Ornette Coleman

[Mark Stryker]

DETROIT FREE PRESS

THE COLEMAN EXPERIENCE: THE UNPARALLELED ORNETTE COLEMAN, WHO REWORKED THE RULES OF JAZZ TO DIZZYING EFFECT, PLAYS HERE FOR THE FIRST TIME IN NEARLY 20 YEARS

BYLINE: MARK STRYKER FREE PRESS MUSIC WRITER

NEW YORK -- Revolutionaries in the 20th Century sometimes reinvented art with such a big bang that they shocked the status quo into apocalyptic fits of controversy and, occasionally, violence. Stravinsky's "The Rite of Spring" caused a riot at its 1913 premiere. Picasso's first cubist canvas created a scandal in 1907. Jackson Pollock's mid-century abstract paintings were ridiculed as the work of "Jack the Dripper."

And there is Ornette Coleman, the single most polarizing figure in jazz history: Fistfights broke out during the alto saxophonist and composer's landmark debut at the Five Spot in New York in 1959. Coleman, who makes his first metro Detroit appearance in 18 years tonight in Ann Arbor, broke so free of the rules that had previously governed jazz that -- as with Pollock's drip paintings -- many suspected a put-on. "I think he's jiving, baby," said veteran trumpeter Roy Eldridge in 1961. "They start with a nice leadoff figure but then they go off into outer space."

Time has vindicated Coleman. Leaving Duke Ellington aside, jazz history can be distilled into four defining soloists: Louis Armstrong invented the improvised solo as we know it. Charlie Parker delivered it into the modern age. John Coltrane translated it into post-bop. And Coleman liberated it from traditional harmony, rhythm and form. His untamed solos proceeded according to their own spontaneous yet undeniable logic, free of expected key resolutions and bar lines, thrillingly alive to naked emotions and the possibilities of collective improvisation.

Coleman rejected bebop harmony in a strong-willed act of primitivism, not unlike the way Picasso remade the simplified forms of African art or Stravinsky elevated barbaric rhythm. To his supporters, his rejection of harmonic blueprints (chord changes), untethered phrasing and daringly expressive intonation were signs of a prophet. To his detractors, the same qualities were evidence of fraud or incompetence. Miles Davis suggested in print that Coleman was "all screwed up inside," and one angry musician punched him in the face one night at the Five Spot.

"In New York, I'm telling you guys literally would say, 'I'm going to kill you. You can't play that way.' " says Coleman, speaking on a recent Saturday in his sprawling loft in Manhattan's Garment District. "It felt terrible, but I never tried to defend anything. If somebody said, 'I'm going to beat you, I don't like how you play,' I didn't say, 'Why?' I just said, 'Well, that's how you feel.' "

Forty-five years after Coleman's quartet came east from Los Angeles, the shock waves continue to reverberate. Even though his seminal recordings of 1959-61 long ago entered the canon and he's been honored with a MacArthur "genius grant," Coleman remains a divisive symbol. The mainstream has made peace with him, but it has never reached a detente with free jazz, the permanent avant-garde ushered in by Coleman's aesthetic that sometimes (not always) lacks his melodicism, discipline and links to the core values of jazz.

For all Coleman's radicalism, his early music still swings and speaks with a rural blues twang. Many pieces take off from angular themes suggesting a wild bebop hallucination. Still, even Coleman's advocates have sometimes scratched their heads at his jazz-rock explorations, the idiosyncratic way he plays the trumpet and violin, his more extreme group improvisations, and the extensions of his concepts into sui generis classical compositions.

Jazz is defined by rugged individualists, but Coleman -- a self-taught musician from Fort Worth, Texas, steeped in the blues, with a homegrown theory of music and maharishi presence -- is beyond category. He belongs in the pantheon of American mavericks alongside Harry Partch, the former hobo who built his own instruments to play microtonal music, and John Cage, the charismatic poet of sound, silence and noise. Given the Bunyanesque lore that surrounds Coleman, it's striking how reserved he is in person. He is a small man, about 5 feet 8, slight across the chest and shoulders, with innocent eyes and a soft handshake. He speaks in a simmering whisper and gentle Texas drawl. His hair is thin and the deep lines across his brow seem to outline the craggy, Bohemian journey of his life.

On this afternoon he wears a fraying blue V-neck sweater and dark pants and sits in his glass-wall office surrounded by a high-end stereo, computer and shelves filled with books on physics, chemistry and other subjects and CDs in every possible genre. He has just finished listening to soprano Joan Sutherland.

You don't really interview Coleman as much as experience him. His conversation swirls about the room in philosophical riffs that double back on themselves like words of a mystic, sometimes breaking free into aphoristic clarity. Human freedom, transcending race and the unity of all music and life are favorite themes.

