Ornette Coleman

[7/4]

March 31, 2008

Music Review | Ornette Coleman

Clear-Cut Case of the Blues, in a Bebop Mode

By NATE CHINEN, NY Times

Time and again at Town Hall on Friday night Ornette Coleman tacked toward the blues. The dimensions of his pristine alto saxophone tone — a small, bright thing with a flavor both tart and sweet — kept warping slightly, in the manner of an R&B singer. He phrased in short, soulful bursts as well as fluid outpourings, frequently skimming a pentatonic scale. And his band invoked the blues clearly at times, with a smattering of riffs and backbeats, and one vamp evocative of the “Peter Gunn” theme.

On some level this wasn’t unusual. The blues have always been a bedrock presence in Mr. Coleman’s music, however avant-garde his reputation. His momentous half-century career has even delved meaningfully into funk, via his band Prime Time. But here he was working in a bebop mode, bracketing his solo flights with tight, concise themes. The blues accent felt like a thoughtful restriction, a way of grounding the abstract thrust of the performance. Whatever the case, it worked: the concert was a bracing triumph.

Mr. Coleman largely stocked it with songs from his album “Sound Grammar,” which won the Pulitzer Prize for music last year. As on the record and most of his recent concerts, he enlisted a sympathetic quartet with two bassists. His son, Denardo Coleman, played drums with hard insistency, even bombast (at bright tempos, his ride-cymbal patterns were rivetlike), but he also kept closely attuned to the flow of improvisation.

The bassists were Tony Falanga, who plucked and bowed his instrument with twitchy prowess; and Al MacDowell, an alumnus of Prime Time, who played in a register and style more suggestive of a guitarist. Though playing an electric bass, Mr. MacDowell’s tone through the amplifier was crisp and trebly. Both bassists had the range to dialogue with Mr. Coleman, and they occasionally did, without overcrowding him.

At times Mr. MacDowell and Mr. Falanga converged on a coordinated bass line. “Song World,” a delicate ballad, involved their slow progression up the scale. On the other end of the spectrum was a Prime Time classic, “Dancing in Your Head,” which had them repeating a jangly hook like a playground taunt, while Mr. Coleman cartwheeled and caterwauled overhead.

A number of tunes — including “Following the Sound,” which opened the concert, and “Song X,” which closed it — followed a similar plotline. First there was a mad scramble, and then an inquisitive tangent, followed by a headlong dash to the finish. The solo portion could feature either Mr. Coleman or Mr. Falanga, with Mr. MacDowell providing a running commentary of chords and arpeggios.

There were also pieces steeped in gentle emotion, like “Song World,” “Sleep Talking” and, of course, the exquisite customary encore, “Lonely Woman.” More curiously, there was a group elaboration on the prelude to Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1, which briefly had Mr. Coleman blaring his trumpet and sawing on his violin.

Somehow, though, that was less puzzling than “Turnaround,” a true blues, and one of Mr. Coleman’s oldest tunes. The band played it as a slow drag, and even in this setting Mr. Coleman was chirpily evasive. He made the blues seem like both a native language and an alien custom, something to approach with wary curiosity.

[7/4]

Always Evolving, Always Sounding Like Himself

BY WILL FRIEDWALD

March 31, 2008

URL: http://www2.nysun.com/article/73912

The first noise that one hears at an Ornette Coleman performance inevitably resembles the sound of a waiter falling down a flight of stairs with a tray of dishes. But after that initial crash, one quickly realizes that the other musicians — the bass and drums — are falling in perfect synchronization. Soon it becomes clear that the whole band is in a perfectly coordinated free flight, producing one of the most glorious sounds you've ever heard. As they say in "Toy Story," there's little appreciable difference between flying and "falling with style."

