Ornette Coleman: Classic Or Dud?

The balls are classic; the horn skronk is classic; the man is simply classic.

Behold the skronk. None more skronk. For those about to skronk. Etc, etc.

(from Free Jazz to Massive Disco... )

So not dud

Abbey Lincoln's opening set was a little disappointing. She shows her age more than him.

Great description! Another one I forgot, "Song X" with Pat M.

anyone recommend seeing him live these days? am thinking about going tonight...

I'm definitely going tonight. May or may not see you there!

ill be in the balcony cheap seats. ornette is probably worth forking out 35-40 quid for.

definitely. i saw his abbreviated set at bonnaroo last month and he sounded great right up until he collapsed. seeing him now is not some nostalgia trip, he's still doin magic.

I saw him ~3 years ago and would do so again in a heartbeat. Even for $80 or so, which is more than I've ever paid for a concert.

I've never seen him and it pains me. Just bought "Of human feelings" and "This is our music" on vinyl the other day and uploaded to a certain swine related site. The final paragraph in the notes on the back of the "This is our music" vinyl are quite classic.

"About myself. I'm thirty years of age and was born in Texas - Fort Worth to be exact. Since there isn't too much I haven't told you about my music, I really told you about myself through it. The other autobiography of my life is like everyone else's. Born, work, sad and happy and etc. We do hope you enjoy our music."

is quite classic even, bah.

ok im going now. paid the most i think ive ever paid for a ticket but ive always wanted to see him so cant wait.

Beefheart to Kid A via Kool Keith

please to essprain

Never apologise, never explain.

yeah probably in your best interests

2001 was such a funny place

does anyone know, when they say at the RFH it starts at 7.30pm does that mean doors open at that time or that the support is on at that time?

I would love to see him play sometime. I only own Change of the Century, Shape of Jazz to Come, Free Jazz, and Science Fiction, but based off of those four, completely classic. Science Fiction in particular is fantastic.

Yeah, I'd love it if he made it out to my neck of the woods sometime in the near future. I'd probably pay a pretty penny! He is indeed super-classic, though I haven't heard a lot of the Prime Time era stuff. Love the early stuff, Science Fiction and have just (after a year or two of having it) fallen heavy for Tone Dialing. Sort of hated it at first, but it's made a big impression the last few listens. Ridiculously melodic, shimmering production -- I'm even coming around to liking the raps!

royce hall los angeles 9/26 on sale to non-subscribers 7/23. be there!

Now that's what I call music!

That was the first time I'd seen him, can't think of anything clever to say other than wow. I can't work out if Denardo can actually play or not, but it seems to work so who cares? I believe they call that "some next level shit".

Can someone explain harmolodics to me?

I don't think anyone's really managed to explain harmolodics, apart from the basic premise (see Litweiler's The Freedom Principle) that (in theory) you improvise continuously on the melody rather than its harmonies and (in practice) everybody solos all the time and tries to keep out of everybody else's way. In my time I have asked Don Cherry, Dewey Redman and Charlie Haden what harmolodics involved and they couldn't really explain it either. But then it feels good and sounds right (even if it's "wrong") so I guess that's what counts.

I saw him many years ago (late 80s? early 90s?) at the Nottingham Royal Concert Hall, with Prime Time. Had no idea what to expect, and didn't know the first thing about harmolodics. Clearly, neither did the vast majority of the audience - I've never seen so many walk-outs at a music show (although a sell-out screening of Fellini's Casanova where a good 25% of the audience walked out still holds the record for that one).

They played for, God, what was it, must have been at least two and a half hours without a break. Yes, everybody soloed all the time, with (seemingly) multiple concurrent time signatures and harmonic clashes, and the result was a pretty dense and relentless squall - and yet played with such calm, centred expressions.

I was determined to sit it out and not to give in. So I sat there for the first two hours feeling fairly bemused - and then, and THEN, for the last half hour everything suddenly snapped into place in my head and I found myself utterly rapt and transported. I remember Ornette switching to violin for the final piece, only I had my eyes closed at the time - fuck, what's THAT? - and opened them to see him demonically scraping all hell out of the instrument.

About a quarter of the remaining audience gave them a stander at the end - the rest just looked dazed. Vivid memory of the big hairy dude on the sound desk stretched back in his seat as we filed out, with a massive blissed out grin on his face, like he was still buzzing off some humungous spliff.