"What I'm thinking about when I play, what I am experiencing, is how to play ideas that will become something that will waken the senses of the person that's listening. You know how I got that way? From playing with musicians. If you play something that someone likes, they'll come and try to make it better. Music is not a race or a style, it's an idea."

Coleman is eager to share his ideas, and is open to any musician who seeks him out. Wynton Marsalis hung out at the loft for two nights til 4 a.m. before last month's Jazz at Lincoln Center tribute to Coleman. But the angle from which Coleman approaches music is so obtuse that it's often bewildering. "He'll say things to me like, 'Which way does a vertical line go?' says Tony Falanga, one of two bassists in Coleman's band. "I'll say, 'It goes up.' And he'll say, 'Why can't it go sideways, too? It's still a line. You have to be open.' "

Since the early '70s, Coleman has used the term "harmolodics" to describe his music. Details defy simple explanation -- no one seems to fully understand the system other than Coleman. Essentially it's his unified field theory of music -- a way of organizing music so that all the instruments in an improvising ensemble are allowed to play in any key or any clef at any time. "I call it compositional improvising, meaning that it doesn't sound like you're getting the idea from a chord or a key," says Coleman. "It's an idea that plays itself exactly at that moment."

On the surface, Coleman's concepts sound like a recipe for chaos. The players must listen deeply, responding to cues of melody, tonality, mood, texture, rhythm and intuition, without falling back on prescribed roles or rules. Coleman's unusual new quartet has been together less than two years. Bassist Falanga, trained in classical music and jazz, plays bowed melodies, joining Coleman as a second horn. Greg Cohen's plucked bass anchors the ensemble. Coleman's son, Denardo, who made his debut on LP at age 10 with his father in 1966, plays drums.

Coleman's tunes, as catchy as nursery rhymes, lead into swirling polyphony, the four players orbiting each other like moons and planets in a cosmic dance. "Ornette is the truest improviser I've ever come across," says Falanga. "But he doesn't believe in squeaks, squawks or honks. It has nothing to do with letting out energy. Everything is melodic."

Coleman has been out of step with his contemporaries since his early days in R&B bands, when he was often fired for refusing to sequester his unique vision. Once after a dance gig in Louisiana, thugs who didn't like his playing smashed his horn and beat him bloody. Beboppers threw him out of jam sessions for making up his own harmony as he went along. The chords limited his imagination. "They were only guiding me as if I didn't know where I was going," he says.

Only after meeting the sympathetic colleagues in Los Angeles who would comprise his original quartet -- trumpeter Don Cherry, bassist Charlie Haden, drummer Billy Higgins -- did Coleman's career find traction.

"He has more determination about what he wants to do than anyone I've every seen," says James Jordan, Coleman's slightly younger cousin who helps manage his business affairs. "When he gets his mind made up about something, that's it," says Jordan, director of music with the New York State Council for the Arts.

Coleman has spent much of his career underground, with bursts of public activity and recordings followed by long periods of self-imposed exile. Racism and shady characters within the music business have left festering wounds, and his strategy since the early '60s has been to insist on top dollar for recordings and concerts. He would rather write and rehearse in seclusion than feel exploited. When he has signed lucrative record deals or received honors like the 1994 MacArthur grant ($372,000), he has funneled much of it back into music, supporting young musicians out of his own pocket and paying travel expenses overseas. He bought space in Harlem in the late '80s, which has been converted into Harmolodic Studios, a recording facility.

Coleman has lived in his current apartment about a decade, and it's a significant upgrade from the ramshackle existence of cold-water lofts in drug-infested neighborhoods that once defined his life in New York. He has done better financially in the past decade, finding the inspiration to perform more frequently and relaxing his more extreme price demands.

At more than 4,000 square feet, his loft was remodeled by the woman he's been seeing for several years, a German-born architect. The furnishings are sparse, modern and chic. Art is everywhere, including huge abstract canvases, African sculptures and smaller portraits and surrealist pictures. Coleman himself did some of the paintings in which ghostly doodles float in abstract fields. He became interested in art when leading painters like Willem De Kooning, Larry Rivers and Robert Rauschenberg used to hang out at the Five Spot.

At 74, Coleman has lived long enough to see his music, once so maligned, taught in conservatories. He remains a God to the radical wing but also an audible influence on mainstream progressives of many stripes, from pianist Keith Jarrett and guitarist Pat Metheny to the young alto saxophonist Miguel Zenon. Coleman knows this but downplays it.

"You know what? The satisfaction is that I'm still alive and I know now that have reached this level and I'm finding freedom -- what I always thought existed. There's nothing that I have to hide or complain about and nothing to make me withdraw from something I believe in."

