best ornette Blue Note Album?

[chewy-chew-chew-bean-benitez]

im voting for love call cause im grooving to it right now, and im really digging it. it musically works for me, i like it very much

theres not one im forgetting in the poll is there?

[paul secor]

Golden Circle Vol. 1 is my favorite.

[David Ayers]

Another vote for Golden Circle 1. Classic.

[brownie]

And another one for Gyllene Cirkeln, vol. 1.

In fond memories of the original mono LP.

The RVG CD edition had great sound too plus additional tracks!

[JSngry]

If we're voting on LPs, make mine Love Call.

[EKE BBB]

Love Call here.

[Hot Ptah]

Golden Circle Vol. 1

[jazzbo]

I voted Love Call. I actually really like them all.

I wish there were RVG remasters of Love Call and New York Is Now, I'd love to hear what RVG does to those (not his recordings originally).

[7/4]

I voted Love Call. I actually really like them all.

I wish there were RVG remasters of Love Call and New York Is Now, I'd love to hear what RVG does to those (not his recordings originally).

I love 'em all too.

I think of Love Call and New York Is Now as the same album, the same project and the same with Golden Circle so it's a bit of a problem to separate them into albums, even though they came that way.

[colinmce]

At the Golden Circle, Vol. 2, though I do really like The Empty Foxhole.

[jeffcrom]

I think of Love Call and New York Is Now as the same album, the same project and the same with Golden Circle so it's a bit of a problem to separate them into albums, even though they came that way.

That's the way I've always seen them.

I'm somewhat arbitrarily voting for New York is Now, partially because I like the Croydon concert with Izenzon and Moffett even more than the Golden Circle performances.

[Enterprise Server]

Hard choices. I love all those recordings. Ornette is one of my favorite artists. You can't go wrong with any of the listed recordings......

[Rooster_Ties]

'Love Call' and 'New York is Now', hands down.

Any/every Ornette is great, but I generally like him a lot better in quartet settings, where I think the foil of another horn nearly always lends to the proceedings.

Loves me some Dewey too (at least on tenor - and iirc, he only plays tenor on these two days, a plus!), so my desert island Ornette on BN is definitely one of those two.

[JSngry]

I think of Love Call and New York Is Now as the same album, the same project...

Yeah, with the CD issues, it's easy/better to see it that way. But with the LPs, which is how I came to this music and the only way I knew it for quite a while, they kind of do divide up...New York Is Now is mostly the "split tempos" album, and Love Call is mostly the "swinging" album. Not unlike how they did the Miles concert with My Funny Valentine being the "ballads" album & Four And More being the "burn" album.

Two things about the New York Is Now CD, though - the original LP package is gorgeous, the photography & graphics are just wonderful. There's an amazing "blurry", glowing color photo of Ornette sitting/studying inside Rudy's brick walls, and the back cover photo almost looks like a watercolor, even though it's a photo. The CD just gives the cover shot, and that's waaaaayyy too bad.

Also, what the CD does to "We Now Interrupt For A Commercial" is just wrong. First of all, it leads off side two, so you got that impact/"purpose" thing going on. Second, the elimination of the interruptional spoken bits blatantly violates the whole premise/purpose of the piece. It was Ornette's idea, so WTF w/removing it,, eh? Finally, the 2nd tune on that LP side is "Round Trip", so you go immediately from this quasi-chaotic surrealism into this straight-up R&B thing, and the impact is seriously cool.

You get none of this on the CD, although you do get a more "objective" presentation of the session itself, which is not w/o a merit of its own. But...

[B. Clugston]

Yet another vote for Golden Circle Vol. 1. I like Jackie McLean's New and Old Gospel (with Ornette on trumpet) too.

[Late]

Not to derail the intent of the thread too much, but has anyone here every wondered/thought about what that Jackie session would have been like if Ornette had played alto?

I've never heard the original "We Now Interrupt." Would like to. Too bad Ornette's later BN sessions weren't in the Blue Note Works TOCJ series. The Japanese would have kept the original intent of the LPs (which would have also meant no alternate takes).

The Empty Foxhole seems like Ornette's most under-valued BN session. I guess because of Denardo's presence, but I've actually grown to like his playing there. Now if only that CD included the unissued session with Dookie on harmonica.

[JSngry]

Doesn't appear to have the proper stereo balance though...

[mjzee]

Not to derail the intent of the thread too much, but has anyone here every wondered/thought about what that Jackie session would have been like if Ornette had played alto?

I've never heard the original "We Now Interrupt." Would like to. Too bad Ornette's later BN sessions weren't in the Blue Note Works TOCJ series. The Japanese would have kept the original intent of the LPs (which would have also meant no alternate takes).

