Ornette

Ornette Coleman Trio Performing The Soundtrack (1966):

Via @destinationout

Weekend Reading

I want to stimulate them instead of asking them simply to accompany me in front of the public. But I find that it's very difficult to do, because the jazz musician is probably the only person for whom the composer is not a very interesting individual, in the sense that he prefers to destroy what the composer writes or says.
...
Most people thought that I just picked up my saxophone and played whatever was going through my head, without following any rule, but that wasn't true.

-Ornette Coleman to the French philosopher Jacques Derrida in an interview for the French magazine Les Inrockuptibles, 1997. Read the whole thing here.

Sonny and Ornette

Lest you forget that the modern world is a wonderful place, here is a video from Friday night's Sonny Rollins birthday extravaganza with special guest Ornette Coleman. Roy Haynes is on drums, Christian McBride is on bass. Read Jason Crane's review of the evening here.

Pat Metheny Just Blew My Mind

This week in The Guardian, Pat Metheny had this to say about Ornette Coleman (emphasis added):

There's no compromise with Ornette - you have to go into his yard to play.When we recorded the 1986 album Song X together, we wanted to make something unlike anything either of us had done before. I think we created something unique. He is one of the most beautiful souls on the planet, a truly gentle person as funny as he is deep. But I don't think I ever got to understand "harmolodics." When musicians talk about it like they know what it means, I listen warily. When a critic does, you can be sure he's full of it.

No idea? Metheny is the last person I would expect to say this, but now I feel a lot better about not understanding it.


h/t: A Blog Supreme

Ornette's Children

The fiftieth anniversary of the recording of Ornette Coleman's The Shape of Jazz to Come has come and gone, and while other sites have offered their own tributes, I thought I would share an iTunes playlist I call "Ornette's Children." Some of the selections on the playlist are Coleman tunes reimagined by his artistic heirs, some are originals composed and performed by some of his disciples and former sidemen, and others are merely tunes that could not have happened without Ornette. I like to throw it on the iPod and shuffle it, so the tracks are in no particular order. This is certainly not an exhaustive list, just tracks from my own library that I particularly like.

• Air: Do Tell, from 80 Below '82
  
• Anthony Braxton: Peace, from Solo (NYC) 2002
  
• The Bad Plus: Street Woman, from Give
  
• Eric Dolphy: Iron Man, from The Illinois Concert
  
• Greg Osby: Mob Job, from Channel Three
  
• Greg Osby and Joe Lovano: Broad Way Blues, from Friendly Fire
  
• Joe Lovano: Ettenro, from Sounds of Joy
  
• John Zorn: Zig Zag, from Spy Vs. Spy
  
• Old and New Dreams: Broken Dreams, from Playing
  
• Pat Metheny: Rejoicing, from Rejoicing
  
• Pat Metheny, 80/81, from 80/81
  
• Pat Metheny and Ornette Coleman: Trigonometry, from Song X
  
• Pat Metheny: Law Years, from Question & Answer
  
• Paul Motian: Mumbo Jumbo, from Sound of Love
  
• Roscoe Mitchell: Ericka, from Nonaah
  
• Scolohofo: Brandyn, from oh!
  

What would you add to the list? Leave your suggestions in the comments.

Listening to Free Jazz

If one record can be said to be responsible for the Jazz Wars, then Ornette Coleman's Free Jazz (A Collective Improvisation) would surely have to be a candidate. Along with John Coltrane's Ascension, Free Jazz is one of the more radical points of departure in the avant-garde canon. Instead of one quartet, it features two. Instead of individual tunes, it features two takes of collective improvisation. It is definitely the most provocative jazz album ever released. It even featured a Jackson Pollack print on the album cover to up the ante. If The Shape of Jazz to come and Change of the Century were were warning shots, Free Jazz must have seemed like an atomic bomb when it was released in 1960.

But despite its notariety and reputation, I have never listened to the album. It is perhaps the most glaring hole in the jazz canon to which I have not been exposed. I have no good reason not to have heard it before. Since I first began to enjoy Ornette's music in college, I have listened to much of his catalogue, and liked much of it. Free Jazz always seemed like such a daunting listening task, though. It is not the kind of album you can throw on any day and check out. With all its baggage, Free Jazz carries with it a weight of responsibility; you cannot simply listen to it, you must take it in and contemplate it. For that reason, I had always put off listening to the album.