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A SAXOPHONE LESSON WITH ORNETTE; HE PULLED OUT HIS CASE, ASSEMBLED THE HORN AND HANDED IT TO ME

BYLINE: MARK STRYKER FREE PRESS STAFF WRITER

NEW YORK -- Ornette Coleman knew that I was an alto saxophonist and jazz musician before becoming a journalist, so when I pressed for details about his harmolodic theory, he generously offered to give me a lesson right there on the spot.

He pulled out his saxophone case, assembled the horn and handed it to me. It was a top-of-the-line Selmer Mark VI that the company gave him in the 1960s. An experimental model -- the company made fewer than 200 -- the horn has an unusual low A-key that allows the player to reach a half-step lower than on most saxophones. The horn was lacquered white, recalling the eccentric plastic alto that Coleman played on his early records.

Coleman had left his Meyer mouthpiece and reed attached to the neck of the horn the last time he played, and the whole apparatus was shoved inside the bell -- with no protective cloth and not even a mouthpiece cap to guard the cane. Any teacher who caught a student storing his instrument this way would have a conniption. Coleman apologized sheepishly: "I know I should have a mouthpiece cap."

In the harmolodic system, Coleman completely deconstructs normal Western musical syntax. All instruments are treated as if they are tuned in C. All instruments can read from the same part without transposing and still produce what Coleman calls a "unison." Improvisers are allowed to play in any key or any clef at any time. He first had me play the notes A, C, D and E-flat, because in harmolodics these are considered a unison. "One note, four sounds," is a Coleman mantra.

Then he had me play three chords that led through all 12 notes of the chromatic scale -- C major 7, E-flat minor 7, D minor with a flat 5, and a final A to account for the 12th note. "That's your first harmolodic lesson," he said. "You can use any tonic and play those same three chords and come up with 12 different notes."

Coleman asked me to improvise starting on any note but to keep in mind the intervals I had already been working with. He was trying to liberate me from conventional harmony, and it worked for a few bars before I relapsed into a bebop pattern. "Here," I said, handing the horn back to him. "Show me."

Coleman closed his eyes and played a fresh, leaping phrase that, like many of his ideas, ended on a high note that shivered with the aching cry of the blues. I noticed Coleman doesn't keep his top teeth on the mouthpiece, a highly irregular technique that allows the vocalized flexibility of his sound. "You can play sharp in tune and you can play flat in tune," is another mantra.

Coleman played a series of zigzagging lines. Some were aggressive blurs like the sweeping gestures of an abstract painter. Others were simple shapes in bold colors. Each idea was as natural as breathing. Each painted the air with swing. Several were melodies worth surrounding with a frame and calling it song.

"Don't let the saxophone tell you what to play," he said. "Let your ear tell you. The same note could be any one of the other 12. An E can be the major 7th of F, the minor 7th of F-sharp, the major 6th of G. If you start thinking like that, the saxophone is going to get smaller and smaller. No matter how much technique you have, you're not going to play no music if all you're doing is playing from how the instrument is built."

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ORNETTE COLEMAN ON CD

The best introduction to Coleman is with the 1959-61 Atlantic recordings, beginning with the peerless "The Shape of Jazz to Come," which introduced his quartet with Don Cherry, Charlie Haden and Billy Higgins and such key compositions as "Lonely Woman" and "Congeniality."

Next best is "Change of the Century" and the prescient double-quartet collective "Free Jazz." Others include "This Is Our Music," "Ornette," "Ornette on Tenor." If you can afford it, Rhino has collected the Atlantics on a 6-CD set, "Beauty Is A Rare Thing" ($90).

The 1958-59 Contemporary LPs, "Something Else" and "Tomorrow Is The Question" catch Coleman just as he's leaving his bop roots behind. The mid-'60s Blue Notes include two grand volumes with David Izenzon and Charles Moffett, "At the Golden Circle, Stockholm," and "New York Is Now" and "Love Call" with Dewey Redman, Jimmy Garrison and Elvin Jones.

From the '70s, the best of the fusion band Prime Time can be heard on "Body Meta" (Verve). The recording of the orchestral "Skies of America" (Columbia) is not how Coleman envisioned the piece, but the results are still fascinating. "Soapsuds Soapsuds" (Verve) is a deliriously lyrical tenor sax-bass duet with Haden.

In the '90s, Coleman embraced the piano for the first time in nearly 40 years, recording two quartet CDs for Verve -- "Sound Museum: Three Women" and "Sound Museum: Hidden Man" -- with Detroit-native Geri Allen. Both feature different takes of the same tunes. "Colors" is a duet with pianist Joachim Kuhn

Edited April 26, 2008 by Mark Stryker