Where in the world is Ornette Coleman?

[dave9199]

Does anyone know why Ornette hasn't put out an album since 1997?

[Lazaro Vega]

I posted on this yesterday, but apparently it didn't make it through. Ornette just played in Chicago earlier this month, will be back in Michigan, Ann Arbor, in March, and played this Spring at Carnagie Hall. You can bet those concerts featured music that isn't as yet documented. Maybe Harmolodic.com has some streaming files of music as yet unavailable commercially.

[bertrand]

Ornette played at Carnegie Hall in late June.

[Christiern]

So he didn't elope with Carmen Santiago...

whew!!!

[Lazaro Vega]

JAZZHOPE REVIEW ARCHIVES

ORNETTE COLEMAN by Howard Reich

Ornette Coleman still blazing a musical trail

Critics praise or skewer his musical theories

By Howard Reich

Tribune arts critic

September 21 2003

NEW YORK -- He has been called a charlatan and a genius, a musical illiterate and a fearless visionary, a destroyer of noble traditions and a builder of enthralling new idioms.

He has been skewered by listeners who yearn for the days when jazz was sweet and easy on the ear, he has been showered with some of the most prestigious prizes in American culture.

Along the way, he also has been falsely arrested, attacked by muggers, beaten, bludgeoned and left for dead.

Yet on this warm September morning, Ornette Coleman -- his name to this day sparks fierce debate among listeners around the world -- looks and sounds the picture of tranquility and peace, a soft-spoken, septuagenarian gentleman if ever there were one.

As the saxophonist-composer welcomes a visitor into the lobby of his Manhattan loft building, one might suspect that Coleman never had seen a day of strife in a career that, in truth, has generated more than its share of distress.

"Oh, man, I've had some really terrible things done to me," says Coleman, arguably the most influential jazz composer, theorist and freethinker of the past half century.

Nevertheless, "At a certain point in my life, I just decided that I would never fight any kind of class, any kind of race, and if someone said, `I don't like you,' I wouldn't try to defend myself," continues Coleman, who plays a rare Chicago performance Friday night at Symphony Center.

"I'm not trying to control, change, dominate, kill or be against anyone, or put somebody above another," adds Coleman, speaking at a hush in a spartan loft dotted by African-inspired sculpture and vividly abstract paintings. The accoutrements brighten a wide-open room that aptly reflects the spaciousness of much of Coleman's music.

"I think my position is that I'm no more than a speck of dust in the sand," says Coleman, "and I'm trying to avoid being stepped on."

In that regard, however, Coleman has not been thoroughly successful, for virtually every concert he has played, every recording he has issued and every unexplored musical avenue he has delved into has drawn at least a measure of derision. Though many fragments of the music establishment have long since

acknowledged that Coleman not only changed the course of jazz but opened it up to uncounted possibilities, he has been a walking target at least since the mid-1950s, when he began to unfold his unconventional views of composing and improvising music.

Yet he seems to have been as unfazed by the assaults as he has been unseduced by the accolades (which have included a MacArthur "genius" Fellowship in 1994 and Guggenheim Fellowships in 1967 and '73), instead steadily spreading the gospel of his unorthodox musical philosophy to any musician seeking it out.

Thinking differently

Although artists famous and obscure have spoken of Coleman's efforts to instruct them in the self-styled musical language he long ago termed "harmolodics," Coleman himself recalls a recent encounter that sums up his approach to getting musicians to think differently.

"A young lady who is trying to make her debut professionally came by a couple of days ago, and though she makes a living doing something else, she also writes songs," says Coleman, 73.

"So I said, `Sing,' and she sang [music based upon] an F chord," a

not-exactly-radical gesture that clearly would hold little appeal for a set of ears as restlessly inquisitive as Coleman's.

"So I gave her a newspaper, and I said, `I want you to read the newspaper, and I'm going to play while you're reading,'" with Coleman presumably blowing unexpected pitches, bizarre melodic intervals and chord-shattering phrases into his alto saxophone.

"And the more she was reading the newspaper, the more her voice became a song," meanwhile leaving the F major chord behind and slipping, unwittingly, into Coleman's more free-ranging musical terrain.

"And I said to her, `You know what? You might not realize it, but when your voice sings ... it's [now] coming out to make you sound like an individual.

"And I call that `harmolodics.'"

In purely musical terms, Coleman's "harmolodics" -- a linguistically suave merger of "harmony" and "melody" -- represents a rebellion against the chord changes that has driven everything in Western music from the fugues of Johann

Sebastian Bach to the pop songs of Elvis Costello. In Coleman's "harmolodics," the strictures of chord progressions are abandoned, allowing each instrumentalist in a band to pursue his own melody line. Instead of chord changes, then, the players use the particular interrelationships of multiple melody lines to

forge a common musical language.

