuts the main connection to show tunes, dance-hall performances, or even background music to which jazz owed much of whatever popularity it enjoyed.

There’s a temptation to consider free jazz as a freedom from: freedom from structures and formats and preëxisting patterns of any sort. But it’s also a freedom to: a freedom to musical disinhibition of tone, a vehemence and fervor, as well as a freedom to invent. The very word “freedom” meant something particular to black Americans in the nineteen-sixties. They didn’t have it, and there’s an implicit, and sometimes explicit, political idea in free jazz: a freedom from European styles, a freedom to seek African and other musical heritages, and, also, a freedom to cross-pollinate jazz with other arts. In the process, jazz musicians developed new forms and new moods that reflected a new generation’s experiences and ideals. The politics of free jazz were inseparable from its aesthetic transformation of jazz into overt and self-conscious modernism.

Coltrane’s turn to free jazz, in his last two years of performance, gave rise to a more overtly transcendent yet frenzied yearning. His playing on “Offering” is even more fervent and, at times, furious than it had been, even two years earlier, on the celebrated album “A Love Supreme.” Yet his heightened, trance-like playing has a core of stillness, of devotional tranquility; his music is like a whirlwind with an eye of serenity.

The difference in Coltrane’s own playing goes hand in hand with that of his group over all. In his last years, he radically changed his very conception of his band, and what resulted was a new musical tone. Coltrane’s former group was a classic quartet (featuring the pianist McCoy Tyner, the bassist Jimmy Garrison, and the drummer Elvin Jones). His new band, heard in “Offering,” was a quintet, augmented by the saxophonist Pharoah Sanders, in which Coltrane’s wife, Alice Coltrane, replaced Tyner and Rashied Ali replaced Jones. (Garrison stayed in the group, though in the “Offering” concert he was replaced by Sonny Johnson.) Also, for the Temple gig, Coltrane supplemented the band with four more percussionists and two guest alto saxophonists, Coltrane’s longtime acquaintance Arnold Joyner and the teen-ager Steve Knoblauch, whom Coltrane invited to solo on “My Favorite Things.” (The liner notes, by Ashley Kahn, feature their accounts of the concert.) The big group, playing free of harmonic structures and foot-tapping rhythm, gives the succession and shift of musical events a tumultuous, organic flow. In the grand scope of its development and in the tumble of its frenetic incidents, the performances make perfect, natural dramatic sense.

Well, the sleeve notes by Ashley Kahn are extremely informative, but I would question the assumption that there is something “spiritual” about this last phase of Trane’s musical journey. If it’s there I can’t hear it. What I do hear is the momentum of what he’d done before—and a situation he’d helped to create—carrying him towards a terminus, a brick wall, a dead-end or, in the cosmic scheme of things, some kind of interstellar void. Or, to bring things back down to earth with Elvin’s reasons for quitting, “a lot of noise.”

Not everyone seems as enamored of this recording—or, for that matter, of Coltrane’s later performances in general. Geoff Dyer, writing at the New York Review of Books site, describes the music as “shrieking, screaming, and wildness.” He loves Coltrane—the works of the classic quartet, featuring Elvin Jones and McCoy Tyner. But Dyer calls late Coltrane “catastrophic”; and Dyer is an honorable fan. He tells the story of Coltrane’s musical transformations around 1965, and, demeaning the recording of “Offering,” cites approvingly Jones’s view of them:

"Well, the sleeve notes by Ashley Kahn are extremely informative, but I would question the assumption that there is something “spiritual” about this last phase of Trane’s musical journey. If it’s there I can’t hear it. What I do hear is the momentum of what he’d done before—and a situation he’d helped to create—carrying him towards a terminus, a brick wall, a dead-end or, in the cosmic scheme of things, some kind of interstellar void. Or, to bring things back down to earth with Elvin’s reasons for quitting, “a lot of noise.”"

Dyer calls Jones “Elvin,” calls Coltrane “Trane”; this sense of false intimacy is significant. Dyer is the author of “But Beautiful,” from 1991, a fictional gaze at classic-era jazz greats, in which he writes about “Lester,” “Bud,” “Chet,” “Ben,” and, for that matter, “Hawk” and “Trane.” He writes like a club patron who insinuates himself into the company of the musicians between sets, extracts their confidences, observes scenes of intimate horror, and then passes them along—using first names and nicknames—as if to flaunt his faux-insider status. But, when the musicians are back on the bandstand, he never lets them forget that they’re there to entertain him.

The epilogue of “But Beautiful” is an essay in which Dyer makes clear that free jazz altogether was already his bête noire—pun entirely intended. He asserts the centrality of “tradition” in jazz—as if it needed his defense—and relies on this principle to justify the limits of his taste. In this essay, too, he writes in veneration of Coltrane’s classic quartet, only to assert that, in Coltrane’s later performances, “there is little beauty but much that is terrible.” Dyer is so bound to his own idea of what jazz is, and to its popular and classical roots, that he can’t hear the ideas of one of its greatest creators. He listens to jazz like a consumer or a patron rather than like an artist; he doesn’t enter into imaginative sympathy with the musicians, and he can’t conceive or, for that matter, feel what the creator of “Spiritual” or “Dearly Beloved” finds necessary in “Interstellar Space” or “Offering.”

In “Offering,” there are astonishing, deeply moving moments in which Coltrane uses his voice—he cries out during a solo by Sanders, and twice sings in a sort of vocalise, pounding his chest to make his voice warble. Dyer writes condescendingly in his review that “these eagerly anticipated moments actually sound a bit daft—which is not to say that they were without value.” They don’t sound “daft” at all; they sound like spontaneous and ingenuous expressions of rapturous joy. But they are gestures that would have had little place amid the prodigious musical strength of Coltrane’s classic quartet. On the other hand, they’re right at home in Coltrane’s open-ended quasi-hangout band, in the familial intimacy that gives rise to its vulnerable furies."

*Brief doc on Offering, including commentary by liner note writer Ashley Kahn, who has also authored making of books on two of the most important albums in jazz history, Kind Of Blue and Coltrane's A Love Supreme.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZQAwahDL8A

 
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Below is an excerpt on Coltrane from Nat Hentoff's book, Jazz Is (linked from the Mosaic site). Miles Davis didn't put a lot of stake in jazz critics, but three he respected were Leonard Feather, Nat Hentoff and Ralph Gleason. All of them were not only gifted writers in general, but insightful on music and musicians, specifically. A business excerpt is placed at top, to convey a sense of the material in the chapter length excerpt below.

"I once tried out on Coltrane my theory that one reason he developed such long solos was in an attempt to create and sustain a kind of hypnotic, dervishlike mood so that the listener would in time become oblivious to distractions and end up wholly immersed in the music with all his customary intellectual and emotional defenses removed."

That may be a secondary effect, Coltrane said, but I'm not consciously trying to do that. I'm still primarily looking into certain sounds, certain scales. Not that I'm sure of what I'm looking for, except that it'll be something that hasn't been played before. I don't know what it is. I know I'll have that feeling when I get it. And in the process of looking, continual looking, the result in any given performance can be long or short. I never know. It's always one thing leading into another. It keeps evolving, and sometimes it's longer than I actually thought it was while I was playing. When things are constantly happening the piece just doesn't feel that long.

_________________________________________________________________________________

The Stacks: John Coltranes Mighty Musical Quest

The tenor saxophonist was one of the most imaginatively restless artists to ever work a bandstand. Nat Hentoff explains why we're still playing catch up with this musical genius.

"If you want to understand and appreciate jazz there is no better place to startapart from listening to the music, of coursethan with the critical writing of Nat Hentoff. Beginning in the 1950s when he was on the scene covering Monk and Miles, Clifford Brown, Charles Mingus, and any number of other giants, Hentoff has always written about the music and the culture in a way that makes it approachable for the outsider. Pick up records from that time and chances are Hentoff wrote the liner notes.

Take for instance this chapter on John Coltrane from Hentoff's wonderful book, Jazz Is. I think you'll dig it. (Also, while you're at it, I urge you to read Hentoff's memoir, Boston Boy, as well as the amazing book of oral histories, co-edited with Nat Shapiro, Hear Me Talkin' to Ya: The Story of Jazz by the Men Who Made It.)

Alex Belth

Coltrane, a man of almost unbelievable gentleness made human to us lesser mortals by his very occasional rages. Coltrane, an authentically spiritual man, but not innocent of carnal imperatives. Or perhaps more accurately, a man, in his last years, especially but not exclusively consumed by affairs of the spirit. That is, having constructed a personal world view (or view of the cosmos) on a residue of Christianity and an infusion of Eastern meditative practices and concerns, Coltrane became a theosophist of jazz. The music was a way of self-purgation so that he could learn more about himself to the end of making himself and his music part of the unity of all being. He truly believed this, and in this respect, as well as musically, he has been a powerful influence on many musicians since. He considered music to be a healing art, an uplifting art.

Yet through most of his most relatively short career (he died at forty), Coltrane divided jazz listeners, creating furiously negative reactions to his work among some. (Antijazz was one of the epithets frequently cast at him in print.) He was hurt and somewhat bewildered by this reaction, but with monumental stubbornness went on exploring and creating what to many seemed at first to be chaos--self-indulgent, long-winded noise. Some still think that's what it was.

Others believed Coltrane to be a prophet, a musical prophet, heralding an enormous expansion of what it might now be possible to say on an instrument. Consider Art Davis. He is a startlingly brilliant bassist, as accomplished in classical music as in jazz. (Because Davis is black, he has been denied employment by those symphony orchestras to which he has applied, and so he has challenged them to pit him against any classical bassist of their choice. The challenge has gone unanswered.) Anyway, Davis, whom I've known for years, is a rationalist, a keen analyzer of music and of life. He is not given, so far as I have ever known, to giant or even small leaps into faith. Davis requires a sound scaffolding of fact and proof for his enthusiasms.

But here is Art Davis, who played for a time with Coltrane, as quoted in the Fall 1972 issue of the periodical Black Creation [institute of Afro-American Affairs at New York University]: John Coltrane would play for hours a set. One tune would be like an hour or two hours, and he would not repeat himself, and it would not be boring. People would just be shouting, like you go to church, a holy roller church or something like that. This would get into their brains, would penetrate. John had that spirit--he was after the spiritual thing. You could hear people screaming despite the critics who tried to put him down. Black people made him because they stuck together and they saw--look what's going down--let's get some of this. You know all the hard times that John had at the beginning, even when he was with Miles. And when he left Miles, starting out, everybody tried to discourage him. But I'd be there and the brothers and sisters would be there and they supported him. John had this power of communication, that power so rare it was like genius--I'll call him a prophet because he did this.

Coltrane had another power, a power of self-regeneration that also has to do with that power of communication. One evening in the early '50's, I saw Coltrane in Sheridan Square, in Greenwich Village. He looked awful. Raggedy, vacant. Junk, said a musician with me. He's been hooked a while. But, I noted, he had a bottle of wine in his hand. That, too, said the musician.

And Coltrane stopped using both. By himself. During his huge musical ascent, which was soon to start. Coltrane was clean and stayed clean. That's power. Like Miles.

Coltrane changed jazz in as fundamental a way as Charlie Parker had before him and Louis Armstrong before Parker. One thing he did was to radically reshape--by the overwhelming persuasiveness of his playing--all previous jazz definitions of acceptable sounds and forms.

Obviously, through the decades, jazz had encompassed an extraordinary range of sounds--growls, slurs, cries, guffaws, keening wails. And certainly it had been accepted from the beginning that each player had his own sound. There was never any one criterion for how every trombone or tenor saxophone or singer should sound. Still, at each stage of jazz history certain kinds of sounds were beyond the pale. Or at least they were considerably downgraded. For years, to cite a pre-modern-jazz example, Pee Wee Russell's rasping tone (which, to its denigrators, veered between a squeak and an access of laryngitis) was mocked by a good many musicians as well as listeners. Yet Pee Wee proved to be among the most inventive and seizingly original of all clarinetists.

Lester Young was in disfavor among some of his peers for quite a while because his sound was too light compared to Coleman Hawkins's robust fullness. Nor was Lee Wiley the only appraiser to think of Billie Holiday that she sounded as if her shoes were too tight. At the advent of Charlie Parker one of the many criticisms of his playing by older musicians and by traditionalist listeners was that his tone was bad, too acrid by contrast, say, with that of Johnny Hodges.

In the case of John Coltrane, a majority of the initial reviews of his recordings in the early and mid-'50's also cited his strident, unpleasant sound. Mine were among them. Later, however, when Coltrane was really underway and pushing his instrument beyond any previous limits of sound possibilities, the intermittent rawness of his tone, the high-pitched squeals, the braying yawps, the screams, generated even more intense hostility along with the denunciation that his extensive solos were structureless, directionless. Musical nonsense wrote one critic.

In retrospect, however, it is clear that Coltrane was one of the most persistent, relentless expanders of possibility--all kinds of possibility: textural, emotional, harmonic, and spiritual--in jazz history. And also one of the most totally exposed improvisers in the history of the music.

I was converted, or educated, from listening first to Coltrane with Miles Davis for many nights. This was the Coltrane sheets of sound period (a phrase originated by critic Ira Gitler). The term came about, Gitler later explained, because of the density of textures he was using. His multinote improvisations were so thick and complex they were almost flowing out of the horn by themselves. That really hit me, the continuous flow of ideas without stopping. It was almost superhuman, and the amount of energy he was using could have powered a spaceship.

Miles would sometimes grumble about the constant hailstorms of notes in a Coltrane solo, since Miles himself preferred to work with space, to let his notes breathe. And the length of the solos also occasionally annoyed him. Why did you go on so long? he once asked Coltrane after a particularly lengthy flight by the latter.

It took that long to get it all in, said Coltrane, and Miles accepted the logic of the answer.

Actually, Miles Davis was much intrigued by the sheer will to creativity of Coltrane on his better nights. Coltrane's really something, Miles told me one afternoon in 1958. He's been working on those arpeggios and playing them fifty different ways and playing them all at once. However, there was a glint of triumph in Miles, he is beginning to leave more space--except when he gets nervous.

It was important for Coltrane to work with Miles. For one thing, of course, he received attention, with the Davis imprimatur legitimatizing Coltrane for some of those who up to that point had considered Trane either incompetent or a charlatan or both. Miles, it was agreed by nearly all, could not and would not be conned musically. If he hired the man, the man must have something to say. That imprimatur also gave Coltrane confidence. Feeling set upon by the critics, he had passed a far more severe test by being considered worthy of a place in the Miles Davis band.


