Fu ck me - this is a bad day. Sir Christopher Lee, Ron Moody and now Ornette Coleman. No more for now please death.




[www.theguardian.com]

Ornette Coleman, one of the most influential and innovative figures in jazz history, has died at the age of 85. He suffered a cardiac arrest, according to his family, and died in Manhattan, where he lived.

Coleman’s greatest breakthrough came in 1959, with his albums The Shape of Jazz to Come, a break from the bebop style that had been so influential in the genre, and a landmark in avant garde jazz. His music polarised jazz fans, with reports of people walking out of shows, or arguing at his gigs with fellow audience members.

In 2007, Coleman told the Guardian why he had adopted his approach to the saxophone. “They were playing changes,” he said of the bebop players, “they weren’t playing movements. I was trying to play ideas, changes, movements and non-transposed notes.”

Coleman indeed brought a new vocabulary to jazz, in the widest terms: melody, instrumentation, technique were all taken in new directions in his music. He received the Pulitzer Prize for music in 2007 for his album Sound Grammar.

Coleman bought his first saxophone with money he had earned from shining shoes, and learned to play it as if it were a toy. “I didn’t know you had to learn to play,” he told the Guardian. “I didn’t know music was a style and that it had rules and stuff, I thought it was just sound. I thought you had to play to play, and I still think that.”

He unveiled his free jazz direction in November 1959, with a residency at the Five Spot club in New York. Critic George Hoefer wrote in Downbeat of the shows: “Some walked in and out before they could finish a drink, some sat mesmerised by the sound, others talked constantly to their neighbours at the table or argued with drink in hand at the bar.”

At this distance, it is hard to imagine the furore his music provoked, but it was revolutionary at the time. Guardian jazz critic John Fordham wrote of The Shape of Jazz to Come: “Some of it resembled bebop, but of a fragmented, idiosyncratically-paced variety. Some of it was hauntingly intense.”

He exerted influence outside the field of jazz, too. In later years, like Miles David, he explored electric music, working with musicians including Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead. In return he appears on stage twice with the Dead in 1993.

Lou Reed, who employed free jazz-inspired guitar playing with the Velvet Underground, professed his admiration, saying: “When I started out I was inspired by people like Ornette Coleman. He has always been a great influence.” John Zorn recorded an album of punk-influenced versions of Coleman songs in 1989, Spy vs Spy, and when the Swedish punk band Refused set out to reconfigure their genre in 1999, they did so with an album that made explicit reference to Coleman: The Shape of Punk to Come.

RIP

Ornette Coleman Quartet - North Sea Jazz 2010 (part 4-5)

A lovely article from The New Yorker Magazine:
Ornette Coleman’s approach to improvisation shook twentieth-century jazz. It was a revolutionary idea that sounded like a folk song.

A very slight and subtle Stones connection - see if you can find it.


Seeing Ornette Coleman
By Taylor Ho Bynum


The most radical artistic innovations often seem deceptively simple in retrospect—more a recognition of a universal truth than the discovery of something new. To paint shape and color rather than image. To give as much weight to a word’s sound as to its meaning. To recognize the music inherent in silence.

Ornette Coleman posited that the infinite improvisational possibilities of a melody could thrive outside of a predetermined structure, that musical ideas could flow and expand in the moment as naturally as breath or speech or thought. A simple idea that shook the world of twentieth-century music—a revolutionary idea that sounded like a folk song, lilting with the loving congeniality of a parent singing to a child.