Just a few weeks after his 78th birthday and the 50th anniversary of his first album, Mr. Coleman took to the stage at Town Hall (the site of his landmark concert in 1962) for his first New York appearance in two years. Mr. Coleman said something to the filled house, but since his speaking microphone apparently wasn't turned on, nobody heard what it was; thankfully, this was the only sound problem of the night. Compared with his last three shows for JVC at Carnegie Hall, where the acoustics remain a sonic nightmare, I felt as though I was truly hearing his current quartet — the two-bass band — for the first time. And the leader was apparently confident enough with the acoustics to be able to play with the visuals: He was wearing a bright kelly green checkerboard suit (in stark contrast to his white lacquer alto), the sort of thing that Ricky Ricardo would wear on St. Patrick's Day.

In the five years or so that Mr. Coleman has been working with the multiple-bass band, he's tried numerous variations: The first edition employed two acoustic basses (the jazz player Greg Cohen and the more classically inclined Tony Falanga). Then, in 2006 at Carnegie, he added a third bassist, the electric player Al MacDowell (known to us through Mr. Coleman's electrified band, Prime Time). Friday's lineup at Town Hall consisted of two basses (Mr. Falanga, playing lots of arco, and Mr. MacDowell) and the two Colemans (Ornette, playing mostly alto saxophone but switching to trumpet and violin when the spirit moved him, and his son, Denardo, on drums).

The slightly different format and improved acoustics gave the leader's playing a whole new sound. At Carnegie, his saxophone struck me as slithery and serpentine; here, it was more punchy and aggressive. Though the alto timbre seemed slightly out of tune on the first few numbers, as both the band and the horn warmed up and the ear became acclimated, Mr. Coleman sounded great soon enough. As the performance progressed, he came closer than ever to the goal of making his instruments sound like a human voice — crying, laughing, and screaming.

Mr. Coleman once said in an interview that the bass represents to him the entire tradition of great European string music, which is why he chose white players (Scott LaFaro and Charlie Haden, to name two) in his early groups. Mr. Coleman has a classical side, expressed in his formal and longform works, and in the playing of Mr. Falanga; he also has a pop side, which comes to the fore in Prime Time and is represented in the current band by Mr. MacDowell. Mr. Coleman is an innovator (although, since his music is as far-out as ever, maybe we should call him an "out-ovator") of jazz improvisation, which makes it unsurprising that his musicians never improvise in the usual way. Rather than mapping out an order of solos, every number features all four players all the time, following Mr. Coleman's lead, with occasional interludes for the bassists. One number on Friday featured a Mozartian line, bowed by Mr. Falanga, while Denardo Coleman banged out a rock 'n' roll-style "power" rhythm and his father did his own thing up front. It all made perfect musical sense. As ever, Mr. Coleman plays in a steady metrical pulse (no out-of-time playing here), and every tune is compositionally directed with an unmistakable beginning, middle, and end.

In that sense, Mr. MacDowell was a hero of the evening, supplying traditional melodic and harmonic accompaniment for the leader's solos without bowing to the conventions of jazz bass playing. Throughout the evening, he played his instrument not like a traditional Fender bass, but more like a unique, amplified, fourstring guitar-bass hybrid of his own invention.

For his own part, Mr. Coleman's most recognized link to convention has always been his inclusion of the blues, or something very much like it. On Friday, he included a blues piece that was originally titled "Turnabout" (on his second album, 1959's "Tomorrow Is the Question!"), but is now called "Turnaround" (as on his most recent album, 2005's "Sound Grammar"). Thanks at least in part to the encouragement of Mr. MacDowell, Mr. Coleman also included several numbers that could almost be described as ballads. One of his most celebrated innovations was his reinvention of the dirge, a melancholy lament not heard much in jazz since New Orleans funerals. His best-known dirge, "Lonely Woman," has become a jazz standard. On Friday, he saved it for the encore. But with Mr. MacDowell supplying guitaresque filigrees behind him, Mr. Coleman played several tunes in a way that could only be described as lyrical and even romantic — Ornette for lovers.