Even more valuable to Coltrane, however, was his stay with Thelonious Monk--in between stints with Miles Davis in the late '50's. That collaboration at the Five Spot Café in New York's East Village was a key historic event--of the musical order of Louis Armstrong playing second cornet to King Oliver at the Royal Garden Cafe in Chicago in the 1920's. I was there nearly every night all the weeks Monk and Trane played the Five Spot, and it was there I finally understood how nonpareil a musician, how dauntless an explorer Coltrane was. The excitement was so heady that soon musicians were standing two and three deep at the bar of the Five Spot nearly every night.

Monk creates a total musical microcosm, and for musicians who play with him the challenge is to keep your balance, to stay with Monk, no matter where his unpredictably intricate imagination leads--and at the same time, play yourself, be yourself.


I learned new levels of alertness with Monk, Coltrane said, because if you didn't keep aware all the time of what was going on, you'd suddenly feel as if you'd stepped into a hole without a bottom to it. He learned other things as well. Monk was one of the first to show me how to make two or three notes at one time on tenor. It's done by false fingering and adjusting your lips and if it's done right you get triads. He also got me into the habit of playing long solos [longer than with Miles] on his pieces, playing the same piece for a long time to find new conceptions for solos. It got so I would go as far as possible on one phrase until I ran out of ideas. The harmonies got to be an obsession for me. Sometimes I was making music through the wrong end of a magnifying glass.

As a teacher, one of the most liberating teachers in jazz, Monk had another kind of impact on Coltrane, as on practically all the musicians who have played with him. Monk kept insisting that musicians must keep working at stretching themselves, at going beyond their limitations, which really were artificial limitations that came from their having absorbed conventional--and thereby gratuitously constricting--standards of what can and what cannot be done on an instrument.

Before Coltrane came with the band, Gigi Gryce had learned this lesson: I had a part Monk wrote for me that was impossible. I had to play melody while simultaneously playing harmony with him. In addition, the intervals were very wide besides; and I just told him I couldn't do it. 'You have an instrument, don't you?' he said. 'Either play it or throw it away.' And he walked away. Finally, I was able to play it. Another time I was orchestrating a number for him, and I didn't write everything down for the horns exactly as he'd outlined it because I felt the musicians would look at the score and figure it was impossible to play. He was very angry, and he finally got exactly what he wanted. I remember the trumpet player on the date had some runs going up on his horn and Monk said they were only impractical if they didn't give him a chance to breathe. The range was not a factor 'because a man should be flexible on all ranges of his horn.'

Then came Coltrane. The story, told by Art Blakey, is in J.C. Thomas' Chasin' The Trane: I played drums on the Monk's Music album for Riverside, where Monk expanded his group to a septet with both Coleman Hawkins and John Coltrane on tenor. Naturally, Monk wrote all the music, but Hawk was having trouble reading it, so he asked Monk to explain it to both Trane and himself. Monk said to Hawk, 'You're the great Coleman Hawkins, right? You're the guy who invented the tenor saxophone, right?' Hawk agreed. Then Monk turned to Trane, 'You're the great John Coltrane, right?' Trane blushed, and mumbled, 'Aw I'm not so great.' Then Monk said to both of them, 'You play saxophone, right?' They nodded. 'Well, the music is on the horn. Between the two of you, you should be able to find it.'

Coltrane kept looking and finding, and, never satisfied, looked some more. His audience was growing, especially among musicians, but more nonmusicians were finding that if they actively listened to his music, their whole way of hearing jazz might well be changed. This did not mean, however, that they had to listen analytically. In the liner notes for Coltrane's album, Om, for example, I suggested that those who were finding Coltrane difficult start again, but this time without worrying about how it is all structured, where it's leading. Let the music come in without any pre-set definitions of what jazz has to be, of what music has to be.

If you find yourself responding--and I don't mean necessarily with conventional 'pleasure,' but rather with any strong feeling--listen on. In this music, just as textures are themselves shapes and motion is by colors as well as by time; so, in the listening, I should have gone on, ingress is by routes that will unexpectedly come upon you in guises other than the usual ways to get into a piece of music. A link of pitches perhaps, an a-rhythmic phrase that will lead to a strong subterranean pulsation.

For the last seven years of his life Coltrane continued to make more demands on himself musically than any jazz musician, except perhaps Cecil Taylor, ever has. None of this, so far as I could tell, was done as an act of competition. It was himself, and only himself, Coltrane kept pressuring to hear more, feel more, understand more, communicate more. At home he would practice for hours, sometimes silently--just running his fingers over the keys--and pick up new instruments and meditate and listen to recordings of Indian music and the music of South African Pygmies. Possibilities. Always more possibilities. He decided he wanted two drummers working with him. Then, on an album, he fixed on two bass players. I asked him why. Because I want more of the sense of the expansion of time. I want the time to be more plastic.

Time. Vast, fierce stretches of time. The music sometimes sounding like the exorcism of a multitude of demons, each one of whom was mightily resisting his expulsion. Yet at other times Coltrane could sound his probes with such gentle luminescence as to fool the voracious spirits, but soon the shaking, smashing, endless battle would begin again.

At night clubs there were scores, hundreds of exhilarating, exhausting nights during which the listeners, along with the musicians, had no resting space but had to keep emotional pace as best they could with the ferociously wheeling, diving, climbing Coltrane.

For better or worse, and that depended on the inventiveness of the musicians who followed him, Coltrane more than any other player legitimated the extended jazz solo. As Archie Shepp, a tenor saxophonist befriended and influenced by Coltrane, said, That was his breakthrough--the concept that the imperatives of conception might make it necessary to improvise at great length. I don't mean he proved that a thirty- or forty-minute solo is necessarily better than a three-minute one. He did prove, however, that it was possible to create thirty or forty minutes of uninterrupted, continually building, continually original and imaginative music. And in the process, Coltrane also showed the rest of us we had to have the stamina--in terms of imagination and physical preparedness--to sustain those long flights.

I once tried out on Coltrane my theory that one reason he developed such long solos was in an attempt to create and sustain a kind of hypnotic, dervishlike mood so that the listener would in time become oblivious to distractions and end up wholly immersed in the music with all his customary intellectual and emotional defenses removed.

That may be a secondary effect, Coltrane said, but I'm not consciously trying to do that. I'm still primarily looking into certain sounds, certain scales. Not that I'm sure of what I'm looking for, except that it'll be something that hasn't been played before. I don't know what it is. I know I'll have that feeling when I get it. And in the process of looking, continual looking, the result in any given performance can be long or short. I never know. It's always one thing leading into another. It keeps evolving, and sometimes it's longer than I actually thought it was while I was playing. When things are constantly happening the piece just doesn't feel that long.

Always looking, Coltrane always tried to be ready for the unexpected revelation, that feeling. Alice Coltrane told me that when John left for work he'd often take five instruments with him. He wanted to be ready for whatever came. That was characteristic of John. His music was never resigned, never complacent. How could it be? He never stopped surprising himself.

He was a man who spoke of universal, transcendent peace--becoming one with Om, the first vibration--that sound, that spirit which set everything else into being. And yet his music, to the end, although sometimes almost eerily serene, remained most often volcanic. Ravi Shankar, who had come to know Coltrane, said: I was much disturbed by his music. Here was a creative person who had become a vegetarian, who was studying yoga and reading the Bhagavad-Gita, yet in whose music I still heard much turmoil. I could not understand it.

Marion Brown, the alto saxophonist and composer, was one of the musicians assembled by Coltrane for his almost unbearably intense set of free jazz, Ascension, and Brown recalls: We did two takes, and they both had that kind of thing in them that makes people scream. The people in the studios were screaming.

Perhaps Om, the first vibration, is a scream. Perhaps Coltrane wished so hard to transcend all of what he regarded as his baser, antispiritual elements, that he was doomed, from the time his ambition became so otherworldly, to always feel desperately imprisoned. Hence the scream. But part of the scream may also have been the pain, the difficulty, of self-purgation, a process that had become the normative conundrum of thorns in his life.

Whatever the explanation--if there is a discernible matrix of explanations for the phenomenon of Coltrane--by the time he died of cancer of the liver in 1967, he had helped shape a new generation of jazz musicians. He didn't like the term jazz, by the way, since he felt all music to be one, without labels.

In musical terms Trane's contributions have perhaps been most succinctly described by David Baker, who has long taught black music, and other music, at the University of Indiana. Now that Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians has at last decided to admit articles on jazz musicians, Baker is writing an entry on, among others, John Coltrane. And the achievements of Coltrane he will cite are using multiphonics, playing several notes or tones simultaneously; creating asymmetrical groupings not dependent on the basic pulse; developing an incredibly sophisticated system of chord substitutions; and initiating a pan-modal style of playing, using several modes simultaneously. I've transcribed some of his solos for teaching my students at the University of Indiana. I think all musicians should study Coltrane solos the way we now study the etudes of Bach and Brahms.

Coltrane, who read theory as well as biographies of the creative (Van Gogh, for instance), might have been pleased to hear that. But at night, on the stand, there would be no abiding satisfaction for him in what he had done in the past. You just keep going, he told me once. You keep trying to get right down to the crux.

He even frustrated himself--in addition to knowing the crux would always be beyond him or anyone else--by yearning for yet another impossibility. Sometimes, Coltrane said to me one afternoon, I wish I could walk up to my music as if for the first time, as if I had never heard it before. Being so inescapably a part of it, I'll never know what the listener gets, what the listener feels, and that's too bad.

Looking at Coltrane's early background--born in Hamlet, North Carolina; schooling in Philadelphia; rhythm-and-blues work with Eddie Mr. Cleanhead Vinson; gathering experience with Dizzy Gillespie, Earl Bostic, Johnny Hodges, Miles Davis, and Thelonious Monk--there would have been no way to predict (before Miles and Monk, anyway) the singular, unyieldingly questioning force that was to revolutionize much of jazz. There never is any way to predict the coming of the next jazz prophet. And that's why nearly all speculation, learned or otherwise, about the future directions of jazz is always futile. The future of jazz has always depended on unexpected individuals with radical (though at first seemingly opaque) questions to ask--questions they eventually proceed to answer: Louis Armstrong on the nature of the jazz solo; Duke Ellington on the nature of the jazz orchestra; Charlie Parker on the obsolescence of the rhythmic and harmonic language that preceded him; and John Coltrane on all manner of jazz constrictions that antedated him.

In spending himself on trying to answer the questions that consumed him, Coltrane eventually developed what in jazz terms could be called a large audience. As Martin Williams has pointed out, It was almost impossible for a man to be as much of a technician, artist, and explorer as Coltrane and still have the kind of popular following he had. What did he tell that audience? In what new and meaningful things did his music instruct them?

I don't know, of course, Williams continued. And perhaps as a white man I can't know. But I would venture a suggestion. I don't think Coltrane spoke of society or political theory. I think that like all real artists he spoke of matters of the spirit, of those things by which the soul of man survives. I think he spoke of the ways of the demons and the gods that were always there, yet are always contemporary. And I think that he knew that he did.

Some months after Coltrane died, I was visiting a black college in Delaware. It had been a year during which I had lectured at many colleges--mostly on education and civil liberties. When music had come into the discussion, the emphasis invariably was on rock sounds and players. Only at this black college did the students talk of Bird and Ornette Coleman, and especially of Coltrane.

You know, one of the black students said, when Trane died, it was like a great big hole had been left. And it's still there.

In one sense that hole is indeed still there and will continue to be. Obviously, certain artists do leave great big holes when they die, for they are irreplaceable in the size and scope of their originality. Louis Armstrong. Duke. Lester Young. Coleman Hawkins. Billie Holiday. And on and on. As this book is being written, there has as yet been no successor to Coltrane in terms of having dominant, pervasive influence on the jazz of the '70's.

On the other hand, as pianist Keith Jarrett said of Trane's death, Everyone felt a big gap all of a sudden. But he didn't intend to leave a gap. He intended that there be more space for everybody to do what they should do.

And there is more space for further generations of seekers. In one way or another they are all children of Coltrane. And, of course, of all those who shaped him. The legacy is long and rich and demanding.

 
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Herbie Hancock & Chick Corea piano duet, Frankfurt '78 (VIDEO 40 minutes). They just played Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles Saturday night, and are on a world tour together for the first time in 37 years. They will be recording and may document it with an album later.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zir6HqjDMo

 
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Carlos Santana & John McLaughlin - Invitation To Illumination: Live At Montreaux '11(VIDEO 135 minutes), getting the band back together from the Love, Devotion and Surrender album in '73.*

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRqxbkdVMMY

* LDS (like what Shatner said Nimoy took too much of in the '60s in Star Trek IV :) ), AUDIO FULL ALBUM 38 minutes, in part an homage to a towering music figure mutually admired by the guitarists, John Coltrane (also their guru, Shri Chinmoy). Includes the sax legend and jazz giant's songs, A Love Supreme and Naima. They were collectively backed by their respective bands, Santana and The Mahavishnu Orchestra. Organ genius Larry Young was a key component of the overall sound.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKFeE1ipJcQ

Album info

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_Devotion_Surrender

Illuminations '74 (AUDIO FULL ALBUM 35 minutes), a collaboration by Santana and Coltrane's widow Alice.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Hs2SjSqJjw

Album info

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illuminations_(Alice_Coltrane_and_Carlos_Santana_album)

Illuminations is a 1974 collaboration between Carlos Santana and Alice Coltrane. Jazz musicians Jules Broussard, Jack DeJohnette and Dave Holland also contributed to the record, on saxophone, flute, drums and bass. Alice Coltrane delivers some harp glissando, while the string orchestra adds a serene mood to the music. Carlos Santana (whose Indian name "Devadip" appears on the sleeve) plays electric guitar in his own fashion, utilizing feedback, long notes and simple melodies, letting much space to the other instruments. The album is conceived as an instrumental jazz album, with lengthy solos on guitar, saxophone and keyboards. The introduction to "Angel of Air", with its violins, has been sampled by the Cinematic Orchestra. It is his first of three solo albums (the others being Oneness and The Swing of Delight) to be released under his temporary Sanskrit name Devadip Carlos Santana, given to him by Sri Chinmoy.

