Portside

Ornette Coleman, the composer and multi-instrumentalist, died on June 11th
in Manhattan. He was 85. Though health challenges in recent years had been
a constant struggle, Coleman’s relevance as a visionary artist kept him
at the helm of the “Change of the Century”; this jazz revolution began
some 60 years ago but lives far beyond his mortal years.

The challenge Ornette posed to listeners, to musicians and to the public in
a period of anxious social upheaval matched the tenor of the times. With
roots in Texas blues and then years spent on the road before endeavoring
deeply in the Los Angeles jazz scene, Ornette’s concepts were stirring,
indeed, radical on every level. His vision of a liberated melody, harmony
and rhythm, aka Harmolodics, reflected the abstract expressionist movement
in visual art and yet held such a visceral connection to the blues, to
African American folk forms, that it was anything but abstract. A closer
listen revealed the entire spectrum of the Black experience as it pushed
outward.

Born in Fort Worth, Texas in 1930, Coleman was raised in a poor household
after his father died in a tragic accident. Searching for the means to grow
beyond the cramped rural home by the railroad tracks, the young Ornette
became enamored with the arts. His initial foray into music grew out of
self-taught experimentation and high school band, and was heralded by the
sounds on the radio and what he could pick up on the circuit. Hearing
Charlie Parker affected Coleman deeply and many of the musicians who knew
him back in Texas have said that he had an uncanny ability to imitate the
legendary Parker’s approach to the alto saxophone. Among his cohorts on
the Fort Worth music scene were drummer Charles Moffet, whom he’d perform
with again in the mid-60s, clarinetist John Carter, drummer Ronald Shannon
Jackson and flutist and multi-reeds player Prince Lasha, all of whom would
go on to careers as expansive jazz artists. Coleman performed in a
disparate range of arenas, from minstrel shows to bars, parties to pick-up
gigs, but was wont to make enemies on many a bandstand due to his burning
need for invention. Not content to perform the be-bop, jump blues or R & B
he was hired for, Coleman forged new ground in this unlikeliest of
places—until finally finding his way to the West Coast.

Once in LA, Coleman sought out sympathetic co-voyagers in after-hours clubs
until finding cornetist Don Cherry. With the saxophonist acting in the role
of guide-star, Cherry’s unique voice came to fruition, offering an
indelible counter-part to Coleman’s own searching, achingly blue and yet
joyous tone. Both had a penchant for brief, simple folk-like melodies that,
upon repetition, reconfigured into bold new layered pathways which overtook
the rules of music theory. Just long enough to explode into seemingly
unfettered forays.

Coleman’s higher form of improvisatory performance-practice, upon
examination, offers clear resolutions connecting passages or
movements —- not the standard chordal dominant-to-tonic resolution but
logical cadences summoning the return of the piece’s melody or its
ending. Concurrently, Ornette Coleman’s abilities as a composer came to
the forefront and he was able to draw out some of the most painfully
captivating melodies from his and Cherry’s horns. Early examples such as
“Lonely Woman” and “Beauty is a Rare Thing” continue to dictate the
apex of jazz balladry.

To the uninitiated, the music in its formative years was akin to wild
confusion. Coleman and Cherry were laughed out of performance spaces,
physically threatened. Jazz critics fought over who would get their hatchet
pieces to press first. Yet, Coleman’s supporters found in his music a new
way, a liberation that shunned pre-conceived notions and tore off the
shackles that confined. Pianists John Lewis (of the Modern Jazz Quartet)
and Paul Bley, as well as Leonard Bernstein, celebrated the daring sounds
and concepts. Even Coleman’s instrument spoke of a new dawn in the music:
he played an alto saxophone made of plastic which produced a throaty wail
in long-held tones. This coupled with musical memories of the Southwest
begat soaring, compelling phrases that dipped and contoured, offering a cry
that stirred one’s soul. This was something drastically new, yet simply
timeless.

The young progressive bassist Charlie Haden joined the cause, and with the
addition of the driving post-bop drummer Billy Higgins or, alternately, the
New Orleans-raised Ed Blackwell (who’d define free drumming), the Ornette
Coleman Quartet came to be. The four-way instrumental conversations that
floated over 20th century jazz constructions advanced the legend, albeit
often in negative terms. Los Angeles in the mid-later 1950s was a bitter
place for an African American musical revolutionary drenched in the avant
garde. Yet, Coleman, brandishing the stealth symbolism of Black liberation,
persisted.