There were other pieces that sounded like classical etudes (one was a dead ringer for Robert Schumann's "Traumeri"), folk songs (one suggesting, in Gary Giddins's famous phrase, a harmolodic hoedown), calypsos (there was a paraphrase from "Day O"), and mambos. Some even sounded like funk tunes, with Denardo supplying a heavy backbeat.

In terms of his musical evolution, this is a particularly rich period for Mr. Coleman, which made this concert the most enjoyable of his I've ever attended: He was riveting on every single number, playing with the same kind of enormous energy that one associates with his fellow 1930-born saxophone colossus, Sonny Rollins. His current band is the perfect mix of every genre out there as well as every phase of his own continuing musical maturation. And though he never repeats anything, he always sounds consistently like himself. For music that some have labeled inaccessible, it yields its pleasures with remarkable ease.

[papsrus]

The dimensions of his pristine alto saxophone tone — a small, bright thing with a flavor both tart and sweet — kept warping slightly, in the manner of an R&B singer.

typic Nate Chinen bullshit & nonsense-- typin' loud & saying NOTHING. tickets were way too expensive for edc-- at least Marty gives us freebies, too bad it was for the Stones. (better than Nate Chinen but what the fuck ain't?)

I dunno. I'm neither here nor there on Chinen, but I thought it was a pretty descriptive sentence. The ticket prices, I'm with you there.

[7/4]

Ticket prices like that make me pass on the opportunities that living close to NYC give me. I go to less and less shows these days.

.

[clifford_thornton]

The dimensions of his pristine alto saxophone tone — a small, bright thing with a flavor both tart and sweet — kept warping slightly, in the manner of an R&B singer.

typic Nate Chinen bullshit & nonsense-- typin' loud & saying NOTHING. tickets were way too expensive for edc-- at least Marty gives us freebies, too bad it was for the Stones. (better than Nate Chinen but what the fuck ain't?)

I dunno. I'm neither here nor there on Chinen, but I thought it was a pretty descriptive sentence. The ticket prices, I'm with you there.

The thing is with Chinen, that that sentence could be said better using most of the same words.

[John L]

The dimensions of his pristine alto saxophone tone — a small, bright thing with a flavor both tart and sweet — kept warping slightly, in the manner of an R&B singer.

typic Nate Chinen bullshit & nonsense-- typin' loud & saying NOTHING. tickets were way too expensive for edc-- at least Marty gives us freebies, too bad it was for the Stones. (better than Nate Chinen but what the fuck ain't?)

I dunno. I'm neither here nor there on Chinen, but I thought it was a pretty descriptive sentence. The ticket prices, I'm with you there.

The thing is with Chinen, that that sentence could be said better using most of the same words.

For example, "his slightly warped pristine thing of alto saxophone dimensions had a flavor both tart and sweet."

Edited April 3, 2008 by John L

[clifford_thornton]

Or, through the magic of babelfish:

have been rejected slightly pristine thing masses contralto saxophone has had a pointed and gentle taste

[7/4]

Jazz

Something Else

Ornette Coleman at Town Hall.

by Gary Giddins April 14, 2008

Ornette Coleman in his apartment in New York City, March, 2008. Photograph by Platon.

Avid expectation invariably precedes a concert by Ornette Coleman, the revolutionary alto saxophonist, composer, and sometime trumpeter and violinist. But the revivalist fervor that accompanied his appearance at Town Hall on a recent Friday evening was something else. This was Coleman’s first New York appearance since a flurry of institutional crownings last year: the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, the Kennedy Center Living Jazz Legend Award, and, from his native state, the Texas Medal of Arts. Most remarkably, he won the Pulitzer Prize for music, for his self-produced album “Sound Grammar,” his first recording in a decade; it’s the only time the award has ever been given for a commercial record. Broadway-scale ticket prices magnified the homecoming—Coleman has lived in New York for nearly half a century—with an aura of exclusivity, and, in an eighty-minute performance, he did not disappoint. The audience emerged awed by his undiminished vigor and capacity to surprise. As my wife and I pulled ourselves away from the Forty-third Street afterglow, she said, “Explain to me again why he was so controversial.”