Two tracks from Bill Laswell's Divine Light "reconstruction and mix translation" project of the above two albums (he has also done these for Miles fusion era and Bob Marley) AUDIO 20 minutes total

A Love Supreme

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKWyDBGu4B8

Angel Of Sunlight

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkffKy_7v3A

Album info/review

http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/reviews/cjw6

A couple of years ago producer Bill Laswell caused outrage and delight in equal measure when he did the unthinkable and remixed 1970s Miles Davis for his Panthalassa project. Once again, Columbia have given Bill a set of keys to their archives and this time he's turned his attention to Carlos Santana. No "Black Magic Woman" here though; Laswell has gone for arguably the two most left field items in Santana's back catalogue and those that were most informed by his interest in Eastern spirituality, Illuminations (1974) and Love Devotion and Surrender (1973).

Both of these records were an explicit acknowledgement of Santana's love of (and debt to) John Coltrane; Illuminations was recorded in collaboration with John's widow, Alice, and pitched Santana's trademark ecstatic guitar stylings over a widescreen exotica backdrop of lush strings, rippling harps and sitar drones. Love Devotion and Surrender paired Carlos with Mahavishnu Orchestra leader John Mclaughlin; generally a much heavier affair, it was a tribute to both Coltrane and Shri Chinmoy, guru to both guitarists. Laswell's 'reconstruction and mix translation' has filled out the sound and upped the atmospherics but as on Panthalassa, he's resisted the urge to mess with the original material too much. The result is both a vindication of his approach and a resounding testament to the beauty and power of the music.

The whole of Illuminations appears on Divine Light; "Angel of Air" sets the tone for much of what's to follow with Santana's characteristic sustained lines and blisssful cascading runs weaving their way through massed blocks of strings. It's no New Age Wholefood whimsy though - "Angel of Sunlight" turns up the heat with Dave Holland's propulsive bass locking with tablas and Jack de Johnette's kit drums to provide a platform for some of Santana's most exploratory playing. Four tracks appear from Love Devotion and Surrender; Mclaughlin and Santana's rework of 'A Love Supreme' has been heavily edited, turning it from a flailing, desperate attempt at transcendence through speed guitar heroics to a purposeful homage, while 'The Life Divine' has been given Laswell's Cinemascope treatment to transform it into one of the most blissful slices of prog fusion ever. Coltrane's 'Naima' is a tender, affecting acoustic duet by our heroes. Corny as it may seem, this is deeply spiritual stuff. Laswell's resurrection of these two albums is a thing to be treasured, and lasting proof that there's no place like Om.

 
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Wayne Shorter Quartet - Live In Marciac '13 (VIDEO 60 minutes)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RxkjBin8mOs

Wayne Shorter Quartet - Stockholm Jazz Festival (VIDEO 90+ minutes)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-MLzJ9ksYc

Shorter, one of the greatest living jazz composers, just turned 80 in 2013, but is still very active. That same year, he released Language of the Unknown, a documentary/concert DVD, and received an Instrumental Jazz Grammy for his solo on Orbits from Without A Net (his first Blue Note album in four decades). He also recently received a Lifetime Achievement Grammy Award for his peerless body of work among active jazz artists.

In depth 2013 New York Times review of the Without A Net album.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/03/arts/music/wayne-shorters-new-album-is-without-a-net.html

 
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I just wanted to say THANK YOU for this thread. I've been a big jazz fan for years and I've had the earphones on listening to all the links you've provided.

 
For me it comes down to Miles and Coltrane. I have others that I throw in on occasion (Rollins, Bird, Coleman, Dolphy, Redman, etc) but I listen to Miles and Coltrane probably 95% of the time. Taking it a step further, Coltrane is the #1 jazz musician to me. I love Kind Of Blue and all the others (Sketches of Spain is one of my all time favorite recordings) but Coltrane took jazz beyond anyone in my opinion. I remember going to a record store in the mid 80's and hearing Blue Train on the speaker and being blown away. It was at that point I immersed myself in jazz. Big Steps, My Favorite Things, A Love Supreme, there are so many classics. I give credit to Miles for his longevity and ever reaching creative passion but he never soared as high as Coltrane. It would have been interesting to see where Coltrane went if he lived another 20 years. He probably reached the pinnacle actually, unlike Miles who was hit and miss for the last frame of his career. I believe Coltrane's sound pushed Miles to reach beyond himself as he couldn't catch up. Maybe this is why he branched out into other genres of music (sometimes good, more often than not bad). Who knows? This isn't meant to bash Miles as much is it is to elevate the output of Coltrane. He was simply on a level all by himself TO ME.

 
Bob Magaw said:
Moanin' (by Mingus, from Blues & Roots). Check the collective, simultaneous impovisation by the band. Perhaps much of this is scored and orchestrated, at any rate, this is some of the most powerful and beautiful jazz I've ever heard, in any idiom.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__OSyznVDOY

Charles Mingus (played in the bands of Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and Charlie Parker, don't get much better jazz provenance than that, as far as his curriculum vitae and formative influences).

(snip)
Click to expand...
Some of my Mingus favs:

The above mentioned “Moanin” is untouchable

Tensions: https://youtu.be/Y9KcMfQhn6w?t=18m48s

Boogie Stop Shuffle: https://youtu.be/JY3hJc4sKqs?t=12m59s

Another Mingus I love that often gets skipped over is 1978’s “Cumbia and Jazz fusion” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P61ayfHIm_I

Also, quasi-tangentially-related … Any Mingus fans should watch “Whiplash”. Several of the original pieces for that felt very much to me like Mingus / the Mingus Big Band.

"overture" -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zc71Q5U2Uow

title track: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHhfsu6P-vM

 
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neal cassady said:
I just wanted to say THANK YOU for this thread. I've been a big jazz fan for years and I've had the earphones on listening to all the links you've provided.
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Thank you for your participation, NC, appreciated.

You are obviously into Coltrane (and Miles), and may know them all already (so for the rest of the thread, too), there are some relevant links in the second to last post on page 2 (#99) and fourth post from the top of page 3 (#104).

Since they may have been buried in a blizzard of links, spread throughout the thread, don't know the post number without referencing it, but both the Blue Note label doc, and the Blue Note label relaunch concert video links, are among my favorites out of all of them. The Clint Eastwood produced Monk doc, Straight, No Chaser is highly recommended. Same goes for ANYTHING with Gary Giddins name attached to it, like the Armstrong (Satchmo) and Parker (?) docs. The Jazz Icons Euro concert (the only kind they did) with Coltrane and Eric Dolphy is a must.

I sometimes will put up links before listening, such as the ones last night. I have since seen the first two videos (plan on catching the Shorter concerts soon), and can comment on them.

The Hancock/Corea piano duet from '78 was brilliant, one of the best concerts I've ever seen (though just 40 minutes). I have seen their work, several times, with Miles-led groups, in the late 60's and early 70's (as well as stuff post-Miles, apart). I love the sound of bass (acoustic and electric), drums, horns, etc. But in group settings, they often had to subordinate their playing to the group needs. It was wonderful to hear them playing just the piano, together, complementing each other, listening to each other, basically having a musical conversation. Either one by themselves are capable of Bach-like counterpoint, interweaving a classical sensibility with jazz improvisation and soloing. Hancock and Corea each sort of have a 10 man big band orchestra in their two hands and 10 fingers. Than there are times when the two together start playing counterpoint to the other's counterpoint. Spectacular, amazing individual soloing and interaction between two of the greatest living jazz piano artists.

The Santana/McLaughlin concert also exceptional. In addition to the LDS and Alice Coltrane collaboration albums, there is much more, including songs from Miles' Tribute To Jack Johnson and On The Corner, some lyrical acoustic Spanish-style duets, scorching blues and funk-inflected numbers. It was two years ago, when McLaughlin was 71, but his playing is as fluent as ever, he has lost none of his chops since his incendiary solos in the late '60s through mid '70s, with Miles, Tony Williams Lifetime and The Mahavishnu Orchestra. McLaughlin played on some of my favorite Miles albums [[and therefore, favorite albums PERIOD, in any genre]], such as In A Silent Way, B. Brew and Tribute To Jack Johsnon, and was in fact the singular throughline and only other common denominator in that seminal trio of fusion albums, besides Miles himself, of course (rotating cast of drummers, percussionists, bassists, keyboardists and other horn players). McLaughlin was an important guitarist, another living master. The interaction with Santana, like that with Hancock and Corea, is beautiful and rare. The organist does a great job emulating/replicating the late, great Larry Young's sound and style (one of the key connection points between the two Santana albums that inspired the 2011 concert video in post #111).

Both concert videos (latter two hours plus) HIGHLY recommended.

* A lot of these guys can be seen in the excellent jazz movie dramatization, 'Round Midnight, along with a starring role by the inimitable Dexter Gordon. Another of my favorite jazz movies. And, of course, the Ken Burns doc series. :)

 
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AhrnCityPahnder said:
Bob Magaw said:
Moanin' (by Mingus, from Blues & Roots). Check the collective, simultaneous impovisation by the band. Perhaps much of this is scored and orchestrated, at any rate, this is some of the most powerful and beautiful jazz I've ever heard, in any idiom.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__OSyznVDOY

Charles Mingus (played in the bands of Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and Charlie Parker, don't get much better jazz provenance than that, as far as his curriculum vitae and formative influences).

(snip)
Click to expand...
Some of my Mingus favs:

The above mentioned “Moanin” is untouchable

Tensions: https://youtu.be/Y9KcMfQhn6w?t=18m48s

Boogie Stop Shuffle: https://youtu.be/JY3hJc4sKqs?t=12m59s

Another Mingus I love that often gets skipped over is 1978’s “Cumbia and Jazz fusion” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P61ayfHIm_I

Also, quasi-tangentially-related … Any Mingus fans should watch “Whiplash”. Several of the original pieces for that felt very much to me like Mingus / the Mingus Big Band.

"overture" -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zc71Q5U2Uow

title track: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHhfsu6P-vM
Click to expand...
Thanks, ACP, I'll definitely check those out and post my impressions later.

Mingus was an inexplicable blind spot in my awareness of the all time great jazz instrumentalists and band leaders, I guess I chalk it up to being such a wide and deep subject. One reason for the thread. I was really getting into Mingus and more deep into Coltrane around that time. Recently I started a Krautrock thread, and have been exploring the group Can. They would be filed and categorized under rock, but combine elements of funk, jazz, trance, world, ambient, electronic, avant garde, psychedelic, etc. (unusual background and inception for a "rock" band, founding bassist and keyboardist trained by modern classical composer Stockhausen, drummer had a free jazz background, they may be the most rhythmic-oriented European-based ensemble I've ever heard, they admired sources as diverse as James Brown and indigenous African music, they greatly admired both). They made about a dozen albums, but the below three are widely viewed as their best.

Tago Mago ('71)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLNRCDPKkU0

Ege Bamyasi ('72)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hls8WnUfHbY&list=PL4BDEDF78BE90CDCB

Future Days ('73)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VbAmpn-_yEk&list=PL94gOvpr5yt1O15RNkUaRfPAiViLc0jmQ

Some celebrated live Mingus:

Cornell Concert '64 (with Eric Dolphy) excerpt - Fables Of Faubus

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLA0zT0mr8s

Town Hall Concert

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JP2XFKGKlAw

Amsterdam excerpt

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9PsqYAr7Ewo

The Great Concert (Paris)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUKG0K0hYn4&list=PLcc51NYcXkvEgvSw8NJIWmT0GiVbN3HHj

Monterey excerpt

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fECCAOpVCR4

* The below seven disc box set by Mosaic gathers up Town Hall, Amsterdam and Monterey concerts, and material which is available on CD for the first time, or in some cases, hasn't previously been issued in any form.

http://www.mosaicrecords.com/prodinfo.asp?number=253-MD-CD

 
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Grant Green - Guitar (overflowingly melodic, ceaslessly torrential groove machine :) )

Larry Young - Organ (dubbed the "Coltrane of the Organ" by fellow B-3 maestro, "Brother" Jack McDuff)

Elvin Jones - Drums (swings like mad!)

Played on four Blue Note albums together (three led by Green, one by Young), all to some extent inspired dates/sessions. In order:

Talkin' About ('64 Green - trio)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpGwmlDGbWI&list=PL993B4A6266A0C126

Into Something ('64 Young - quartet, trio augmented by Sam Rivers on sax)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fRTzom2E5tQ&list=PL4B32860D78757FC1

Street Of Dreams ('64 Green - quartet, trio augmented by Bobby Hutcherson on vibes)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUMKVh45KYE&list=PLB5355B9DEDF4B342

I Want To Hold Your Hand ('65 Green - quartet, trio augmented by Hank Mobley on sax)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tonexlw6tOo&list=PL2826F66DBF924A6A

* Also highly recommended, with Young and Jones, the former's seminal Unity ('65), including an organ/drums "power duo". A quartet including a two horn front line with brilliant up 'n comers Woody Shaw on trumpet and Joe Henderson on sax. Young would later help give birth to fusion in the late '60s and early 70s, with Miles Davis, Tony Williams and John McLaughlin (and also played on bootlegs and unrecorded sessions during that time with giants like Hendrix and Coltrane).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bExtnIm-cDQ&list=PL269793D3D10748FB

 
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This is the only jazz thread I know of so it seems appropriate to post here. Kamasi Washington released his real debut jazz album this month. It's called The Epic and that is accurate as it's a triple disc 3 hour long album that covers a lot of jazz history- lots of Coltrane and Miles influences.

Kamasi got a lot of attention earlier in the year as he was one of the main men behind rapper Kendrick Lamar's critically acclaimed To Pimp a Buttetfly album. The Epic has no rap or rap influence do don't exoect some kind of jazz rap crossover. It is pure jazz.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NtQRBzSN9Vw

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=U8NFS8WXfCI

 
Ilov80s said:
This is the only jazz thread I know of so it seems appropriate to post here. Kamasi Washington released his real debut jazz album this month. It's called The Epic and that is accurate as it's a triple disc 3 hour long album that covers a lot of jazz history- lots of Coltrane and Miles influences.

Kamasi got a lot of attention earlier in the year as he was one of the main men behind rapper Kendrick Lamar's critically acclaimed To Pimp a Buttetfly album. The Epic has no rap or rap influence do don't exoect some kind of jazz rap crossover. It is pure jazz.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NtQRBzSN9Vw

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=U8NFS8WXfCI
Click to expand...
Thanks for this, missed it before, I'll check it out (with ACP's generous Mingus thoughts/links).