The Quartet relocated to New York and held residency at the Five Spot club
on the Lower East Side for months. Through the derision of negative
reviewers as well as the championing of others, Coleman was elevated to
celebrity status. The Quartet’s groundbreaking recordings led the way of
this musical genre, this new thing, that had no title as of yet.

Following releases such as “Something Else!” and “Change of the
Century”, Coleman’s next albums continued the trend of claiming ground.
The self-defining “This is Our Music” led to the breathtaking “Free
Jazz” which featured a double quartet –-in stereo!–- that included the
likes of Eric Dolphy, performing freeform works. For many at the time, this
was as far as the music could go. The latter album title soon stood as the
banner of the genre itself. For the next generation of social justice
activists, the eponymous freedom in a /free jazz/ was a grand symbol of,
a soundtrack to, movements of liberation. This unleashing of the
instrumentalist created an art form as radical as the days demanded.

The musicians of the Coleman ensembles included the aforementioned giants
Cherry, Haden, Blackwell, Higgins and Moffet as well as bassists Scott
LaFaro and David Izenson, saxophonist Dewey Redman and drummer Denardo
Coleman, Ornette’s young son, among others. Ornette Coleman’s
chameleon-like tendency toward change saw him through a variety of musical
settings, testing his limits (and the audience’s) at each turn. The
quartets and trios brought the leader to still wider experimentation
including an expansion of his own musical arsenal, adding trumpet and
violin.

Later, Coleman played in Morocco with the Master Musicians of Jajouka, he
composed the epic orchestral work ‘Skies of America’, founded the space
Artists House, won the Pulitzer Prize and multiple fellowships, and then
realized the transformation of his Harmolodic theory as Prime Time, a band
built on funk and dance grooves. Electric instruments became central and
guitarist Bern Nix and bassist Jamaaladeen Tacuma were among the stalwarts
Coleman called upon to realize this concept.

Prime Time became Coleman’s vehicle for performance through the final
decades of his performing life but he also collaborated with older
bandmates at various junctures, helped to found Karl Berger’s Creative
Music Studio in Woodstock NY and presented his music at Lincoln Center in a
performance with the New York Philharmonic, Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson.
He created the performance hall Caravan of Dreams in Texas, performed
around the world and recorded an award-winning album with guitarist Pat
Methaney. Coleman’s rather legendary battle with major labels saw him
refusing huge sums of money as he sought out, as usual, his own way.

There was no one like Ornette, this brilliant musical philosopher and
singular voice who forged a path of revolt in a time when racism and
inequity coursed through the nation unashamed. His musical journey inspired
new generations of free improvisers and experimental composers and
demonstrated that undeterred vision can conquer the status quo.

The implications for the wider battle for revolutionary change should have
been apparent in all Coleman did. The themes in his epic work ‘Skies of
America’ speak volumes: “Foreigner in a Free Land”, “The Men Who
Live in the White House”, “Native Americans”, “Soul Within
Woman”, “The Military” and “The Artist in America” offer insight
into the quiet man’s concerns for his nation and his people.

But Coleman’s commentary on the struggle could best be heard through his
revolution of sound. Screaming and then subtle, devoid of the obvious, all
was left to the listener to define the meaning for himself.

In remembering some of the Coleman theories on race relations, the
trumpeter Matt Lavelle, a student of Ornette for years and a current
Harmolodic protagonist, recalled the master stating:

“The major chord is white; the minor chord is black. Do you agree?”

But the question was defiantly rhetorical.

“O.C. just dropped in this sort of subversive, almost subliminal way to
bring you to a higher perspective”, Lavelle explained. “To your own
reality in that higher perspective”.

And then the profound silence which followed became enveloped in a mournful
song of colossal heights.

[John Pietaro is a writer and musician from Brooklyn NY. His Dissident
Arts Festival occurs this August 15 and 16 in New York City; it will be
dedicated to the memory of Ornette Coleman and the struggle for the
people’s unity. For more information see: http://www.dissidentarts.com/
and http://theculturalworker.blogspot.com/ ]

Thanks to the author for sending this to Portside.