No musician has ever roiled the jazz establishment quite as much as Coleman. Musical history is filled with jeering audiences and critics, but not many musicians have inspired personal violence. In Louisiana, in 1949, Coleman was summoned from a bandstand and beaten bloody by a mob which also destroyed his saxophone. A decade later, when he arrived in New York to play at the Five Spot, in Cooper Square, the drummer Max Roach came to listen and, as Coleman tells it, ended up punching him in the mouth. But musicians with a grounding in the classical avant-garde were more encouraging: Leonard Bernstein declared him a genius, Gunther Schuller wrote a concerto with him in mind, and John Lewis, the pianist and musical director of the Modern Jazz Quartet, touted him as the most important jazz figure since Charlie Parker.

The object of this furor is a preternaturally gentle man who speaks, with a modest lisp, in visionary metaphors and bold assertions. Those assertions came initially, between 1958 and 1960, in a series of provocative album titles: “Something Else!!!!”; “The Shape of Jazz to Come”; “Change of the Century.” His double-quartet album, “Free Jazz,” ornamented with cover art by Jackson Pollock, made him, along with Cecil Taylor and John Coltrane, the most radical and divisive member of a movement that set aside fixed meters, harmonies, and structures. His phrase “free jazz” became the war cry of an entire generation.

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

Much of Coleman’s career has been dedicated to creating ensembles that complement this sound. He has usually avoided instruments with fixed pitch, like the piano, and instead has sought bassists and guitarists who, through special tunings or sheer empathy, can harmoniously balance his timbre and intonation. This search has led him to explore a wider range of contexts than any other jazz composer. He has written for symphony orchestra (most successfully, the 1972 magnum opus “Skies of America”), woodwind quintet, string quartet, and jazz trios, quartets, and a variety of other chamber-size ensembles. As early as the sixties, he was drawn to the possibilities of electric bands, a line of inquiry that led to his own version of jazz-rock fusion, which he called “harmolodic.” This neologism, contracted from “harmony,” “movement,” and “melodic,” gives some idea of a music in which harmonies freed from their tonal centers and rhythms freed from regular meters function as an integral, continuously modulating whole.

At Town Hall, a few weeks after his seventy-eighth birthday, and after touring Croatia, Spain, Canada, Hong Kong, Australia, and New Zealand, Coleman introduced his new quartet, made up of long-term allies—Tony Falanga on bass, Al MacDowell on bass guitar, and Coleman’s son Denardo on drums. Coleman has long worked at a reconsideration of the relationship between the front and rear lines of the jazz ensemble. Jazz typically involves soloists improvising over a beat and bass line provided by a rhythm section, but, as jazz developed in the postwar era, rhythm instruments began to play increasingly active, liberated roles. Coleman always demanded greater involvement on the part of his bassists and drummers, even if the over-all shape of his performances remained tied to the idea of a soloist supported by rhythm. However, his preferred instrumentation in recent years, involving drums and two basses, as heard on “Sound Grammar,” has enabled him to retain the central role of his improvisations while increasing the prominence of the other musicians to the point where the ensemble displays the organic unity of a string quartet.

