Ornette Coleman Trio at Hill Auditorium

[GregK]

Hey, was that his plastic alto? It was white, with gold inside the bell and around the keys, and a Selmer mark on the neck key. I thought it was metal, but then I was thinking about that photo in the boxed set and the plastic one had metal parts, too.

that was my first thought too, when he picked it up-"that's the plastic one!!!!"

[Chuck Nessa]

Just white, not plastic.

[7/4]

Thanks. Did they function the same way in Chicago, with one bass playing plucked, the other bowed, most of the night?

Yes. They did perform "Turnabout"as well in its entirety.

Too cool! It's a fun tune.

[Lazaro Vega]

Stephen Rush, pianist and associate professor at U of M's music school, wrote the encore was actually "When Will the Blues Leave?" and not, as previously reported "Turnaround" or "When the Saints Go Marching In." Final answer.

[randissimo]

Nice article Lazaro...

[Lazaro Vega]

Remembering....

[colinmce]

I listened to Sound Grammar a few times yesterday, and it really is one of my favorite recordings of his. Something about the instrumentation .... such a beautiful, broad canvas. I *think* this performance was taped in an ampitheater, but either way that's what it sounds and feels like: like it's Ornette, the stars, and the big night sky.

[ep1str0phy]

This band and its precursor (the trio with Denardo and Charnett Moffett--never got to see the band with Geri Allen) completely flattened me. The Charnett/Denardo band was muscular, dynamic, and strange, and witnessing this band's truly surreal not jazz/not electric hybrid (with Ornette on violin and Denardo in full John Bonham mode) was a formative experience.

The second time I saw Ornette, it was the Sound Grammar band--Charlie Haden's Quartet West opened, and Haden actually joined Ornette for the inevitable encore of "Lonely Woman"--it was more subdued, and the crowd was almost openly hostile for the duration of the show, but Ornette's playing assumed this plaintive, evasive quality that I'd only rarely heard on record up to that point.

The last time I saw him was almost an otherworldly experience--it was the three bass band (with Charnett in tow), and at that advanced stage, Ornette's playing had been reduced to a spectral murmur. All of the rhythmic momentum was in the hands of the younger cats (including Al MacDowell--who, in being saddled with playing all of the heads, was the night's secret MVP). The music itself was unbelievable--conceptually rich, sonically complex, and somehow (sounding) absolutely spontaneous. It was more thoroughly "avant-garde" than any Ornette on record: spontaneous group rhythmic displacement (i.e., the band coming together on these seemingly improvised streams of mixed meter), insane melodic communication, crazy juxtaposition of feels and sounds. Denardo took this post-"Wipeout"/pseudo-Mitch Mitchell drum solo that was absolutely out of this world--the maturation of a path that Ornette had set out on back when he and son first teamed for the audacious The Empty Foxhole all those years ago. I had a cold when I arrived that evening, and it was gone by the end of the show.

[Lazaro Vega]

That's awesome.

[clifford_thornton]

Yeah, I saw that three-bass band in Austin. They were extraordinary.