Coleman was always an outsider. While others fixated on the fluid virtuosity and harmonic sophistication of Charlie Parker, Coleman heard the bluesy cry in Parker’s tone and the rhythmic unrest just beneath the surface. He spent his early twenties touring with carnival shows and rhythm-and-blues bands, suffering ridicule (even physical abuse—he was once actually attacked and beaten after a gig) for his unconventional approach. He eventually found his way to Los Angeles, where he worked part-time as an elevator operator and began to find new allies amidst the disdain. With long hair and a beard, long before that look was in fashion, and wearing a heavy overcoat in ninety-degree weather, Coleman scared the trumpeter Don Cherry at their first meeting. But the music drew Cherry in, and soon their symbiotic telepathy recalled Parker and Dizzy Gillespie’s. In addition to Cherry, such burgeoning master improvisers as the bassist Charlie Haden and the drummers Billy Higgins and Ed Blackwell heard the magic in Coleman’s concept and dedicated themselves to its ensemble realization.

In a jazz industry often obsessed with young lions, Coleman didn’t make his recording début until a month before his twenty-eighth birthday (“Something Else!!!!” on Contemporary Records in 1958). From the beginning of the album, you can recognize his mature conception, even while you hear Coleman and Cherry chafing at the more conventional forms imposed by the pianist and bassist that the label brought in. By the following year, now accompanied by like-minded collaborators of his own choosing, Coleman moved to New York City and began a series of classic recordings for Atlantic Records—including “The Shape of Jazz to Come,” “Change of the Century,” and “This is Our Music”—which lived up to their propitious titles. He also began an extended residency at the Five Spot, in New York City, that solidified his role as the figurehead of the “new music.”

Sporting a white plastic alto saxophone (matched by Don Cherry’s toy-like pocket trumpet), abandoning traditional song form and chord changes, with the microtonal vocal cry of his horn following the unforgettable cadences of his melodies, Coleman became the contentious flash point for arguments over the validity of the avant-garde. Critics were divided, pro and con, five-star reviews against zero stars, no middle ground. Some musicians rallied in Coleman’s defense, others denounced him as a charlatan. It was the loudest argument in jazz since the emergence of bebop, and perhaps the last loud enough to echo into the popular consciousness. In Thomas Pynchon’s 1963 novel “V.”, a thinly veiled character named McClintic Sphere appears, playing a “white ivory” saxophone at the “V Spot.” Pynchon’s wonderfully terse parody of the portentous debate around Coleman’s music is as follows:

“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.

Over fifty years later, it is hard to remember what all the fuss was about—Coleman’s music is so naturally swinging, so melodic, so bluesy, especially in comparison to the more extreme abstractions of his near contemporaries such as Cecil Taylor or Albert Ayler. But we take for granted how profound his influence was. Without Coleman’s lead, neither the spiritual explorations of the late John Coltrane Quartet nor the elegant deconstructions of the Miles Davis Quintet with Wayne Shorter would have existed. Experimental rockers from the Velvet Underground to Sonic Youth cite his example; everyone from Yoko Ono to the Grateful Dead sought his collaboration. Sourcing from those examples alone, you can draw a family tree of most of the creative jazz and popular music of the past half century.

One of those Atlantic recordings, “Free Jazz,” featuring Coleman’s double quartet, was famously paired with a Jackson Pollock painting as the cover art. While the modernist comparison with Pollock is apt, I would argue the term “free jazz” is a continuing misnomer—for all its humanistic abandon, Coleman’s music is deeply grounded in structure and concept. (The term has created other misunderstandings: a rare double quartet-concert, in Cincinnati in 1961, was cancelled after a near-riot, because the patrons took the marquee billing “Ornette Coleman—Free Jazz” too literally and refused to pay admission.)

After his initial breakthrough, Coleman continued to push boundaries, in his own idiosyncratic way. He introduced more accomplices fluent in his language, like the cornet player Bobby Bradford and the tenor saxophonist Dewey Redman, two other native Texans who combined bluesy melodicism with searching improvisatory flight, as featured on Coleman’s brilliant 1971 album “Science Fiction.” He brought in his then ten-year old son Denardo to play drums on several late-sixties recordings, prioritizing a child’s joyful musical curiosity rather than technical expertise—and continued that familial collaboration for the rest of his life, as Denardo matured into one of his most frequent and trusted collaborators. Coleman taught himself how to play violin and trumpet, adding new colors to his improvisational palette—while he did not play traditionally, he coaxed sounds out of those instruments that were wholly his own and beautifully inimitable.