Coleman’s latest lineup took that idea to a new level. His plaintive alto centered the music, but it never flew beyond the gravity of the ensemble, and the quartet functioned as one. On bass, Falanga brought cello-like purity of sound, a sense of European classicism especially evident in pieces derived from that tradition: “Sleep Talking,” a piece that Coleman has been developing since 1979, echoes the opening of Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring,” and “Bach” begins with the opening of the first cello suite, before reordering itself with a funky backbeat. MacDowell’s electric bass, with its twangy sound and rhythm-guitar-like sliding chords, suggested at times a “harmolodic” frisson of contrary keys, realigning the harmonies. His contribution was consistently assertive, and, in the dark meditation of “9/11” (apparently a new piece) and the twelve-bar blues “Turnaround,” a version of Coleman’s 1959 classic “Turnabout,” it became a defining presence. Denardo Coleman, meanwhile, has survived a peculiarly difficult and humiliating apprenticeship, having débuted, at the age of ten, on Coleman’s 1966 album, “The Empty Foxhole.” Coleman’s decision to feature his son in a role previously occupied by some of the finest drummers of the era was interpreted as yet another provocation, and the criticism was deadly. But Denardo continued to develop his skills in public, and somewhere along the way he became an essential member of the group. Now in his fifties, he plays with fierce drive, lacking the intricacy and subtlety of his predecessors but compensating with lightning reflexes that allow him to navigate between backbeats, shuffles, and machine-gun fills.

As for Coleman himself, the Town Hall concert was a reminder that, for all the innovation and the putative gauntlets hurled at musical conventions, the dominant mode of his music is lyrical. Coleman’s pieces still cross generic borders, but they do so more cheerfully than aggressively, suggesting an oddly universal equation that partakes of classical music, rock, blues, and country melodies. Coleman may, indeed, be the last great melodist—trafficking in the sphere of irresistibly hummable tunes, alternately happy and sad, that strike us in those unprotected areas of naïve pleasure that survive childhood. No better example exists than his standard encore and most celebrated ballad, the 1959 “Lonely Woman,” performed at Town Hall in a slightly abbreviated arrangement that underscored the deliciously yearning main melody, which haunts the mind long after the final notes have faded, like the memory of a wonderful idea.

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/musi...u_music_giddins

[Larry Kart]

The dimensions of his pristine alto saxophone tone — a small, bright thing with a flavor both tart and sweet — kept warping slightly, in the manner of an R&B singer.

typic Nate Chinen bullshit & nonsense-- typin' loud & saying NOTHING. tickets were way too expensive for edc-- at least Marty gives us freebies, too bad it was for the Stones. (better than Nate Chinen but what the fuck ain't?)

Chinen has caught Ratliff's Disease, which leads me to think that it's probably generic to jazz writers at the Times. The problem, if I'm right, is simple -- you've got to come up with a way of talking about jazz that is addressed to no one (certainly not anyone who knows anything about the music) but sounds kinda lofty/writerly, with a side order at times of fake hip. Thus, bullshit and nonsense. In fact, one of the basic challenges in journalistic criticism of any art is to begin by not excluding anyone and then -- almost immediately and semi-invisibly -- get to the point; and that would be the same damn point one would make if one were locked in a room with, say, EDC, C. Nessa, and Sangry. You can't have one set of thoughts for the paper and another for your friends. Mark Stryker is a good current example of how to do it.

[Guest Bill Barton]

The dimensions of his pristine alto saxophone tone — a small, bright thing with a flavor both tart and sweet — kept warping slightly, in the manner of an R&B singer.

typic Nate Chinen bullshit & nonsense-- typin' loud & saying NOTHING. tickets were way too expensive for edc-- at least Marty gives us freebies, too bad it was for the Stones. (better than Nate Chinen but what the fuck ain't?)

Chinen has caught Ratliff's Disease, which leads me to think that it's probably generic to jazz writers at the Times. The problem, if I'm right, is simple -- you've got to come up with a way of talking about jazz that is addressed to no one (certainly not anyone who knows anything about the music) but sounds kinda lofty/writerly, with a side order at times of fake hip. Thus, bullshit and nonsense. In fact, one of the basic challenges in journalistic criticism of any art is to begin by not excluding anyone and then -- almost immediately and semi-invisibly -- get to the point; and that would be the same damn point one would make if one were locked in a room with, say, EDC, C. Nessa, and Sangry. You can't have one set of thoughts for the paper and another for your friends. Mark Stryker is a good current example of how to do it.

Where are Mark's pieces published, Larry?

I'm hoping that I can build up my immunity to the dreaded Ratliff's Disease.