One of the greatest jazz guitar songs ever? It Ain't Necessarily So (from the Complete Quartets w/ Sonny Clark), immaculate tone, pristine recording by legendary Blue Note (Prestige, etc.) engineer Rudy Van Gelder.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vP1iyEUyHeI

 
Apple Jack said:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/12/arts/music/ornette-coleman-jazz-saxophonist-dies-at-85-obituary.html?_r=0

life mang. :(
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RIP. I've been getting more into avant garde jazz lately, previously I didn't appreciate Coleman's contribution to modern/contemporary jazz. Coincidentally, I just burned a CD for a friend of The Shape Of Jazz To Come yesterday.

Great obit, BTW, thank you, and highly recommended to those in the thread interested in a singular visionary, not just avant garde, but in jazz history.

Excerpt in two parts from the brilliant doc series, Ken Burns Jazz, of Episode 9 - The Adventure (1955-1960) VIDEO 11 minutes. The 40 second commentary by Gary Giddins from 1:10 to 1:50 is an excellent description of how Coleman's guiding spirit, impetus and direction made his music different and noteworthy. Coleman was prescient, in the sense that his example embodied, and his voice augured the rapidly changing, revolutionary social and cultural forces and turbulent times to come.

 
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Aw, man, Ornette Coleman heavily influenced what is possibly my favorite punk/hardcore album ever. The Shape of Punk To Come by Refused was influenced both in title and in spirit by Ornette's The Shape of Jazz to Come. I do not listen to much jazz -- I'm not that hip yet and my brain processes things in a way that needs immediate gratification, but I always liked the aforementioned album and Giant Steps by Coltrane (back in my wilder and more forgettable days).

RIP, Ornette.

The Shape of Jazz to Come

The Shape of Punk to Come

 
Sonny Rollins

Benny Golson

Lee Konitz

Phil Woods

Wayne Shorter

Pharaoh Sanders

ETA: Steve Lacy & Anthony Braxton

 
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Shorter will be at the Playboy Jazz Festival (day one of two) with former Miles band mate Herbie Hancock at the Hollywood Bowl Sat. 6-13. He is in his 80s and still active, I think they both teach at the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz on the UCLA campus.

 
87 year old Lee Konitz is the oldest of the guys I mentioned two posts up. He still appears to be playing a few festival dates in Europe this summer. Konitz was a bit of a transitional figure between bop, cool and free jazz but doesn't fit squarely into any single camp. His individual style on the alto was harder to pigeonhole than some of his contemporaries. He's never been a flashy player but is a uniquely inventive improviser.

Performance from July 2013

The same number from 60 years earlier with Lennie Tristano and Warne Marsh

 
Sucks to lose Ornette. I'm a jazz novice but The Shape... is an amazing album. What would be the next thing to check out of his?

 
Here's a Spotify playlist of ten Coleman tracks.

He released a double LP album in the late 80s titled In All Languages. One record was a reunion of his classic quartet with Don Cherry, Charlie Haden and Billy Higgins while the second was recorded by his electric Prime Time band (2 guitars, 2 drummers and the great Jamaaladeen Tacuma on the electric bass). A few songs on the album were recorded in very different version by both bands. Sadly it's out of print now but it's worth a listen to hear how Coleman's sound evolved in his late 50s. He was never content to backtrack down roads he'd navigated before.

There is one album with Prime Time on Spotify as well as the excellent 1985 collaboration Song X with Pat Metheny, Haden, Jack DeJohnette and Coleman's son Denardo. People who think of Metheny as new agey will be surprised how great he is on this album (well, he's great in general but it's great how he meshes with Coleman and the rhythm section). Coleman rarely performed with a piano in the group so the guitars in his 80s recordings provide both a solo voice and a rhythmic comping role.

 
Eephus said:
Sonny Rollins

Benny Golson

Lee Konitz

Phil Woods

Wayne Shorter

Pharaoh Sanders

ETA: Steve Lacy & Anthony Braxton
Click to expand...
Leo is great- surprised he is still alive actually. When Sonny goes, I'll be real bummed. He's the greatest living jazz legend in my uninformed opinion.
 
Speaking of Sonny Rollins, here's a live performance of God Bless the Child from his early 60s pianoless quartet featuring Jim Hall followed immediately by him absolutely killing in a performance with Leonard Cohen from 1989. I'm not sure Sonny and Cohen are playing the same song but there's no use trying to stop him when he's on a roll like that.

Night Music was the greatest music show ever on American network TV and is likely never to be equaled. The whole episode is outstanding.

 
Eephus said:
Here's a Spotify playlist of ten Coleman tracks.

He released a double LP album in the late 80s titled In All Languages. One record was a reunion of his classic quartet with Don Cherry, Charlie Haden and Billy Higgins while the second was recorded by his electric Prime Time band (2 guitars, 2 drummers and the great Jamaaladeen Tacuma on the electric bass). A few songs on the album were recorded in very different version by both bands. Sadly it's out of print now but it's worth a listen to hear how Coleman's sound evolved in his late 50s. He was never content to backtrack down roads he'd navigated before.

There is one album with Prime Time on Spotify as well as the excellent 1985 collaboration Song X with Pat Metheny, Haden, Jack DeJohnette and Coleman's son Denardo. People who think of Metheny as new agey will be surprised how great he is on this album (well, he's great in general but it's great how he meshes with Coleman and the rhythm section). Coleman rarely performed with a piano in the group so the guitars in his 80s recordings provide both a solo voice and a rhythmic comping role.
Click to expand...
Thanks for the playlist. Listening now and loving it.
 
Eephus said:
Here's a Spotify playlist of ten Coleman tracks.

He released a double LP album in the late 80s titled In All Languages. One record was a reunion of his classic quartet with Don Cherry, Charlie Haden and Billy Higgins while the second was recorded by his electric Prime Time band (2 guitars, 2 drummers and the great Jamaaladeen Tacuma on the electric bass). A few songs on the album were recorded in very different version by both bands. Sadly it's out of print now but it's worth a listen to hear how Coleman's sound evolved in his late 50s. He was never content to backtrack down roads he'd navigated before.

There is one album with Prime Time on Spotify as well as the excellent 1985 collaboration Song X with Pat Metheny, Haden, Jack DeJohnette and Coleman's son Denardo. People who think of Metheny as new agey will be surprised how great he is on this album (well, he's great in general but it's great how he meshes with Coleman and the rhythm section). Coleman rarely performed with a piano in the group so the guitars in his 80s recordings provide both a solo voice and a rhythmic comping role.
Click to expand...
Thanks for the reminder about In All Languages, Eephus. I found a copy at Amoeba. At first, I thought you were talking about the 2 CD reissue Complete Science Fiction Sessions, another reunion album, from earlier. Surprisingly, it is #4 in Funk and #5 in Avant Garde Jazz, on the Amazon genre best seller lists as of today (maybe primarily due to the timing, 7 of the top 10 and like 10 of the top 20 Avant Garde titles are Coleman). Not sure if the Complete Atlantic Recordings box set link below is an ideal intro (Ornette Coleman: Beauty Is A Rare Thing), but if people like him, and don't already have them, it is a nice collection with an booklet essay by insightful music journalist Robert Palmer. I have the original Rhino version, but they reissued it this year to commemorate his 85th birthday (looks like new copies can be found for close to $25). Below that is a youtube link to one of my favorite recordings by Coleman, the two CDs from the Blue Note label, Live At The Golden Circle.

Complete Science Fiction Sessions

http://www.amazon.com/Complete-Science-Fiction-Sessions-COLEMAN/dp/B00004T0PM/ref=sr_1_fkmr1_1?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1434085450&sr=1-1-fkmr1&keywords=ornette+coleman+sci+fi+sessions

"This two-CD set combines a pair of Ornette Coleman's Columbia LPs, Science Fiction and Broken Shadows, and adds three tracks--a new piece, an alternate take, and an alternate mix. Most of the material comes from sessions in September 1971, when Coleman surrounded himself with old associates--including the group with which he'd made his startling New York debut a dozen years earlier: trumpeter Don Cherry, bassist Charlie Haden, and drummer Billy Higgins. Also along were tenor saxophonist Dewey Redman, drummer Ed Blackwell, and trumpeter Bobby Bradford, another longtime associate. The seven musicians recorded as two distinct quartets, as a quintet with Bradford, and as a septet, while other guests contributed to still more permutations. All the musicians were deeply immersed in Coleman's musical language: the complex, sometimes jagged tunes; the emotional directness that drew on the wellspring of the blues; the sprung rhythms and melodic freedom that had first defined the free-jazz movement.

The set's first CD consists largely of quartet and quintet pieces. There are new groupings that take new directions, such as two evocative songs with the gifted Indian vocalist Asha Puthi, accompanied by a septet with two classical trumpeters and Higgins on tympani. And on "Science Fiction," the band breathes seething chaos around the poet David Henderson's voice. Much of the second CD concentrates on the septet, a group that inevitably invokes Coleman's most radical grouping, the "double quartet" that recorded Free Jazz in 1960, with five of the original members present. The pieces here are shorter, with more clearly defined compositional materials, but the collective improvisations are still bracing and the rhythmic dialogues often stunning. While Cherry and Coleman no longer worked together regularly, they shared a vision and empathy unique in jazz, and the shifting densities and internal meters of "Elizabeth" are something to behold. "Good Girl Blues" and "Is It Forever" catch Coleman layering and alternating different components--Kansas City blues, swing, bop, free, and classical--to create unique musical spaces. This is one of Coleman's strangest groupings, with his regular band joined by blues singer Webster Armstrong, guitarist Jim Hall, hard-bop pianist Cedar Walton, and a woodwind quintet. This is essential hearing, varied and intriguing music from one of the greatest architects, composers, and improvisers in the history of jazz."

Ornette Coleman: Beauty Is A Rare Thing - The Complete Atlantic Recordings (6 CDs)

http://www.amazon.com/Ornette-Coleman-Complete-Atlantic-Recordings/dp/B00RC9WLAO/ref=sr_1_1?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1434084744&sr=1-1&keywords=ornette+coleman+beauty+is+a+rare+thing

The Ornette Coleman Trio At The Golden Circle Stockholm Vol. I & II (circa '65)

 
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The eulogies continue to pour in.

Ornette Coleman's Revolution by Richard Brody of the New Yorker

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/ornette-colemans-revolution

One of the main reasons why 1959 is often cited as a watershed year in modern art is the arrival of Ornette Coleman to New York; the release of his first major-label record, “The Shape of Jazz to Come,” in October of that year; and the beginning of his epochal gig at the Five Spot, in November. The radical nature of his work was in its newfound, hard-won simplicity. Coleman, who died on Thursday, was born in Texas, in 1930, and got started playing rhythm and blues. But his advanced ideas—and his idiosyncratic habits—got him into trouble, and he continued having trouble (including insults from critics and from such musicians as Miles Davis and Roy Eldridge) even when he became a seeming overnight success in late 1959 and early 1960, after ten years of struggle.

Coleman was a musician who always thought of his music in philosophical terms; in Shirley Clarke’s film, “Ornette: Made in America,” from 1985, Coleman discusses some of those ideas in detail; he does so, too, in this conversation with Jacques Derrida, from 1997. But the essence of Coleman’s philosophy connects it to the defining trait of philosophical thought from Socrates onward: the puncturing of shibboleths, the rational devaluation of concepts considered essential, the proof through reason that ideas and categories believed to derive from nature are merely convenient artifices and social markers and can easily be dispensed with. But those ideas and categories are dispensed with by those who cherish their freedom of spirit, and often at the cost of their social position. To expose familiar habits as fusty fabrications is to expose oneself to ridicule, as a weirdo, and to persecution, as a threat to the established order.

The order that Coleman overturned with, seemingly, a blast from his alto saxophone is, in a word, bebop. Not that he didn’t love the music of Charlie Parker. (They narrowly missed playing together at a Los Angeles club in 1951 or 1952.) Coleman said, “I wanted to have the experience of him hearing what I had done, because by the time we met, in 1951 or ’52, I was really into what I did later on my own records.” Coleman’s frequent musical collaborator, the trumpeter Don Cherry, explained what went wrong: “When he got to the club, they wouldn’t allow him in because of his long hair.”

Parker took the harmonic structures of popular songs, and of his own compositions, and complexified them, extending the range of improvisations into exotically chromatic realms. But as far as Parker’s solos may have ranged, he and his fellow musicians kept the structure of the tune in their heads, matching chords to bars and replicating, in chorus after chorus, the underlying musical architecture of the composition. Coleman’s idea was to play the melody. He didn’t get rid of the notion of harmony—he and his musicians created magnificent contrapuntal interweavings—but he got rid of the idea of a fixed series of chords that matched to a fixed series of bars and to particular beats within bars. Coleman composed melodies that had wondrous harmonic implications—and he and his bandmates adopted those implications freely, as the inspiration struck them.

Coleman was from Fort Worth and he grew up hearing and playing the blues. Much of his music was inspired by the blues, and the first thing that strikes a listener, upon hearing the 1959 recording, “The Shape of Jazz to Come,” is that, as radicalism goes, it’s damn catchy. The sobriquet “free jazz” may have been an apt slogan for what Coleman was doing, and it became the title for his 1960 album that was built around collective improvisations by Coleman’s “double quartet” (in practice, it featured individual solos punctuated freely with interjections from three other horn players), but much of what Coleman and his fellow musicians chose to do with their freedom involved irresistible melodic invention and deeply swinging grooves.

Yet to working musicians whose sense of form and craft were deeply ingrained—and whose personal artistry and place in the profession were built on improvising on the harmonies of songs—Coleman, for all his lyrical inventiveness and rhythmic drive, was a threat. Jazz could suddenly dispense with their techniques—and when Coleman became an instant succès de scandale, battle lines and generational lines were drawn.

Just as, at the very same moment, the French New Wave swept away many of the conventions of filmmaking while honoring its greatest artistic traditions, Coleman inaugurated a new era in jazz that rendered it instantly pliable to a generation of musicians whose background differed from that of classic artists. The club scene was withering; local bands were often supplanted by recordings; rock and roll had risen to take the place of jazz-like music as the central popular style; and younger musicians were likelier to have conservatory training. The instant, across-the-board freedom that Coleman heralded and that he put into action opened the door to a panorama of possibilities.