"It's like having a million melodies all at once," explains Coleman, "yet it's still a kind of unison."

In Coleman's hands, this approach produces a music that is often sublimely lyrical, though also often harmonically provocative.

Love it or hate it, however, it continues to influence some of the most significant experimenters in jazz.

Just a few weeks ago, the brilliant Chicago musician Ken Vandermark gave the Chicago Jazz Festival its most artistically significant performance leading his new Crisis Ensemble.

Named for Coleman album

"Yes, the Crisis Ensemble was named after [Coleman's] album `Crisis,'" says Vandermark, in an e-mail from Oslo (where Vandermark is on tour), referring to a characteristically adventurous Coleman recording of 1969.

"Ornette's use of `fluid tonality' [another way of describing `harmolodics'] has had a huge impact on the way I think about harmony in my compositions and playing," adds Vandermark, whose art embraces a broad range of techniques, many originating with Coleman. "Coleman's breakthrough with freeing harmony from

a strict, repetitive structure has had a huge impact on the way improvisers

have thought about tonality since the late 1950s. And his efforts to reduce the hierarchy between soloist and rhythm section also indicated a direction that free improvisers have built on since the late 1960s."

Indeed, as Vandermark suggests, Coleman utterly rewrote the rules for improvising and writing jazz. The conceptual leap he made -- from the extraordinarily complex chord changes of bebop giants such as Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk to a post-chordal language of his own device -- not only

changed the music but liberated it.

Like most aesthetic revolutions, however, this one earned its leader considerable fire.

In Los Angeles, in the mid-1950s, Coleman was hard-pressed to find musicians who would talk to him, let alone take his radical ideas onto a bandstand.

And in New York, in the early 1960s, revered swing trumpeter Roy Eldridge said, "I think he's jiving, baby"; trumpeter Miles Davis said, "If you're talking psychologically, the man is all screwed up"; and drummer Max Roach, after hearing Coleman play, "punched Ornette in the mouth," notes John Litweiler in his Coleman biography, "A Harmolodic Life" (William Morrow and Company Inc.,

1992).

Even today, some observers hold serious reservations about the significance of Coleman's contributions.

"Free jazz is one of the things that anyone can do, because there are no rules to which you have to conform," says John McDonough, a veteran jazz critic who penned a famous anti-Coleman essay -- "Failed Experiment" -- in the January, 1992, issue of Down Beat, where he serves as contributing editor.

"It's empty in the same way that when Sid Caesar does a [fake] Japanese or French dialect. It sounds authentic, but it says nothing."

Others, such as veteran Chicago jazz impresario Joe Segal, have had mixed feelings about different facets of Coleman's work.

"I've heard him make some great music -- like when we had him at the Jazz Showcase [in 1975] with [bassist] Charlie Haden, [drummer] Ed Blackwell and [saxophonist] Dewey Redman. I liked the tunes, because they had that Charlie Parker flavor.

"But [later] I heard him playing all-electric, and me and the other beboppers left at intermission, because it sounded like a big mess."

Early on, however, a select few musicians instantly perceived the melodic beauty that Coleman's ideas made possible.

"Don Cherry [the innovative trumpeter] told me about this alto player, Ornette Coleman, so I went to hear him, and Ornette takes out this white plastic alto saxophone, and I never had heard anything so beautiful in my life," recalled bassist Haden, in a conversation with the Tribune last year.

"When he walked out of the club, I ran back after him.

"I just thought he played like some revolutionary angel.

"So he invited me to come to his home -- actually, it was his apartment, a little one-room shack with music on the floor and everywhere.

"And I'll never forget what he said to me: `After we play the intro, listen to me, and we'll play what we want to play, not what we're supposed to be playing.'"

Altered direction of jazz

From these early collaborations with Haden, trumpeter Don Cherry and bassist Billy Higgins, among others, came recordings that radically altered the direction of jazz. The bracing sounds of "Something Else! The Music of Ornette Coleman" (1958), "Tomorrow is the Question" (1959), "The Shape of Jazz to Come"

(1959), "Change of the Century" (1959) and "Free Jazz" (1960) signaled that jazz musicians content to play endless choruses on "All the Things You Are" permanently had lost their position on the front lines of the music.

If this work sounded shocking to the uninitiated, it represented a great gust of fresh air to musicians with open ears and minds.

"I remember listening to those records when they came out, and it's true that a lot of people didn't seem to understand what he was doing," recalls Chicago tenor saxophone virtuoso Fred Anderson, himself a cutting-edge player.

"But I understood what Ornette was doing -- he was coming right out of Charlie Parker, and it was good.