But no longer. I had sacrificed my own credibility too long, having not even sat through Coleman's first magnum opus. So the other night I sat down and listened to the entire album in one sitting. Below are my thoughts as I listened, condensed with some after-the-fact edits for clarity's sake.

This album belies the stereotype of free jazz as a caterwauling nonmusical free-for-all. Though the album is frenetic, there is also a lot of order. You could not make an album like this without some good listeners. Also, despite the reputations of Coleman, Dolphy, and Hubbard, there is a lot of space in these tracks from the winds. With steady rhythm underneath, each front-line player gives ample space to the rest of the front line most of the time.

The term "Collective Improvisation" is a misnomer; There is way more arranging on this album than you would expect.

When I listen to this, I think of jazz being broken down only partially, in big chunks, then rebuilt. Each instrument on the album sounds like jazz on its own, and collected together they build an entirely new structure out of the original parts; like deconstructing Huck Finn and rewriting it as On the Road. Free Jazz is still jazz, like On the Road is still a novel. But still, it feels like an entirely new style regardless.

The album was most definitely a worthy experiment, but not the most essential Ornette album on my list. One wonders what this album would have sounded like had Ornette only used his regular quartet at the time (with Billy Higgins, Charlie Haden, and Don Cherry). Could four voices be as effective as eight? This is not to say that it is not a good album, just not an ideal introduction to Ornette Coleman for novices.


Other Resources
Jazz.com reviews First Take
Do the Math on early Ornette Coleman: "Free Jazz has some great moments but is too monochromatic. As I speculated before about the two Contemporary albums, I wonder if Free Jazz has harmed Ornette’s reputation, especially at the time it was released."

Can Wynton Be Free?

Earlier this week, Howard Mandel discussed the upcoming season of Jazz At Lincoln Center, which includes a performance by Ornette Coleman's quartet. As you can imagine, some observers are enthusiastic that a major partisan in the jazz wars has embraced one of the major figures and influences of the opposing camp.

In the same post, Mandel embedded a YouTube of the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra playing an arrangement of Coleman's tune "Free," first recorded in 1960 on Change of the Century. The arrangement (which is uncredited on YouTube, but presumably was written by one of the band's members at the time) is interesting enough, but what shocked me was the solo by Marsalis on trumpet. In short, he plays outside the changes with authority. Here's the video:

Wynton's solo does justice to Don Cherry. Though he plays with tonality, his solo is remarkably free and well-conceived. I admit to being a bit taken-aback by the solo. Though I wouldn't have expected him to impose a more familiar structure onto the tune, I also was not expecting him to produce a free jazz solo of that quality. But Wynton is a virtuoso, and you know he has studied Ornette. So perhaps it is not surprising that he could play the tune so well. Even so, nice solo.

Review: Compass

Joshua Redman
Compass

In 2007, when he released Back East, Joshua Redman automatically drew comparisons to Sonny Rollins and Ornette Coleman for his use of a pianoless rhythm section. Daunting as these comparisons may be, he was nonetheless hailed for making "the most agile and personal record of his career," in the words of Ben Ratliff. Having found artistic success in this format, Redman returns to the pianoless trio for his latest album, Compass. Leaving out the piano adds spontenaity to his music, as he told NPR in 2007:

It's a tremendously liberating format, because there's no piano, no dedicated melodic instrument, it gives me and the other musicians so much room to experiment and explore, both melodically and harmonically. But with that freedom comes an awful lot of responsibility.

On Compass, Redman ups the ante by doubling the bass and drums on some of the tracks, platooning Larry Grenadier and Rueben Rodgers on bass and Gregory Hutchinson and Brian Blade on drums. As with Back East, Redman's goal is to free up his own playing, eliciting spontaneous explorations of harmony and melody. On many tunes, Redman adroitly toes the line between outside and inside playing, stepping just outside the chord changes long enough to make the listener notice, but returning to the changes in enough time to keep the tune's melody within sight.