By 1962, he had composed a string quartet, while also playing with a trio that meandered through tempi and rhythms with him in vast organic compositions developed on the wing. His trumpeter, Don Cherry, became one of the early avatars of world music; the bassist in his famous quartet, Charlie Haden, became one of the key figures in a sort of archeologically eclectic classicism; and Coleman’s own music took visionary turns (as seen in Clarke’s film) that involved technological and sociological experiments, symphony orchestras, international cross-pollination, and, in the nineteen-seventies, plugging in with a band that featured multiple electric guitars and a new theory that he called “harmolodics.” (He spoke to The New Yorker’s editor, David Remnick, about it in 2000.) Here’s a remarkable early example, from 1978, of its power. It features the guitarist James “Blood” Ulmer, one of the avant-funk masters.

But if there is, above all, one core word for Coleman’s achievement, it’s passing from the realm of music—with its social and conventional implications—to the realm of sound. Coleman broke through style and structure to seek sound. He himself had a sound like no other (initially, playing a plastic saxophone). Coleman is instantly recognizable from a single note, and that sound—separated from the theoretical apparatus of music, from the modes of the profession, from the critical categories of jazz—is inseparable from his very being. Coleman’s liberation of jazz was intimate and personal from the start, for listeners and musicians alike.

Embedded link, one of three 9 minutes sections of Coleman's harmolodic funk with James "Blood" Ulmer ('78).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0HB8ybKJzo&feature=youtu.be&t=33s

From NPR

http://www.npr.org/sections/ablogsupreme/2015/06/11/413630335/ornette-coleman-jazz-iconoclast-dies-at-85

Above includes a link to the song Midnight Sunrise from the album Dancing In Your Head ('77), a collaboration with the Master Musicians of Jajouka from Morocco (a Sufi trance music ensemble called a 4,000 year old rock group by William S. Burroughs).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=23QVY94tAj0

* Another outstanding obit with in-depth bio and historical background info, as well as an insightful interpretation of his impact on jazz, other musical forms of the 20th century and beyond, from The Guardian.

http://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/jun/11/ornette-coleman

 
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I listened to the Metheney/Coleman collaboration Song X samples, great stuff, found that at Amoeba, too. The 20th anniversary edition has some extra tracks and supposedly remastered for better sound.

 
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Gotta say- at this point I'm always surprised that these guys were still alive when I hear about them dying.

Sonny Rollins is still around? wow.

eta: RIP Coleman- that's a big one.

 
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Enjoyed the first day of the Playboy Jazz Festival at the Hollywood Bowl Saturday (tickets still available for the Sunday show starting at 3:00 PM). Couldn't see the whole show, but saw the middle four acts, The Campbell Brothers (I had seen their pedal steel guitar stylings on one of the Clapton Crossroads Festival DVDs - possibly one that also featured Joe Walsh), Jason Moran performing his Fats Waller Dance Party (he dedicated a number to Ornette), The Gerald Wilson Orchestra conducted by his son Anthony (a tribute to the legacy of his late father, who passed last year at 96) and Herbie Hancock/Wayne Shorter with some of their students from the Thelonious Monk Jazz Academy at UCLA (with and without them on some numbers, they were outstanding).

Stopped by Amoeba on the way to pick up used copies of the Coleman titles In All Languages and Song X, as well as two Blue Note titles by Jason Moran, Black Stars and Ten. The former made NPRs 50 Most Important Recordings Of The Decade list. Down Beat put Moran on the cover for sweeping the 2010 yearly polls with the latter album (to commemorate his tenth anniversary with his trio Bandwagon - it was also their first album in seven years), as well as pianist and artist of the year. He won a MacArthur Grant the same year, has been the Kennedy Center's musical adviser for jazz since 2011 and artistic director for jazz since 2014 (taking over for the late pianist/musical educator Billy Taylor), and received many commissions in recent years, often working with multi-media - such as one on Monk made into a documentary. He was classically trained as a child, but described hating the piano until exposed to Monk at the age of about 13. He trained in college or after under Andrew Hill, Richard Muhal Abrams and Jaki Byard. Gary Giddins recently co-authored a standard/intended text titled Jazz, and in his last chapter, he chose Moran to represent contemporary developments and trends.

Moran is the first contemporary jazz artist I've listened to in a long time (I should listen to the radio, but tend to play the classics from my CD/itunes collection, such as Miles, Coltrane, Blue Note, etc.). I'm glad I did, and can see what the ruckus is about. For years, many critics other than Giddins (though he is one of his most influential champions) have hailed him as one of the most gifted and promising young, contempory jazz pianists and artists in general. He is stepped in jazz history, but not burdened by it, often deconstructing it, refracting it through his encompassing sensibility and expressing it through his unique voice, making new history his own in the process.

Thanks again for the recs on In All Languages and Song X, Eephus, they were both brilliant (especially the former). I found Coleman, like Monk was at first for me (for that matter, even some Miles, Coltrane and a lot of jazz when I was younger), to be an acquired taste. I never really "got" Monk until hearing him play a particular song on the Clint Eastwood produced doc Straight, No Chaser, when I had an experience that can be described as inner tumblers clicking into place (had a similar experience with Eyes of the World during the Grateful Dead Movie), where his rhythm and sense of time was no longer jagged, angular and off-putting, but simply original and beautiful. When hearing Coleman initially, it sounded like everybody was playing their own solo simultaneously, and it was like a random cacophany. Lately I have been appreciating him more. I watched the Coleman documentary Made In America again last night after the festival, and while reading the liner notes to In All Languages, realized they were describing some of the same events from that time (being honored by his home town of Fort Worth, the first public performance of Skies Over America, but as originally intended and composed, with orchestra augmented by Prime Time - the label made him cut the band at the time, with only his solo voice added). When listening to In All Languages, I had that same tumblers clicking into place experience. It was no longer a cacophany. The different voices, while never playing in unison, sounded complementary and harmonious. While Coleman has a radically different conception and sense of rhythm and harmony, he has an almost otherworldly melodic gift. Hearing in many cases the same songs in the classic quartet setting, than again with the electrified Prime Time version (for instance, Mothers Of The Veil one of my favorites to get this doubled, mirrored treatment) was a revelation, as well as an example of the guiding spirit and concept of the album title in action.

* Playboy Jazz Festival artist-related

Campbell Brothers

A Sacred Steel Love Supreme (VIDEO 28 minutes)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDAXClAQr78

Jason Moran

Black Stars (with Sam Rivers)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncR_uRzVKU0&list=PLYtl6WGFaWsOBJJ_iCA-NXFtHOcHCrysE

From Ten (RFK In The Land Of Apartheid, Crepuscule With Nellie, Gangsterism Over 10 Years, To Bob Vatel Of Paris)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-7oAvrW1oQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V--dsyTh44c

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5VUT0b0Wngw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cliz1a4bouM

Gerald Wilson Orchestra (VIDEO, close to 20 minutes combined)

Blue For Yna Yna (from Frankly Jazz 1965)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cgzepsWGSns

The Wilson family legacy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w9MjyTahmL4

 
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Ornette's Permanent Revolution by Francis Davis of the Atlantic Monthly ('85)

https://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/unbound/jazz/dornette.htm

ALL Hell broke loose when the alto saxophonist Ornette Coleman made his East Coast nightclub debut, at the Five Spot Cafe, in Greenwich Village on November 17, 1959--twenty-five years ago last fall.

The twenty-nine-year-old Coleman arrived in New York having already won the approval of some of the most influential jazz opinion makers of the period. "Ornette Coleman is doing the only really new thing in jazz since the innovations in the mid-forties of Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, and those of Thelonious Monk," John Lewis, the pianist and musical director of the Modern Jazz Quartet, is reported to have said after hearing Coleman in Los Angeles. (Lewis later helped Coleman secure a contract with Atlantic Records.) Coleman's other champions included the critics Nat Hentoff and Martin Williams and the composer Gunther Schuller, all of whom wrote for the magazine Jazz Review. "I honestly believe . . . that what Ornette Coleman is doing on alto will affect the whole character of jazz music profoundly and pervasively," Williams wrote, a month before Coleman opened at the Five Spot.

Not all of Williams's colleagues shared his enthusiasm, once they were given the opportunity to hear Coleman for themselves. In Down Beat, George Hoefer described the reactions of the audience at a special press preview at the Five Spot: "Some walked in and out before they could finish a drink, some sat mesmerized by the sound, others talked constantly to their neighbors at the table or argued with drink in hand at the bar." Many critics, finding Coleman's music strident and incoherent, feared that his influence on jazz would be deleterious. Others doubted that he would exert any influence on jazz at all. Still others, bewildered by Coleman's music and preferring to take a wait-and-see position on its merits, accused Coleman's supporters at Jazz Review of touting Coleman for their own aggrandizement. Musicians--always skeptical of newcomers, and envious of the publicity Coleman was receiving--denounced him even more harshly than critics did. Some questioned his instrumental competence; the outspoken Miles Davis questioned Coleman's sanity.

Internecine squabbling over the merits of historical movements and geographical schools was nothing new in the jazz world. But not since a short-lived vogue for the rather decrepit New Orleans trumpeter Bunk Johnson two decades earlier (and perhaps not even then) had one musician split opinion so cleanly down the middle. Coleman was either a visionary or a charlatan, and there was no middle ground between advocacy and disapproval. The controversy raged, spreading from the music journals to the daily newspapers and general-interest magazines, where it gradually turned comic. Every VIP in Manhattan, from Leonard Bernstein to Dorothy Kilgallen, seemed to have wisdom to offer on the subject of Ornette Coleman. In Thomas Pynchon's novel V. there is a character named McClintic Sphere, who plays an alto saxophone of hand-carved ivory (Coleman's was made of white plastic) at a club called the V Note.

'He plays all the notes Bird missed,' somebody whispered in front of Fu. Fu went silently through the motions of breaking a beer bottle on the edge of the table, jamming it into the speaker's back and twisting.

FOR those of us who began listening to jazz after 1959, it is difficult to believe that Coleman's music was once the source of such animus and widespread debate. Given the low visibility of jazz today, a figure comparable to Coleman arriving on the scene might find himself in the position of shouting "Fire" in an empty theater.

Looking back, it also strains belief that so many of Coleman's fellow musicians initially failed to recognize the suppleness of his phrasing and the keening vox-humana quality of his intonation. Jazz musicians have always respected instrumentalists whose inflections echo the natural cadences of speech, and they have always sworn by the blues (although as jazz has increased in sophistication, "the blues" has come to signify a feeling or a tonal coloring, in addition to a specific form). Coleman's blues authenticity--the legacy of the juke joints in his native Fort Worth, Texas, where he had played as a teenager--should have scored him points instantly. Instead, his ragged, down-home sound seems to have cast him in the role of country cousin to slicker, more urbanized musicians--as embarrassing a reminder of the past to them as a Yiddish speaking relative might have been to a newly assimilated Jew. In 1959 the "old country" for most black musicians was the American South, and few of them wanted any part of it.

What must have bothered musicians still more than the unmistakable southern dialect of Coleman's music was its apparent formlessness, its flouting of rules that most jazz modernists had invested a great deal of time and effort in mastering. In the wake of bebop, jazz had become a music of enormous harmonic complexity. By the late 1950s it seemed to be in danger of becoming a playground for virtuosos, as the once liberating practice of running the chords became routine. If some great players sounded at times as though they lacked commitment and were simply going through the motions, it was because the motions were what they had become most committed to.

In one sense, the alternative that Coleman proposed amounted to nothing more drastic than a necessary (and, in retrospect, inevitable) suppression of harmony in favor of melody and rhythm--but that was regarded as heresy in 1959. It has often been said that Coleman dispensed with recurring chord patterns altogether, in both his playing and his writing. The comment is not entirely accurate, however. Rather, he regarded a chord sequence as just one of many options for advancing a solo. Coleman might improvise from chords or, as inspiration moved him, he might instead use as his point of departure "a mood, fragments of melody, an area of pitch, or rhythmic patterns," to quote the critic Martin Williams. Moreover, Coleman's decision to dispense with a chordal road map also permitted him rhythmic trespass across bar lines. The stealthy rubato of Coleman's phrases and his sudden accelerations of tempo implied liberation from strict meter, much as his penchant for hitting notes a quarter-tone sharp or flat and his refusal to harmonize his saxophone with Don Cherry's trumpet during group passages implied escape from the well-tempered scale.

Ultimately, rhythm may be the area in which Coleman has made his most significant contributions to jazz. Perhaps the trick of listening to his performances lies in an ability to hear rhythm as melody, the way he seems to do, and the way early jazz musicians did. Some of Coleman's comeliest phrases, like some of King Oliver's or Sidney Bechet's, sound as though they were scooped off a drumhead.

Coleman was hardly the only jazz musician to challenge chordal hegemony in 1959. John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins, and Thelonious Monk, among others, were looking beyond Charlie Parker's harmonic discoveries to some of the rhythmic and structural implications of bop. Cecil Taylor and George Russell were experimenting with chromaticism and pantonality, and a Miles Davis Sextet featuring Coltrane and Bill Evans had just recorded Kind of Blue, an album that introduced a new spaciousness to jazz by replacing chords with modes and scales. But it was Coleman who was making the cleanest break with convention, and Coleman whose intuitive vision of the future bore the most natural relationship to the music's country origins. He was a godsend, as it turned out.

IN 1959 Coleman's music truly represented Something Else (to quote the title of his first album). Whether it also forecast The Shape of Jazz to Come (the title of another early album of Coleman's) is still problematical. Certainly Coleman's impact on jazz was immediate and it has proved long-lasting. Within a few years of Coleman's first New York engagement established saxophonists like Coltrane, Rollins, and Jackie McLean were playing a modified Colemanesque free form, often in the company of former Coleman sidemen. The iconoclastic bassist Charles Mingus (initially one of Coleman's antagonists) was leading a pianoless quartet featuring the alto saxophonist Eric Dolphy and the trumpeter Ted Curson, whose open-ended dialogues rivaled in abandon those of Coleman and Cherry.

Over the years Coleman has continued to cast a long shadow, as he has extended his reach to symphonies, string quartets, and experiments in funk. By now he has attracted two generations of disciples.