He composed for orchestra (“Skies of America”) and for trumpet and string quartet (“The Sacred Mind of Johnny Dolphin”), and he played with The Master Musicians of Jajouka and on film scores (“Naked Lunch”). In the nineteen-seventies, he embraced the possibilities of electric ensembles, mentoring a crew of young musicians that included James ‘Blood’ Ulmer, Bern Nix, Jamaaladeen Tacuma, and Ronald Shannon Jackson and creating Prime Time, a band that turned funk into Coleman’s own harmolodic fantasy. On extraordinary recordings such as “Body Meta” and “Dancing in Your Head,” Coleman layered line upon line and rhythm upon rhythm, trusting that the inherent beauty of his melodies and the relentless pulse of his rhythms would be amplified, not obscured.

The first time I saw Ornette Coleman in concert was at the San Francisco Jazz Festival in 1993, a double bill of a revamped Prime Time (with doubled keyboards, guitars, basses, and percussion) and a new acoustic quartet with the pianist Geri Allen, the bassist Charnett Moffett (the son of Coleman’s longtime drummer Charles Moffett), and Denardo on drums. During the intermission, Coleman invited an extreme-body-modification performance artist named Fakir Musafar to offer a demonstration—which featured young people in various states of undress being pierced through the cheeks, breasts, and other seemingly un-pierceable body parts. (My favorite line from the shocked jazz-festival crowd: “Jesse Helms is on the phone—he wants to talk about your funding!”). I later read in an interview that Coleman was interested in the ability of the body to overcome pain; what most saw as courting controversy was actually yet another example of his continual curiosity. And the music reflected that ongoing search. With two keyboards, a classical acoustic guitar, and a tabla, Prime Time had morphed from free-funk propulsion to a thick, impressionistic stew; the acoustic quartet with piano mirrored a classic jazz format yet remained untethered fom jazz cliché. Neither set sounded like anything I’d heard from Coleman before, but both sounded like nothing but Ornette Coleman.

The final time I saw Coleman live was at Carnegie Hall in 2006, this time in yet another unique ensemble—a quintet with Coleman, three bassists, and Denardo again on drums. With that much activity on the sonic bottom, the music was a marvelously oblique rumble, a tangle of thick roots over which Coleman’s alto blossomed. He was seventy-six years old at the time, but his sound, his whole concept, sounded impossibly fresh yet familiar. I remember he closed the concert with an encore of “Lonely Woman,” perhaps his most famous composition and a gesture to his past. As ever, the music was deceptively simple and implacably radical. Ornette Coleman ignored the boundaries between high art and folk music, between modernism and tradition; he recognized that the most human impulse is to explore and search for beauty. It is to all of our benefit that his own search was so fruitful.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2015-06-13 15:46 by latebloomer.

Apparently the bass riff of Ian Dury's 'Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll' was nicked from an Ornette Coleman song - Ramblin' off his album 'Change of the Century'.........

"Ian Dury once apologised to Coleman for lifting the riff but, as Coleman explained, he (or possibly Haden) had lifted it himself from a Kentucky folk tune called "Old Joe Clark". An alternative version to this story exists: as Dury explained when he guested on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs, he had apologised to Haden at Ronnie Scott's Club for the riff lift, who responded by saying there was no need for an apology as he had lifted it from an old Cajun tune".

[en.wikipedia.org]

Neither set sounded like anything I’d heard from Coleman before, but both sounded like nothing but Ornette Coleman.

Ornette Coleman ignored the boundaries between high art and folk music, between modernism and tradition; he recognized that the most human impulse is to explore and search for beauty. It is to all of our benefit that his own search was so fruitful.

Nice quotes from an indeed lovely article. Thank you latebloomer for bringing it here! And of course the Stones connection is that he played with The Master Musicians of Jajouka.

Incredible musician. RIP