The Empty Foxhole seems like Ornette's most under-valued BN session. I guess because of Denardo's presence, but I've actually grown to like his playing there. Now if only that CD included the unissued session with Dookie on harmonica.

But all he wanted to do was DANCE!

[ep1str0phy]

Golden Circle, Volume 2 was always my jam back when I was getting into Ornette. I cannot understate the impact of my first exposure to "Snowflakes and Sunshine" (which I later discovered to be somewhat of a regular set piece for the trio). Consuming all of this music with the virtue/curse of hindsight makes for some weird narrative disjunction... I think I leapt from Shape of Jazz to Come to Golden Circle 2 to Science Fiction (or maybe Sci Fi was in the middle, I can't remember), which did wonders for my appreciation for Ornette as this sort of comprehensive avant genius (though, at the same time, blunting my understanding of the ENORMOUS leap in terms of liberty/looseness between the Atlantics and the trio music--or rather, the unreal virtuosic tightening up between the Blue Note music and the reformed Haden/Blackwell group).

I still hold that Vol. 2 is the superior album (compared to 1), even though the performances are easily appreciated as a whole. Vol. 1 is pure shredding and motivic invention, whereas Vol. 2 is ragged creation, big ideas, and emotional projection (the latter of which meaning the most to me). I still hear Vol. 1 as an enjoyable but relatively facile representation of Ornette's emotional dimensions (the ballad, "Dawn," sounds far less direct and earnest than Vol. 2's "Morning Song"), and the one real "big idea" track on the album ("European Echoes") teeters really close to laboriousness (I love the insistence of Ornette's more repetitive melodies, but I wonder if the trio had difficulty saying much with the waltz idea). Anyway, 2 has the balls-to-the-wall, terrifyingly untutored blowout ("Snowflakes"), a stark and movingly unguarded ballad ("Morning Song"), a ridiculous uptempo alto feature ("The Riddle"), and the sort of warm, slow-burn, rhythmic juggling that Ornette's music excels at ("Antiques"). Anyway, Vol. 2 has everything.

I almost wished I voted for Foxhole, though, because the sheer balls on that album are a miracle. Of course, it works as a musical piece, and as a sort of jazz art brut it's in the upper echelons (alongside some of Rahsaan's weirder works, early Art Ensemble, some of the wackier stuff Dudu Pukwana was involved in, and a number of other things). I can understand it might not be everyone's taste, but taken on its own grounds (as a "folk music" and not, say, the apotheosis of the pianoless trio concept), it's a stunner. I think it accomplishes exactly what it seems Ornette wanted it to accomplish.

My love for the Redman/Garrison/Jones dates is an up and down kind of thing--I think everyone is there to play, but Garrison in particular sounds a little spent for ideas in spots--but the quality of the heads and the general musicianship on display is of such a high quality that I'd consider all of it worth listening to. I actually don't think these albums are as "successful" in and of themselves as Empty Foxhole or the bordering-on-sublime Golden Circle records, but I would rather hear Elvin jones work through an unfamiliar idiom than I would virtually any contemporary jazz drummer burn through your (now) typical post-Tony Williams, post-Miles sort of bag.

I think that the piece "Old Gospel" is an amazing performance and everyone plays through the McLean album wonderfully, but the other compositions seem a little too self-conscious for my tastes. I think McLean thrived in that mysterious, not-quite-earworm space that Grachan Moncur III conjured so effortlessly, and the Ornette-ish context is simultaneously liberating for Jackie and kind of straightjacketing (all bright edges and less mystery). Again, worth listening to, still.

[David Ayers]

Very, very interesting comments, ep1.

[David Ayers]

Incidentally I played though the atlantics recently after a (very) long period without them. Not so 'free'? Maybe. BUT incredibly lucid, much more thought-through and composed and less belonging-to-nature than I guess I used to think. I never found as much in Cherry as I do here, where the context or guidance or just sheer on-the-day in-that-band form makes him sound like a genius, and the genius he sounds like is Ornette.

Edited August 12, 2011 by David Ayers

[Leeway]

Golden Circle 1. Everything about it is right.

[chewy-chew-chew-bean-benitez]

do u guys like love call more than new york is now. im listening to jsngrys clip, do not dig the violin. not to much into ornette really but i DUG love call. it all made sense and was attractive music i thought

[sidewinder]

I'll go out on a limb and say 'New and Old Gospel' - certainly this session has left the greatest impact on me, although I need to go and revisit the likes of 'Love Call'.

[7/4]

Poor Foxhole has zero votes right now. I love 'em all for different reasons!