There are the original sidemen in his quartet and their eventual replacements: the trumpeters Cherry and Bobby Bradford; the tenor saxophonist Dewey Redman; the bassists Charlie Haden, Scott LaFaro, Jimmy Garrison, and David Izenzon; and the drummers Billy Higgins, Ed Blackwell, and Charles Moffett. These musicians were followed in the late 1970s by younger ones who brought to Coleman's bands the high voltage of rock and funk: for example, the guitarist James Blood Ulmer, the electric bassist Jamaaladeen Tacuma, and the drummer Ronald Shannon Jackson. Some of Coleman's early associates in Texas and California, such as the clarinetist John Carter and the flutist Prince Lawsha, have gone on to produce work that shows Coleman's influence unmistakably.

Coleman planted the seed for the free jazz movement of the 1960s, which in turn gave rise to a school of European themeless improvisors, led by the guitarist Derek Bailey and the saxophonist Evan Parker. Since 1965 Coleman has performed on trumpet and violin in addition to alto and tenor saxophones, and several young violinists have taken him as their model: for example, Billy Bang, whose jaunty, anthemlike writing bespeaks his affection for Coleman. And for all practical purposes, the idea of collective group improvisation, which has reached an apex in the work of a number of groups affiliated with the Chicago-based Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, began with the partial liberation of bass and drums from chordal and timekeeping duties in the first Ornette Coleman Quartet.

IF one listens closely for them, one can hear Colemanesque accents in the most unlikely places: the maundering piano soliloquies of Keith Jarrett and the bickering, simultaneous improvisations of young hard-boppers like Wynton and Branford Marsalis. Yet for all that, Coleman's way has never really supplanted Charlie Parker's as the lingua franca to jazz, as many hoped and others feared it would.

One reason could be that Coleman's low visibility has denied the jazz avant-garde a figurehead. Since his debut at the Five Spot, Coleman has set a price for concerts and recordings that reflects what he perceives to be his artistic merit rather than his limited commercial appeal. Needless to say, he has had very few takers. As a result, he performs only occasionally, and it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that he bears some responsibility for his own neglect.

Just a few years ago it appeared that Coleman's star was on the rise again. In 1977 his former sidemen Cherry, Redman, Haden, and Blackwell formed a quartet called Old and New Dreams. Coleman compositions, old and new, accounted for roughly half of the group's repertoire. If the myth that Coleman had to be physically present in order for his music to be played properly persisted in some quarters, Old and New Dreams dispelled it once and for all. The band played Coleman's music with a joy and a sense of purpose that bore witness to Coleman's acuity as a composer. The success of Old and New Dreams showed that the music that had once been both hailed and reviled as the wave of the future had taken a firm enough hold in the past to inspire nostalgia.

The rapture with which jazz audiences greeted the band's reinterpretation of vintage Coleman owed something to the fact that Coleman himself had moved on to other frontiers--appearing with two electric guitarists, two bass guitarists, and two drummers in a band he called Prime Time. The group provided the working model for a cryptic (and, one suspects, largely after-the-fact) theory of tonality that Coleman called harmolodics. The theory held that instruments can play together in different keys without becoming tuneless or exchanging the heat of the blues for a frigid atonality. (As the critic Robert Palmer pointed out in the magazine The New York Rocker, Coleman's music had always been "harmolodic.") In practice the harmolodic theory functioned like a MacGuffin in a Hitchcock film: if you could follow what it was all about, good for you; if you couldn't, that wasn't going to hamper your enjoyment one iota. What mattered more than any amount of theorizing was that Coleman was leading jazz out of a stalemate, much as he had in 1959. He had succeeded in locating indigenous jazz rhythms that play upon the reflexes of the body the way the simultaneously bracing and relaxing polyrhythms of funk and New Wave rock-and-roll do.

Unlike most of the jazz musicians who embraced dance rhythms in the 1970s, Coleman wasn't slumming or taking the path of least resistance in search of a mass following. Nonetheless, a modest commercial breakthrough seemed imminent in 1981, when he signed with Island Records and named Sid and Stanley Bernstein (the former is the promoter who brought the Beatles to Shea Stadium) as his managers. There is some disagreement among the principal parties about what happened next, but Coleman released only one album on the Island label. In 1983 he severed his ties with the Bernstein agency and once more went into a partial eclipse.

Lately the task of shedding Coleman's light has fallen to Ulmer, Tacuma, and Jackson. They have been no more successful than Coleman in attracting a mass audience, despite a greater willingness to accommodate public tastes--and despite reams of hype from the intellectual wing of the pop-music press. When Coleman next emerges from the shadows, he may have discarded harmolodics in favor of some other invention.

IN the final analysis, Coleman's failure to redefine jazz as decisively as many predicted he would is more the result of the accelerated pace at which jazz was evolving before he arrived in New York than of his lack of activity afterward. During the fifty years prior to Coleman's debut a series of upheavals had taken jazz far from its humble folk beginnings and made of it a codified art music. It was as though jazz had imitated the evolution of European concert music in a fraction of the time. Just as the term "classical music" has come to signify European concert music of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the words "modern jazz" have become synonymous with the style of jazz originally called bebop.

With Ornette Coleman, jazz established its permanent avant-garde--a "new" that would always remain new. If one measures a player's influence solely by the number of imitators he spawns and veteran players who adopt aspects of his style (the usual yardstick in jazz), Coleman finishes among his contemporaries a distant third behind Davis and Coltrane. Yet his accomplishment seems somehow greater than theirs. Davis and Coltrane showed which elements of free form the jazz mainstream could absorb (modality, approximate harmonies, saxophone glossolalia, the sixteenth note as a basic unit of measurement, the use of auxiliary percussion and of horns once considered "exotic") and which elements it finally could not (variable pitch, free meter, collective improvisation). Coleman's early biography is replete with stories of musicians packing up their instruments and leaving the bandstand when he tried to sit in. If Coleman now showed up incognito at a jam session presided over by younger followers of Parker, Davis, and Coltrane, chances are he would be given the cold shoulder. Bebop seems to be invincible, though Coleman and other prophets without honor continue to challenge its hegemony.

The bop revolution of the 1940s was a successful coup d'etat. The revolution that Ornette Coleman started is never wholly going to succeed or fail. Coleman's revolution has proved to be permanent. Its skirmishes have marked the emergence of jazz as a full-fledged modern art, with all of modernism's dualities and contradictions.

NO modern jazz record library is complete without the albums that Ornette Coleman recorded for Atlantic Records from 1959 to 1961, including The Shape of Jazz to Come (SD1317), Change of the Century (SD1327), This Is Our Music (SD1353),Free Jazz (SD1364), Ornette! (SD1378), and Ornette on Tenor (SD1394). Although most of them remain in print, the question arises why Atlantic has never re-issued its Coleman material in chronological order, complete with unissued titles and alternate takes. This seminal music merits such historical presentation.

Coleman's recordings with Prime Time and its immediate precursors are Dancing in Your Head (A&M Horizon SP722), Body Mehta (Artists House AH-1), and Of Human Feelings (Island/ Antilles AN-2001). The group Old and New Dreams, which still exists as a part-time endeavor, has released three albums, including Playing (ECM-11205) and two titled Old and New Dreams on different labels (ECM-1-1154 and Black Saint BSR-0013).

Other essential Coleman includes his album-length concerto for alto saxophone and orchestra, The Skies of America (Columbia KC-31562); his duets with the bassist Charlie Haden, Soap Suds (Artist House AH-6); and his best concert recordings, The Ornette Coleman Trio Live at the Golden Circle, Volumes 1 & 2 (Blue Note BST-84224 and BST-84225, available separately).

* Ornette's liner notes to Change Of The Century, in his own words.

http://www.jerryjazzmusician.com/2014/10/liner-notes-ornette-colemans-change-century-written-ornette-coleman/

 
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Ornetter Coleman: In His Own Language from JazzTimes ('06)

http://jazztimes.com/articles/17404-ornette-coleman-in-his-own-language

There are three styles to music: improvising, composing, and improvising.

Ornette Coleman makes this statement a few minutes into our first conversation, and for a moment Im not sure whether the famously inscrutable alto saxophonist is being coy. But then Coleman quickly corrects himselfI should say, improvising, composing and arrangingand reaches the turnaround: But all those styles use the same intervals.

Coleman is perched on a rectangular couch at his home, a loft in Manhattans midtown garment district. This voluminous apartment occupies the fourth floor of a nondescript commercial building; its main room, all polished floorboards and open space, calls to mind a contemporary art gallery, or perhaps the rehearsal studio of a modern dance company. Its a far cry from, say, the Five Spot, the East Village haunt where Coleman set off a jazz revolution not quite half a century ago.

At 76, Coleman is inevitably a bit grayer than he was then, but he cuts almost the same wiry figure, and engages in some of the same polemics. The culture has changed around him: Hes an NEA Jazz Master now, and the recipient of a MacArthur genius grant. When he performs these days its on a concert stage, a fact that no one seems to find outrageous, regardless of the challenges still posed by his music.

Over the past several years, Coleman has been renewing those challenges with a kind of youthful vigor that many observers feared was behind him. At Carnegie Hall on a JVC Jazz Festival concert several years ago, he premiered a new ensemble with two upright bassists, Tony Falanga and Greg Cohen, and a drummer, his son Denardo Coleman. The quartet, unnamed at the time, seemed to sprout directly out of the terrain of Colemans musical history, while pushing toward whatever bright uncertainties lay ahead.

The group has since performed often enough to become an established entity, though Coleman has characteristically tinkered with its sound and approach. Last year it played a concert in Ludwigshafen, Germany that was recorded for posterity, and the resulting albumSound Grammar, on a newly formed label of the same nameis nothing short of a landmark. Its the first new Ornette Coleman album in 10 years, as mysterious and glorious as anyone might expect. Its release can only be considered a significant event.

For Coleman, of course, the album represents merely one moment in time, a single frame in a moving picture. This summer he returned to Carnegie Hall with a version of his Sound Grammar band that included a third bassist, Al MacDowell, on electric. The sound of the group had already strayed a bit from what was captured on the album, yet it was still quintessentially, almost classically, Ornette.

This makes perfect sense if you allow that Coleman is, more than most jazz artists, an auteur: His career can be understood, in reductive terms, as the product of a steadfast aesthetic pursuit. Sound Grammar crystallizes that fact as vividly as any title in his catalog, though it doesnt go so far as to unravel it. Coleman cant entirely explain it himself, though one clue lies in that runic yet reasonable statement of his: Music may involve a few different processes, but they all use the same intervals.

***

Ornette Coleman is one of a small handful of jazz musicians whose early career can deservedly be described as meteoric. Not in the sense of a meteoric risehe wasnt a prodigy, and besides, meteors do the opposite of risingbut in the manner of something otherworldly, dazzling and disruptive. He blazed onto the scene like some alien object hurtling into the atmosphere, and the force of his impact shook the ground.

If that impact can be traced to a precise moment, it would be Colemans appearance at the Five Spot in November of 1959, with his working quartet of Don Cherry on pocket trumpet, Charlie Haden on bass and Billy Higgins on drums. Not that there wasnt fair warning. A cadre of critics, notably in the Jazz Review, had already heralded the sharp significance of Colemans first few albums, including Tomorrow is the Question!, on the Contemporary label, and The Shape of Jazz to Come, issued on Atlantic one month before the Five Spot gig.

Converts and dissenters alike flocked to that engagement; one musician was so offended by Colemans music that he hauled off and punched the saxophonist in the face. In retrospect, Robert Palmer wrote in the liner essay for Beauty Is a Rare Thing, an invaluable 1993 box set of Colemans Atlantic recordings, the furor that swirled around the Coleman quartet was the sort of event that happens only once in the history of an art form: the Great Divide. The analogous moment in classical lore, he added, would be the riotous premiere of Stravinskys The Rite of Spring.

As is the case with that Russian opus, Colemans output from the late 50s and early 60s no longer registers as incendiary, though its still capable of delivering a welcome jolt to the head and heart. Its formal innovations are easily identifiable: the plasticization of tempo; the explosion of established song structure; an improvisational blueprint based on melodic intuition rather than harmonic prescription. And at a time when modern jazz was palpably crossing a threshold from popular entertainment to intellectual art music, it embodied the promise of some brave and hopeful future. This of course was a general preoccupation of the era; it hardly seems coincidental that 1959 was also a banner year for Tomorrowland, the Disney theme park attraction.

Small wonder, then, that Martin Williams, one of Colemans most perceptive and influential champions, later criticized the progress-fetish titles of the early quartet albums as a tactical error. (Change of the Century, the most immodestly named of the bunch, appeared in 1960.) In his 1970 survey The Jazz Tradition, Williams made a point of connecting Coleman to a host of precursors stretching from the bluesman Sonny Terry to the tenor Lester Young, even as he opined that his music represents the first fundamental reevaluation of basic materials and basic procedures for jazz since the innovations of Charlie Parker. He felt compelled to add, in a footnote: I have heard Coleman play an uncannily exact reproduction of Parkers style, by the way.

Coleman himself still requires no prodding to reminisce about Parker. When I was coming up playing music, I used to go and listen to Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk, he recalls. They were my peers, and I really always wanted to play in the band, and I never did. Maybe I did play somewhere with Monk later, but it wasnt on a level of what I would have chosen to do. But the style and the class of how we are as human beings got in the way of all of that. In my case I have never discriminated against good or bad, because everyone can get better.

***

As a self-taught musician in Fort Worth, Texas in the 1940s, Coleman came up against his share of discrimination, both musical and social. He struggled to make it on the regional rhythm and blues circuit, frequently running afoul of bandleaders and abusive audiences for his flinty, pitch-imperfect style. But one of his early technical frustrations had a decisive impact on his philosophy of sound. The issue in question was transposition, a mental exercise that had reportedly also stymied Parker in his formative years.

Coleman was puzzled by the adjustment in key required by his E-flat alto, and in his autodidactic way, he decided to turn the concept on its ear. One of the fundamental tenets of Harmolodic Theorythe concept formally introduced with the premiere of Colemans 1972 symphony Skies of America, and exemplified throughout the 80s by his free-funk band Prime Timeis the conviction that it shouldnt matter what key an instrument plays in, if intervallic relationships are preserved. (Or even, in many cases, if they arent; for an aesthetic code, Harmolodics is stubbornly resistant to absolutes.)