"It wasn't that he was trying to play like Charlie Parker. He was trying to

find his own voice."

Parker, indeed, was the alto saxophonist Coleman most admired, but while

generations of imitators tried to ape Parker's breakthroughs, Coleman chose

instead to push beyond Parker's bebop revolution.

"I saw Charlie Parker play when I just got to L.A.," in the early 1950s, recalls Coleman, "when I was really, really starving at that point. I couldn't even get in the nightclub, because of the way I was dressed.

"They said, `Please, the customers don't want to see you like this.'

"So I spoke to him outside . . . he opened up ears to hearing another way of playing music."

Coleman chose to do no less.

"Jazz means two things: `unknown' and `present,'" says Coleman, explaining his view of the music that has defined his life.

"In other words, you [bring] something unknown into the present, right?

"Now I didn't call the music I was doing `free jazz.' Someone [at the Atlantic record label] named it that, put a Jackson Pollack painting on it and called

it `Free Jazz.'"

The phrase, which has stuck to post-chordal jazz ever since, may have done a disservice to Coleman and his idiom, for it gave casual listeners the impression that, in this music, anything goes, anyone can play anything.

In reality, however, Coleman's fluid system of "harmolodics" requires musicians with uncommonly sensitive ears and nimble intellects, as well as audiences willing to embrace bursts of abstract instrumental color, utterly unpredictable phrase lengths and a kind of democracy among players that allows a robust

counterpoint to flourish.

So far as Coleman is concerned, this thinking-outside-the-margins approach to creating music was shaped early on, in Ft. Worth, where the absence of Coleman's father and the tiny wages earned by his mother left the family shut out of mainstream society.

Beyond his reach

Even music seemed beyond his reach, at first.

"I don't ever remember hearing [classical] instruments like violins -- I was always hearing people with guitars and blues and stuff like that, because there was segregation," says Coleman.

"The first time I saw a guy play a saxophone, I didn't know what it was. And someone told me it was a saxophone. So I asked my mother, and she told me that if I go out and make money I could buy myself one. So I made me a shoeshine box and went on the streets smelling feet.

"Until one day she told me, `Look under the bed' -- it took about three or four years -- and I took it out and played it."

Or, more specifically, Coleman invented his own way of playing the

instrument, since music education was not in the family budget. Long unfamiliar with the technicalities of keys, transpositions and other nitty-gritty of the musician's art, Coleman conceptualized his own systems for how tones harmonize (and

didn't harmonize), leading, perhaps, to his homemade "harmolodics."

Looking in other cultures

Ever since, Coleman has been relentless in his search for new sounds, venturing to study the musical rituals of Hopi Indians in 1962, to absorb the "healing powers" of the master musicians of Joujouka, Morocco, in the early 1970s, and to practically every other culture to which he could obtain entree. These influences perpetually have refreshed his art, inspiring epic pieces such as the jazz-meets-the-symphony "Skies of America" in the early 1970s, the quasi-classical "Freedom Symbol" suite (featuring a 20-piece ensemble) in 1989 and the multimedia, multicultural social commentary of "Tone Dialing" in 1995.

Though these works have been praised and damned, Coleman remains undeterred.

"I'm drawn to what I can't see that represents God," says Coleman, who has put aside, he says, bitterness over race-driven arrests in his youth, beatings from fellow musicians early in his career in the South and two brutal muggings from apparently random criminals in his adopted home, New York.

"I remember that I got my horn in the '40s, and after I had some experience [on it], I discovered the word `art.'

"And it seemed to me that art was anything that was created that didn't have to give in to anyone's influence. . . .

"That's one thing that I haven't done yet, and I'm not planning to."

- - -

Essential Coleman

Essential listening from Ornette Coleman's discography:

"The Music of Ornette Coleman: Something Else!" (Original Jazz Classics; 1958). The opening shots in Coleman's revolution seem tame by today's standards but caught a generation of listeners off guard.

"The Shape of Jazz to Come" (Atlantic; 1959). The first recording of Coleman's breakthrough quartet shows trumpeter Don Cherry, bassist Charlie Haden and drummer Billy Higgins forging a harmonically liberated, intensely melodic musical language.

"Change of the Century" (Atlantic; 1959). Coleman and the quartet venture more deeply into a post-chordal idiom.

"Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation" (Atlantic; 1960). Coleman's pioneering double quartet foreshadows the composer's future projects.

"Beauty is a Rare Thing: The Complete Atlantic Recordings" (Rhino/Atlantic; 1959-1961; reissued 1993). This must-have, six-CD boxed set exhaustively documents Coleman's late '50s, early '60s innovations.

-- Howard Reich