[Larry Kart]

The dimensions of his pristine alto saxophone tone — a small, bright thing with a flavor both tart and sweet — kept warping slightly, in the manner of an R&B singer.

typic Nate Chinen bullshit & nonsense-- typin' loud & saying NOTHING. tickets were way too expensive for edc-- at least Marty gives us freebies, too bad it was for the Stones. (better than Nate Chinen but what the fuck ain't?)

Chinen has caught Ratliff's Disease, which leads me to think that it's probably generic to jazz writers at the Times. The problem, if I'm right, is simple -- you've got to come up with a way of talking about jazz that is addressed to no one (certainly not anyone who knows anything about the music) but sounds kinda lofty/writerly, with a side order at times of fake hip. Thus, bullshit and nonsense. In fact, one of the basic challenges in journalistic criticism of any art is to begin by not excluding anyone and then -- almost immediately and semi-invisibly -- get to the point; and that would be the same damn point one would make if one were locked in a room with, say, EDC, C. Nessa, and Sangry. You can't have one set of thoughts for the paper and another for your friends. Mark Stryker is a good current example of how to do it.

Where are Mark's pieces published, Larry?

I'm hoping that I can build up my immunity to the dreaded Ratliff's Disease.

Detroit Free Press:

http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/section?Category=COL17

[Larry Kart]

I see that none of those pieces is a review per se, but Mark did send me some of his things about six months ago, and they were very good.

[Mark Stryker]

I see my name has come up here -- Larry, thanks for the kind words. Means a lot coming from you ...

I wish I had a homepage on the Free Press site that collected my best stuff, but, unfortunately, the only permanent link, which Larry provided above, takes you to a list of weekly what's-going-on-around-town columns, a tiny sliver of what I do and not a place for deep thinking or writing. I've asked our web folks to set up a page that kept my most recent jazz and classical reporting and criticism available in one place, plus some of the more substantial efforts from the past. (I cover both classical and jazz here, plus with cutbacks in recent years, the Detroit Institute of Arts.) I've also asked for a Detroit Jazz Corner that would keep evergreen links available to stories from the last dozen years about Hank Jones, Tommy Flanagan, Barry Harris, Elvin Jones, Charles McPherson, Geri Allen, Louis Hayes, Ron Carter, Kenny Garrett, Bennie Maupin and many others. So far my requests have fallen on deaf ears, but hope springs eternal.

Onward.

Edited April 16, 2008 by Mark Stryker

[Larry Kart]

Mark -- If you've got some or most of your stuff of on your computer at home or on an archive at work you can leaf through, why not post a few things you like here?

[Guest Bill Barton]

Thanks, Larry. And thanks also to you, Mark, for the information. It's good to see that another daily has quality coverage of jazz and classical music.

Oh, yes, and Larry's idea of posting some of your favorites somewhere here on the Big O would be great.

Edited April 16, 2008 by Bill Barton

[Mark Stryker]

If drafted, I will not run. If nominated, I will not accept. If elected, I will not serve.

Actually, since there seems to be interest, I'll post a few things as I get a chance. Thanks for the nudge, guys.

Edited April 16, 2008 by Mark Stryker

[ghost of miles]

If drafted, I will not run. If nominated, I will not accept. If elected, I will not serve.

Hey Mark, did you see this thread and video? There's also footage floating around of him actually inside Nick's.

Let me know if that jazz page ever becomes a reality and I'll use it to replace the current Mark Stryker link on the Night Lights site.

[B. Clugston]

Re: New York Times. All the stories seem to be written in this archaic, faux formal style which clouds the substance of stories. It’s still an institution for those raised on newspapers, but for the younger generation it must be like listening to a teetollalering great uncle talk about how he spent the 1960s organizing church bazaars and guess the pie weight contests.

Re: the Coleman concert. I am sure it was a great concert, but the New York crowd may have missed out on an added plum from the preceding tour. I saw the quartet plus Charnett Moffat on a very groovy electric bass play in February.