In conversation, Coleman is fantastically and sometimes frustratingly discursive, but on the topic of transposition he gets both animated and specific. Say you have C natural, he says, and its on the third space in the treble clef. That same note is E natural [in the bass clef]. That same note for a saxophone is C sharp, and for the trumpet, its a D. The violin is getting away with murder! Like many Coleman propositions, this one makes sense only with a bit of interpretative effort.

But he extends the idea, gesturing with his hand to indicate an imaginary piece of sheet music. C natural, if you put it upside down, its an A. But its still the same sound. The only thing that can change sound is emotion. Other stuff just gets in the way and makes it sound like noise. But emotion actually changes sound. Which means that emotion is ten times more pure than sound.

The idea of emotional inflection is not new to Colemans process, though it now seems to play an especially crucial role. I just lately started using that phrase Sound Grammar, he says, but its been in my mind ever since Ive been playing music. Although I do know that in the emotion of human beings, sound is growing: in revolutions, in purpose, and most of all, in freedom. A person can say a word that they know what it means without you knowing what it means, and speak to you in a way that you get a meaning from it.

This reference to speaking prompts some further exploration of Colemans conceptual catchphrase. Grammar articulates relationships, I venture.

Coleman nods. But it also works in the way that adjectives, pronouns and conjunctions do in language. The main thing is that the word improvising is the only word that can be used by anyone in any form they want with different results. What I think improvising is, is adding to the quality of the melody and making a much more interesting idea out of it, collectively. Thats what I think improvising is. I dont think its broken down further. Although the rhythm instruments are probably the truest form of improvising, because you dont think of having whole steps, you dont think of harmonies, you dont think of movement; you think of pure rhythm. Like your heartbeat: Does it beat in 4/4 time? 8/4 time? Its not even measured like that, right? It just beats.

That analogy is classic Coleman; reminiscent of rhythmic patterns should be as natural as breathing patterns, a credo memorialized by Williams. From the start, the saxophonists most articulate supporters have drawn attention to the humanistic pulse and cadence of his music. Around the time of the Five Spot gig, Whitney Balliett weighed in with the observation that Colemans most adventurous tonal flights appear to be attempts to reproduce on his horn the more passionate inflections of the human voice. Coleman still encourages this idea. Every note that has a title has so many frequencies to represent that note, he says. But thats not true of your voice. Were speaking, right? But we dont have to tune up to talk.

Its worth noting that the human voice is a rather sophisticated thing to emulate. Theres no other creature that has an intellectual relationship with rhythm, the way your emotion allows you to appreciate things, muses Coleman. The sad part about that is that when you think of races of color, you think of rhythm, and when you think of races of non-color, you think of class. But theres nobody without rhythm; there are just people who dont know how to make it fit, because of the quality of what its supposed to represent. But with sound, you dont have that problem. And for some reason sound is beginning to be a very important emotional quality, in the voice, in the drums, in the instruments, and in the revolution of ideas.

***

Theres a fundamental tension between the surge of progress and the onward march of time. Tomorrow may be the question, but as each one arrives, you add to a stockpile of yesterdays. Though never a backward-glancing type, Coleman has been revisiting certain themes in concertLonely Woman, his best-loved composition, has become a standard encoreand describing his own work in more holistic terms, as an oeuvre.

And during my first visit to his home, he riffs extensively on the topic of death, unprovoked. At one point, when I make a point about the practical application of Sound Grammar, he responds with a quip: When you said application, you know what I thought of? Life insurance. We both laugh, but then he rolls with the idea. Lets face it: cant nobody be responsible when youre gonna live and when youre gonna die.

I was in Central Park yesterday listening to some people, he says moments later, referring to a SummerStage concert featuring Asha Puthli, the classically trained Indian vocalist who appeared on his 1971 Columbia album Science Fiction, and Dewey Redman, the tenor saxophonist who made for an exceptional improvisational foil on the same recording. It was beautiful. It sounded good. Three weeks later, Redman would be gone, felled by liver failure at age 75.

For a stretch of time, Redman was seemingly as visible a proponent of Colemans vision as the man himself. (He was well qualified for this task; born and raised in Fort Worth, he played alongside Coleman in their high school marching band.) In the 70s, Redman was a member of two highly acclaimed ensembles: Keith Jarretts American Quartet, with Jarrett on piano and reeds, Haden on bass and Paul Motian on drums; and Old and New Dreams, with Haden, Don Cherry and drummer Ed Blackwell, all former members of the Ornette Coleman Quartet. Both ensembles were important elaborations on Colemans legacy, in an era when he was plugging in with Prime Time.

As an outlet and laboratory, Prime Time was a significant development, even a milestone, for Coleman. The groups first album, Dancing in Your Head, was released on A&M in 1977, with one side devoted to an expansion of The Good Life, a theme from the sprawling and often sublime Skies of America. The other side of Dancing included a recorded meeting with the Master Musicians of Joujouka; Robert Palmer, the rock critic, plays clarinet. Significantly, notes Gary Giddins in Visions of Jazz, the album was embraced by members of the rock press and reviled or ignored by the jazz commentators who had hailed the Atlantic-era quartets. (One of the great mind-blowing clips on YouTube.com is a 1979 Prime Time performance on Saturday Night Live, complete with an introduction by Milton Berle.)

Coleman led multiple iterations of Prime Time up through the 80s, enlisting a roll call of musicians including the guitarists Bern Nix and Charles Ellerbee; electric bassists Jamaaladeen Tacuma and Al MacDowell; and drummers Ronald Shannon Jackson and G. Calvin Weston. In 1985 he accepted the invitation of guitarist Pat Metheny to make a collaborative album: Song X, which Nonesuch reissued in a 20th-anniversary edition last year with six illuminating new tracks. There, too, a version of The Good Life appeared.

Before Sound Grammar, the most recent releases under Colemans name were issued a decade ago on his own Harmolodic imprint, distributed by Verve. The albums, Sound Museum: Three Women and Sound Museum: Hidden Man, marked a return to acoustic combo work, though the lessons of Prime Time were still pertinent. And return isnt quite the word, since in addition to a rhythm sectionDenardo Coleman plus bassist Charnett Moffett, whose father Charles Moffett was the drummer on Colemans Blue Note albums At the Golden Circle, Vols. 1 and 2the band included a pianist, Geri Allen. Her work on both albums is remarkable, and not just because she manages to make her instrument defy its usual fixed tonalities. The Sound Museum albums have held up well over time; even better, it would seem, than the contemporaneous duo recording Coleman made with another pianist, Joachim Kühn. Certainly they feel connected to the new release; the melody of P.P. (Picolo Pesos), which appears on both Sound Museum albums, would later resurface as Matador, on Sound Grammar.

The difference between the two releases is that Sound Grammar documents a working band, something Coleman searched vainly for through the latter half of the 90s. In 2000 he appeared on a Bell Atlantic Jazz Festival concert at Battery Park with three separate projects: Global Expression, a well-intentioned but mushy world-rhythm group; Freedom Symbol, an uneven chamber piece inspired by the Statue of Liberty, which was visible in the distance; and a tantalizing reunion with Haden and Higgins that was cut short by the City Parks Department.

At the start of the concert, Coleman walked onstage, one arm in a sling, and briefly philosophized about the universality of music. Among his pronouncements was one that now seems both prophetic and slightly problematic: Sound is free of grammar.

Colemans contemporary quartet premiered on June 25, 2003 at Carnegie Hall. They played an uninterrupted concert-length whorl: exhilarating, knotty and deliriously complex. Denardo Colemans drums and cymbals implied more pulse than time. Greg Cohen plucked his bass, conjuring a slippery groove; Tony Falanga mostly bowed his, in a plangent tone. Coleman wove his way through this fabric, owning the music completely, yet with a generous air.

The group already had some history. Months earlier, Coleman had asked his cousin and manager James Jordan to scout out a bassist with classical technique, and Falanga turned out to be their man: a Berklee-trained jazz bassist who had later earned both a classical degree (at Juilliard) and an assistant principal chair (with the Orchestra of St. Lukes). Ornette heard the way I play with the bow, especially in the higher register, and he was really taken with it, Falanga recalls. After about four or five concerts as a trio, he said: Im going to look for a second bass player so that you can just stay with the bow. That mandate led to Cohen, a bassist whose vast credits include membership in John Zorns Masada, a group partly patterned after Colemans early 60s quartet. It was a perfect fit right away, reflected Cohen a few months after the first Carnegie concert.

There has been ample opportunity to chart the ensembles progress over the past few years, at least in the Northeast: two gripping follow-up concerts at Carnegie Hall, a breezy stand at Newport and a hit in Newark, N.J. with the Bad Plus. Not surprisingly, the group has evolved, though certain characteristics have endured, like the complex dialectic of those multiple bassists.

The reason he has two bass players, explains Falanga, is because a bass note changes the character and the function of whatever note is being played against it. Ornette could play a B and if I play a G, it sounds like hes playing the third; or I could play a C, and it sounds like hes playing the seventh. So he goes, Now I have two of you guys changing the meaning of my notes as I play them. Its the opposite of most people, who rely on the bass to give them the root of the chord.

Then he finds notes that influence us to play a different note, Falanga continues. So hell play a note, and were in another tonality, which could be interpreted in a lot of different ways. Its tough, but when it works it really works, and its totally unique. He did it a long time ago with the double quartet. And then he did it electric with Prime Time. Now hes just taking the bass notes, which are the ones that change everything, and hes getting rid of those other instruments which take up solo territory. Everybodys changing everybody up constantly, so theres new meanings to whats happening all the time.

***

This process, exquisitely expressed on Sound Grammar, is no less evident in rehearsal. So at Colemans invitation, I attend one at his loft, observing an hour and a half of a roughly three-hour session. Al MacDowell is filling the role originated by Cohen, whose schedule has presented a conflict. (The bands bass section now includes Falanga with either MacDowell or Cohen, depending on availability; but Coleman stirred things up by featuring all three on his most recent Carnegie Hall concert.)

Colemans music studio is a cozy space with leopard-print carpeting and two opposing walls lined with books and music. On the top of one bookshelf sits a DVD set of Ken Burns The Civil War and a Charley Patton CD box set, both shrink-wrapped. Coleman, sitting in a chair with his white plastic alto, offers few comments as the band makes its way down a list of songs, running through most of them twice. Some of them, like Those That Know Before It Happens, sound deeply powerful the first time around.

On a brisk new tune, Following the Sound, MacDowell alternates between walking quarter notes and guitar-like chords, fingers flying over his fretboard. What key are you at? Coleman asks him, after the song has snapped to a finish. Without waiting for an answer, he turns the question into a pun: The key is in your pocket, right?

The highlight, among the pieces I heard, was Sleep Talking, which appears on Sound Grammar. As Ben Ratliff has pointed out in the New York Times, its melody suggests the first movement of the Rite of Spring; Colemans sly acknowledgment, perhaps, of the controversy his own music incited at the Five Spot all those years ago. In rehearsal, it begins with Falangas high arco bass and Denardo Colemans bass drum, thumping a heartbeat cadence. Then Coleman enters, his alto crying the blues. MacDowell starts a warped ostinato, vaguely Latin in tone; the effect is that of a DJs remix in real time. Then at no perceptible signal, the ensemble lunges into action, creating a churn both explosive and cohesive. After a few minutes, it ends as sharply as it begins.

But first theres a moment during his solo when Coleman inserts a passing reference to Beautiful Dreamer, the Stephen Foster song. (It seems to be a favorite theme of his: the same quote appears on Sound Grammar, not quite two minutes into a reinterpretation of Turnaround.) Afterwards, he professes not to recall making the referenceIt must be because I like that idea. These things just come and describes his role during rehearsals as that of a provocateur. What I do is prod them, to see where they can go. With the two basses its three of us. But it sounds like more.

A few days after the rehearsal, Coleman and the quartet play a concert in Paris. In October they will travel to Italy for an exceedingly rare performance of Skies of America. Meanwhile, there will be many more rehearsals. We're always rehearsing, constantly, says Denardo, making it clear that this is not a complaint and many more attempts at articulating a vision.

I think that there is something I know, Coleman says, but I think theres something I could know better about. If I speak about it and no one understands it, its not helping me. But if I speak about the things that you do understand, then it helps me to do what I can explain, so you say Oh, thats what he was talking about. Im going through that period right now, and its good and bad at the same time.

One thing Coleman can communicate, with utmost clarity, is a sense of pride regarding a body of work now held in high esteem. Its acceptance, after all, was hardly assured. Ive had musicians come up to me and say, You cant play like that. They took my horn and threw it over a cliff. I mean, its been a long time; theyre not doing that now. But I didnt understand: How would he know if he didnt hear me play? I dont want to play like I played last night! But thats not what he meant. He pauses, as if in reflection. Whats really come to be true is that every race on the planet of life can play any way they want to play, without having to please someone else just to get an opportunity to be heard. And Im so glad: whatever caused that to happen, I hope it gets better.

 
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Ornette Coleman and the Circle with a Hole in the Middle by Robert Palmer ('72)

https://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/unbound/jazz/palmer.htm

THE image on the screen is a village street in Nigeria. Brightly dressed people are clustered in a circle playing drums, giant calabashes, double-reed horns, and a sort of violin with horsehair strings. Ornette Coleman is standing in the middle of the circle, switching from alto saxophone to trumpet and back, laying alternations of skittery runs and long, expressive blue notes into the simmering stew of cross-rhythms and gutty, jagged melodies. The picture focuses and refocuses cyclically on the face of a woman, sad or blank or unknowable like the whitewashed walls of the village. Her ululating rises sharply above the music like the barking of dogs.

Behind the television set a collage covers a brick wall. There is an empty space helmet, a tube oozing green paste, the convolutions of a naked brain, an ARVN officer with a pistol shooting a suspected terrorist through the head. The victim is falling in multiple exposure, changing color from flesh tones to a washed-out gray. A corner is hung with the spirit images of Z. K. Oloruntoba, a Nigerian who paints ghosts and gods into rich, stylized color canvases full of disembodied eyes and mysterious protoplasmic movement. Z.K. is hanging his first New York show downstairs, in the storefront where Ornette often rehearses. Ornette is in another corner, sighting down a pool cue. "Take aim, then hit it," he says, dropping one of his stripes into a side pocket. "If you wait, you lose your aim." The cries of children in the SoHo street float in through the open third-floor window.