As with many current saxophone records, Compass can at times sound a bit too much like some of its influences. "Hitchhiker's Guide" sounds suspiciously like the opening of Sonny Rollins' Freedom Suite. "Identity Thief" sounds like the kind of tune Ornette Coleman would have written in the early 1960s. This would be a problem if Redman did not leave his personal stamp on the tunes, but by the end of each tune, you are left with no doubt who is on saxophone.

A highlight of the album is "Insomnomaniac," a melody featuring repeated, clipped phrases played over a manic groove. It is an apt title, as the melody features a pastiche of thoughts and phrases familiar to anyone who has lied awake at night for hours at a time. The tune shifts between multiple tempos, and Redman's trio constantly refers to the main melody, like someone with a troubling thought on his mind. He brings a heightened sense of drama to his solo which serves the tune well.

"Identity Theif" also struck my interest. Redman utilizes both bassists and both drummers on this tune, which sounds practically harmolodic to my ears. Grenadier and Rogers play off of each other nicely, as do Blade and Hutchinson. In fact, if you were to listen to this tune on a monaural sound system, you might not be able to tell that there are four rhythm players on the track due to the cohesiveness of the group.

However enjoyable these tracks are, though, I cannot escape the feeling that something was lost in the process of recording the album. This weekend, I saw Terence Blanchard play a guest-artist concert with the University of Virginia jazz ensemble, and the experience reminded me how little of an impression his studio albums left on me compared to seeing him live. There is some quality to his studio work that prevents his albums from leaving much of an impression on me. Compass shares this trait, unfortunately. I can listen to it and enjoy it, but the album does not captivate me. This is not intended as a criticism of Redman. Indeed, maybe the problem is me. Nonetheless, when I listen to Compass, I can't help but think that I don't enjoy the album as much as I should. Such are the idiosyncracies of life sometimes...


Track Listing: Uncharted; Faraway; Identity Thief; Just Like You; Hitchhiker's Guide; Ghost; Insomnomaniac; Moonlight; Un Peu Fou; March; Round Reuben; Little Ditty; Through the Valley
Personnel: Joshua Redman, saxophone; Larry Grenadier, Reuben Rogers, bass; Gregory Hutchinson, Brian Blade, drums

List: 1959: Before and After

Being that 1959 saw the release of so many landmark jazz albums (Kind of Blue, Time Out, Giant Steps, The Shape of Jazz to Come, etc.), plenty of writers will be profiling the golden jubilees of all these albums throughout the year. But focusing on 1959 misses the point of that era. While 1959 was certainly a great year for jazz, the years surrounding 1959 all created their fair share of classics canonized in The Jazz Tradition. Since the late 1950s and early 1960s were a veritable golden age for jazz, when young lions like Coltrane and Coleman were reshaping the music while older stars like Ellington and Hawkins were still thriving, lets not limit ourselves to remembering 1959 as a watershed moment. Below are some great albums from 1958 and 1960 which are sometimes overshadowed by the weight of 1959.

A quick note: I am classifying these albums by the date they were recorded. Some were released the year after they were recorded, but the way things were changing in the jazz world at this time, a musician could sound much different over the space of a year (such is the case especially with John Coltrane).

1958:

1. Bill Evans, Everybody Digs Bill Evans. Featuring an interesting album cover, Everybody Digs Bill Evans effectively introduced Evans to the jazz world just as he was to join Miles Davis' quintet at the piano chair.
   
2. Cannonball Adderley, Somethin' Else. One of the classic hard bop records, Cannonball was joined by a veritable all-star band featuring Miles Davis, Art Blakey, Hank Jones, and Sam Jones. Adderley firmly established his reputation as a prominent figure in jazz with this record.
   
3. Ornette Coleman, Something Else!!!!. One of the few albums in which Coleman used a piano player (Paul Bley in this case), Something Else introduced the world to Coleman before his infamous residency at New York's The Five Spot in 1959.
   
4. Miles Davis, Porgy and Bess and Milestones. Porgy and Bess reinforced Miles' image as the biggest star in jazz, selling countless copies, while Milestones set the stage for 1959's Kind of Blue.
   