Ornette's sparkling green tunic creases and his brow knits as he arches over the pool table. He lives in a world of clear, endlessly permutating images, of global musics, folk and classical and jazz, that interpenetrate. Not so long ago he was dissuaded from putting out an early mix of his Columbia albumScience Fiction that had on it an inordinate amount of echo in the horns. He liked it, he explained, because the echo "made the sound visual, like a mirror." He calls his orchestral piece Skies of America "a kinetic kaleidoscope composition." On the television, the Nigerian video tape has been replaced by the Ornette Coleman quartet performing in Milan. Ornette's trumpet and Dewey Redman's musette are playing a loose unison, both their voices distinct, like the unisons in the Nigerian music. On a table in the center of the large loft are a score for ninety-piece orchestra, notes for Coleman's as yet unpublished book on his Harmolodic Theory, and a box of specially painted postcards announcing the opening of Z.K.'s show. "Aren't his things beautiful?" Ornette asks as he makes another cushion shot. "I met him when I was in Nigeria, bought his work. And just having it in my possession I learned that, you know . . . it's harmless and it's there. Eight ball in the corner pocket."

Whack! "You know, most artists think they're above show business, but an artist is not a different person; he just has a different title. The fact that you're an artist doesn't mean that you're not supposed to learn to read and write and count. It just happens that if you're an artist, you haven't had any time to be doing lots of other things. I know that when I was going to school I was learning geometry, history, and science, and also I had an art class. So education must include all those things as having something to do with the concept of value in relation to intelligence. I never thought of myself as being a person that just dealt with music and everything else was irrelevant. I like the involvement of bringing things into existence that better the life of people. I love that concept. And whatever it's called, to me that's art. Do you want to rack up the balls for another game?"

Ornette's conversation is often like his painting The Circle with a Hole in the Middle, which graces the cover of his Atlantic album The Art of the Improvisers. His music manifests the same thought pattern, circling around the theme, moving far afield, returning to the starting point when you least expect it, and moving away again, progressing by variations of feelings and ideas, balanced like Humpty Dumpty on the edge of the void, the hole in the middle of space and time.

The Ornette Coleman quartet that debuted in New York at the old Five Spot, in the fall of 1959, approached the void and, at times, tumbled into it. The listeners that first night included Leonard Bernstein, Gunther Schuller, Nesuhi and Ahmet Ertegun, John Hammond, and almost every musician in town. Some heard formlessness and chaos, others a sound that would radically alter the course of jazz and inform the work of a generation of musicians to come. "In the music we play," Ornette said, "no one player has the lead. Anyone can come out with it at any time." This new approach to group playing looked ahead with its polyrhythms, geared to exploration rather than to predetermined patterns, and its melodies that proceeded through a complex of unstated modulations rather than riding on a cushion of traditional chord progressions. But the music looked back through the jazz tradition with its collective improvisations and its personal, speechlike approach to intonation and phrasing, so much like the ensemble and solo styles of the early Southern and Southwestern blues and jazz musicians. In the fall of 1971, Ornette reassembled his original quartet to record Science Fiction. In twelve years the style had become classic, distilled into the kind of unique, breathtaking perfection that characterized the work of Lester Young, Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, and a handful of other black innovators.

By the beginning of 1972 twenty-one Ornette Coleman albums were listed in the Schwann catalogue. All but one were small group recordings, and all but two or three of the compositions were Coleman originals.

"I started writing before I started playing," he explains. "I didn't start playing until later, because nobody would hire me. But when I went to audition my tunes for Les Koenig [of Contemporary Records, Los Angeles] he liked me playing my own music, so I got the date. And yet it's been twelve years and they're still saying I haven't paid off the cost of the record." For a decade Ornette channeled his compositional ideas into providing frameworks for his combo to improvise on. Somehow he found time to write a string quartet and a piece for strings and woodwinds. Then he was awarded a Guggenheim, which allowed him to devote more time to writing, and last summer Skies of America, a full-length work for soloist and symphony orchestra, was given its premiere at the Newport-in-New York jazz festival.

In a sense, the composition is "about" the many things that have happened to Ornette Coleman since March 19, 1930, when he was born in Fort Worth, Texas, "under America's skies." More specifically, it is about being black, feeling exploited, working for recognition as an artist and a man in a society that has often been aloof, condescending, or hostile. He started on the alto saxophone at the age of fourteen, switched to tenor two years later, and played in numerous Texas rhythm-and-blues groups. He first left Fort Worth as a teen-ager, with a carnival band. He was dismissed from the tent show for playing bebop, stranded in New Orleans, threatened by racist sheriffs in Mississippi. In Baton Rouge a gang of roughnecks beat him up and threw his tenor off a hill, so he went back to the alto, which is still his principal horn.

He went to Los Angeles with Pee Wee Crayton's blues band and spent the better part of the fifties there, working at various odd jobs, studying music theory, practicing and composing whenever he could. He continued to develop his own expression, and gradually a few musicians began to understand, especially the trumpeter Don Cherry, bassist Charlie Haden, and drummers Ed Blackwell and Billy Higgins. Ornette, Cherry, Haden, and Higgins worked with pianist Paul Bley at Los Angeles' Hillcrest club in 1958, and struck out on their own later that year.

During the sixties he was the subject of numerous articles, which either idealized or vilified him, and a series of "misunderstandings" with record executives and club owners made him more and more distrustful of the white middlemen who still control the presentation and dissemination of jazz and popular music in America.

"America is a very good country for a Caucasian human being," he says, "because regardless of what his native tongue is, if he changes his name and speaks English he could be of any Caucasian descent. And believe me, that is a very successful form of freedom. If you're black you can change your name, you can do anything you want to, but the color of your skin defeats you from having the same privileges as what I just spoke about. This is the tragedy of America.

"John Lennon says women are the ######s of the world. Well, I guess the Jewish, the Italian, and the Irish people were the ######s of the white world. But you can take any Irish or Jewish or Italian person, and when they return from their job and go home they are returning to an original concept of who they are as a person. When they're on the street, selling their merchandise or doing anything to relate to the country in a land of the free, home of the brave situation, they speak English, take an English name, and that's it. When they get home, whatever their name is or whatever they are knowing in their ancestral background, they can live that. And I think that is very beautiful for a human being to have, where he can go out in the world and make a living for himself and then come home and have his ancestral roots still intact. That is one thing that black people here have never yet had. I'll tell you, man, I'm so tired of feeling that being black in America has something to do with not being white in America that I find I can no longer be involved in social functions that have to do with intellectualism or art or racial questions. Knowing the things I've just said to you, I find myself being totally . . . paranoid about some person trying to get ahead in life when I'm one of the many persons he can use to get ahead without feeling that he's doing anything wrong.

"I would like to have the same support for Skies of America as any artist that the public has heard and enjoyed. And everybody in their heritage and natural state of being wants success; no one is basing their involvement in anything on a negative attitude. I'm speaking about success humanly, intellectually, racially, financially, and religiously. I mean success in those senses of knowing that they have something to do with having less enemies and more friends, or less debts and more objects, less evil and more love, or less hatred and more happiness. And I don't want someone to pat me on the back and not truly listen or try to understand the piece of music. I get lots of lip service that has to do with the value of my work having to always be dictated to me by people who have no interest in my welfare at all. I've written lots of music, but not because I wanted to have someone say oh, isn't he a wonderful writer. I wrote the music because I could write the music, and then secondly I wrote it because if I hadn't written it down I wouldn't have had any way of keeping it and explaining it to others.

"One day I finally realized that all the music I had heard, someone had made it possible for me to learn or hear it by simply writing it down or repeating it. So since I became aware that it had something to do with writing, I decided that was what I wanted to be. That's the concept of Skies of America: to give people an insight into things that I've done and to show them that they could also participate with me in doing it.

"Anywhere you go," he says, "you're going to have some problems with people not getting into your music. And you're going to get lip service."

The modern black American composer-improviser is particularly subject to this lip service syndrome, and to what Ornette calls "a very New York cliche thing: people satisfying you mentally but never giving you anything that you want." One reason is that the music of an Ornette Coleman, a Cecil Taylor, an Anthony Braxton, or a Sun Ra draws on a much wider spectrum of influences than many listeners have been exposed to. In addition to past and present jazz, there are the repertoire of modern concert music, the amplification and pulselike beat of rhythm-and-blues and rock, and the infinitely diverse musical traditions of the emerging nonwhite nations. The black composer may use in a single piece elements from any number of these primary sources. Living as he does in Western urban centers, wired into the output of cultures he would never have come into contact with a few decades ago, he hears, and uses, any music that comes naturally to his particular sensibility.

The more he hears, the more connections he makes. The vocalized scream in Ornette's sound, for example, is a tone split into its harmonics or overtones. This practice was characteristic of blues musicians and singers as far back as the beginnings of "race recordings," and it can be heard in pure African music. Ngbaka (central African) soloists on the musical bow are able to draw a multitude of harmonics from the single "ground" tone of the bow's string, just as a saxophone virtuoso like Ornette runs harmonics over a root that is sounded simultaneously. But modern European and American "classical" composers are also interested in harmonics. Iannis Xenakis, for instance, often indicates in his scores which particular partials of a given tone are to be sounded. The complex African polyrhythms currently in favor with many jazz groups were finding their way into modern concert music as early as Varese's 1931 Ionization. And many of today's major jazzmen were playing "jazz/rock" long before its current vogue, often because the only jobs they could get were with rhythm-and-blues bands.

This unusual number of reference points has left much of the new black music in a commercial vacuum. The music is often too intricate and demanding for the traditional smoke-filled nightclub, but it has yet to attract the widespread private and foundation support that would make regular concert hall performances possible. While some of Coleman's contemporaries, such as Cecil Taylor and Ken MacIntyre, have accepted positions in the black studies programs of Eastern universities, others--Pharaoh Sanders, Sun Ra--continue to function in the nightclub milieu. Ornette, who continues to write for his quartet as well as for orchestra, and whose recently completed theory book is potentially a major shaping influence on the younger generation of black composer-instrumentalists, hopes to utilize all these outlets, provided, of course, that they become available to him. Since Skies of America's premiere he is beginning to feel that maybe he's on an upswing.

DOWNSTAIRS, Z.K.'s show is opening. Champagne is being served to a mixed crowd of musicians and artists. The Nigerian video tape is playing and Ornette Coleman, dressed in a neat, conservative suit, walks from circle to circle, greeting friends and making conversation. The scene in the gallery and the image on the screen merge into a continuum of circles, with Ornette in the middle of each one.

 
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Bob Magaw said:
Excerpt in two parts from the brilliant doc series, Ken Burns Jazz, of Episode 9 - The Adventure (1955-1960) VIDEO 11 minutes. The 40 second commentary by Gary Giddins from 1:10 to 1:50 is an excellent description of how Coleman's guiding spirit, impetus and direction made his music different and noteworthy. Coleman was prescient, in the sense that his example embodied, and his voice augured the rapidly changing, revolutionary social and cultural forces and turbulent times to come.

Click to expand...
Fabulous.

 
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Avant-garde etymology (also avant garde, avantgarde); French, literally "advance guard" (see avant + guard (n.)). Used in English 15c.-18c. in a literal, military sense; borrowed again 1910 as an artistic term for "pioneers or innovators of a particular period."

The avant-garde générale, avant-garde stratégique, or avant-garde d'armée is a strong force (one, two, or three army corps) pushed out a day's march to the front, immediately behind the cavalry screen. Its mission is, vigorously to engage the enemy wherever he is found, and, by binding him, to ensure liberty of action in time and space for the main army. ["Sadowa," Gen. Henri Bonnal, transl. C.F. Atkinson, 1907]

Ornette/Prime Time

Dancing In Your Head (AUDIO 35 minutes)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHacXpUis1U

BODY META (AUDIO 42 minutes)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BgsbgtDipHE

Picolo Pesos and What A Friend We Have In Jesus from Sound Museum/Hidden Man and Three Women, respectively (noteworthy, because Geri Allen was the first pianist to play with Coleman since, possibly pre-'59 - he found fixed-note harmony instruments too rigid for his improvising flexibility preferences)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JG2FeoqQtdk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LRG8lu4QRs

Guesting on Sonny Rollins Road Shows Vol 1 2010 Sonnymoon For Two (AUDIO 20+ minutes)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhXlwdkcLc4

With the Grateful Dead 2-23-93 The Other One (AUDIO 12 minutes)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0LyIw0eA9XE

 
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I'm curious what you thought of the Kamasi Washington album? I know so little of Jazz, but I thought it was really impressive. I'm curious what those with more experience with jazz think.

 
I still need to check it out, but coincidentally, I saw him play Saturday, he was one of the featured soloists for the Gerald Wilson Orchestra. As soon as I looked up his resume on wiki, I instantly recognized his face, his playing was great. Consider my interest even more piqued than before.

 
Sun Ra - In The Orbit Of Ra "Greatest Hits" Compilation (recent and imo best career spanning retrospective, highly recommended "crash course" in Sun Ra, 2 CDs)

Essential Sun Ra Discography article

http://www.factmag.com/2012/05/25/the-essential-sun-ra/

Sun Ra - The Ultimate Guide Parts I & II

http://www.furious.com/perfect/sunraguide.html

http://www.furious.com/perfect/sunraguide2.html

Sun Ra Arkive - Interview with Irwin Chusid, Administrator for Sun Ra Music (on Mastered for iTunes reissues)

http://sunraarkive.blogspot.com/2014/09/exclusive-complete-interview-with-irwin.html

Interview with John Szwed, author of Sun Ra - Space Is The Place, the definitive biography.

http://www.furious.com/perfect/sunra2.html

 
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10 Sun Ra Albums to Blow Your Mind

Calling Planet Earth: Sun Ra, the Original Space Musician: A 100th Centenary Tribute

https://echoesblog.wordpress.com/2014/05/22/10-sun-ra-albums-to-blow-your-mind/

Author includes the liner notes he wrote for Languidity, one of Sun Ra's best from the late 70s.

Sun Ra: 10 Essential Tracks

This year marks the 100th anniversary of Sun Ra's birth, and his interstellar take on jazz and funk continues to live on and inspire to this day. Jason Heller chronicles the pioneering Afrofuturist's career and offers a playlist of highlights. 7-1-14

http://pitchfork.com/features/starter/9447-sun-ra-10-essential-tracks/

An NPR five track/album beginner's guide and Sun Ra primer

http://www.npr.org/sections/ablogsupreme/2014/05/22/314363815/act-like-you-know-sun-ra

 
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