5. Art Blakey & The Jazz Messengers, Moanin'. The title track was, in my estimation, the quintessential hard bop tune, the definitive example of the style I play when trying to explain what hard bop was.
   
6. John Coltrane, Blue Train. Hard to believe Blue Note Records only got Coltrane in the studio as a leader once in his life.
   
7. Sonny Rollins, Freedom Suite. Some say this is Rollins' best studio album. Hard to argue against that, but the album is also important for the brief liner notes written by Rollins which draw light to the status of African Americans in the land of the free.
   

1960:

1. Miles Davis, Sketches of Spain. Though plenty of people will tell you that this is not really a jazz record, it nonetheless introduced jazz to a lot of people over the past five decades. I remember when I bought this album eight years at a music store in Toronto. When I paid for it, the cashier, a guy in a Slayer t-shirt with multiple piercings, simply said to me, "great album." This was not the kind of person you'd expect to make that comment.
   
2. John Coltrane, My Favorite Things and Olé Coltrane. While My Favorite Things propelled Coltrane into stardom, Olé Coltrane is an underrated album in the Coltrane canon, featuring a young Freddie Hubbard in addition to the dueling basses of Reggie Workman and Art Davis.
3. Ornette Coleman, Free Jazz. In which Ornette ups the ante and firmly opens Pandora's Box, cementing the enfant terrible reputation he began to earn with Something Else.
   
4. Charles Mingus, Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus. The opening track, "Folk Forms No. 1," perfectly fuses the blues with improvised contrapuntal composition, while "Original Faubus Fables" unleashes Mingus' contempt for a segregationist Arkansas Govern0r Orval Faubus.
   
5. Art Blakey & The Jazz Messengers, A Night in Tunisia and Roots & Herbs. Featuring one of the best editions of the Messengers (Lee Morgan, Wayne Shorter, Jymie Merritt, and Bobby Timmons), Blakey recorded a lot of albums in 1960. These two are my favorites of the bunch.
   
6. Max Roach, We Insist! Max Roach's Freedom Now Suite. Featuring a photo of black college students at a sit-in, Roach's Freedom Now Suite presented a musical history of African Americans, featuring the vocals of Abbey Lincoln.
   
7. Wes Montgomery, The Incredible Jazz Guitar of Wes Montgomery. Montgomery lays down some choice hard bop and shows all who care to listen that he is the guitar boss of the jazz community. His version of Airegin is my favorite recording of the Sonny Rollins standard.

UPDATE 1: The lists have already begun. Here's one from acompleteunknown at The Good, The Bad, and The Unknown. They've made some good choices, though I would replace Mingus' Ah Um with Blues and Roots, and would not have left off Giant Steps...

UPDATE 2: Kevin Kniestedt offers his thoughts on 1959 at Groove Notes.

Friday Album Cover: Serious Music

Let's get 2009 started on the right foot, with a Friday Album Cover. One of the dominant narratives of jazz history has been the struggle for acceptance of jazz as a high art. From the early days of jazz, when Duke Ellington was calling his music an African American art, to the academization of jazz after the 1960s, jazz musicians have defined their music as an art form, and not simply a folk or popular music. Some musicians have used album art to present themselves as serious musicians who have worked painstakingly hard to develop their music.

As I wrote earlier this year, Charles Mingus used this technique on the cover on his album Blues and Roots, released in 1959. Around the same time, avant-garde wunderkind Ornette Coleman posed with his quarter for the cover to his album This Is Our Music. The album cover was a self-conscious presentation of something new in the jazz world. It tells the viewer/listener that whatever he or she thinks about it, the music of Coleman and his band is their own artistic expression that deserves to be taken seriously.

Ornette Coleman

This Is Our Music

Almost thirty years after Coleman, another wunderkind, trumpeter and spokesperson for the Young Lions Wynton Marsalis, used the Serious Artist archetype on an album of his own, Standard Time, Vol.1. Like Coleman on This is Our Music, Marsalis strives for the listener to take him seriously as an artist. Like jazz itself, the Serious Artist archetype lives on in the inferiority complexes of musicians everywhere...

Wynton Marsalis
Standard Time, Vol.1