I've never bought any Ornette Coleman albums. The experience was complete as it stood.

i went last night. im not sure if i enjoyed it. im not even sure if i thought it was 'good'. i dont have loads of his albums, only a few, but i like them. last night though, im not so sure about.

i did think 'emperors new clothes' quite a few times actually.

just watched that last night, a bunch of stuff I had no idea about like the connections to Fuller and Gysin and um circumcision vs. castration

Got two live albums - Live in Paris 1971 and 1987 Hamburg Concert - on the way. That 1987 one is from when he reunited with the 1959-60 quartet (Don Cherry, Charlie Haden, Billy Higgins) and recorded In All Languages. The 1971 disc has Dewey Redman, Haden, and Ed Blackwell.

Premium box set, vinyl & CD/DVD: all performances (incl. his, unscheduled), from Celebrate Ornette, along with all from the memorial: http://www.ornettecoleman.com/#section-premium-box-set

Nice! That's mighty tempting.

I really hope the price drops on this:
http://www.amazon.com/Free-Jazz-Harmolodics-Ornette-Coleman/dp/1138122947/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1483915727&sr=1-1&keywords=ornette

I'm intrigued by the site's teaser of future releases of as-yet unrleased material. Hopefully it will help fill some of the huge holes in Ornette's career in the latter years.

Yeah, I don't know what they've ("they" being Denardo) got in mind, but I know, for example, that a 2003 concert I saw at Carnegie Hall - which was the debut of the Ornette/Tony Falanga/Greg Cohen/Denardo band - was recorded and had been planned for release, but was scrapped. Maybe that will emerge now.

Yeah I hope it's not just a one-man operation that peters out due to percieved lack of interest. By the look of the typography, the recent RSD re-release of The European Concert was a Song X release as well, so mayb e it's a bit more put together than I'd think.

A fine discovery and comment from the original interviewer:

I had no idea this, from 1972, had survived in the BBC archive. Ornette Coleman was a pure and gracious spirit, and a marvellous talker. Sorry about the dumb questions, but at least I kept them short. https://t.co/fA92s4q5xJ

— Richard Williams (@rwilliams1947) April 8, 2018

yeah! never seen this clip before ... Richard Williams' blog is always full of good stuff: https://thebluemoment.com/

Oh, don't do that to me...

"now, back to manfred mann's earth band ... "

I think Richard Williams must be the only decent Sports writer I've ever seen who is also brilliant on music as well.

That was a great interview, and I'm especially fascinated because it's about Skies of America, and I just wrote a piece about Ornette's chamber and orchestral music a couple of weeks ago.

I found myself spinning Skies of America this morning for the first time in a long while and came on to see how others rated it, and just read Phil’s write up of it along with the chamber pieces, which I’m listening to now. Very illuminating!

It's probably the album I've listened to the most over the past four years. Make of that what you will.

the Ornette Coleman I've listened to most in recent years is Crisis .. and it grows and grows every time I listen to it, what a fucking band.

I don’t know that I’ve ever heard it! I need to remedy that.

Recently reissued on CD as a twofer with Ornette At 12, which is also very much worth hearing.

'ornette at 12' is one of my faves. also 'at the golden circle' and the 'naked lunch' soundtrack

that rhythm section on at the golden circle is so great, one of best jazz trios ever imo.

cosign

i agree w/mself of 19 years ago lol

'free jazz' is actually one of my favorites too tbh

I recently came across 'Opening the Caravan of Dreams', a 1985 live album from Prime Time that I don't see much talk about. Really, really funky and cool. Almost no-wavey in parts. Fans of 'Dancing in Your Head' would dig, I reckon.

like a jerk, I never saw him play…but one time I spotted him getting off the A or E at the West 4th st station…he was carrying a pearl paint bag… absolutely no one around the station had any notion, so I greeted him, shook his band and made small talk for a bit… he was lovely and completely OK with talking to some stranger…

I’ve been after a copy of that one for a while. I have an mp3 rip, definitely a cool one. Memory days it’s in the vein of ‘Of Human Feelings’

Prime Time finally started to click for me in the last year or two. Listening to Body Meta now, though Of Human Feelings is my favorite.

a thing i liked abt prime time is that whenever you bought a physical copy of the village voice from the mid-80s thru the 90s bern nix always had an ad in the classifieds offering guitar lessons

that’s delightful.

Of Human Feelings ranks among my top Ornette LPs.

my favourite Prime Time is probably Opening the Caravan of Dreams

saw ornette with group from the 'sound grammar' album when they headlined newport in 2004, it started raining and everyone left except the real headz lol

i watched "ornette: made in america" the other night and i loved it, particularly the musical performances with ornette/prime time playing with orchestras. so i'm listening to "skies of america" and it's great but doesn't have any of ornette's band on it. i'm wondering if there are any albums or live recordings that are closer to the performances in the movie with orchestral parts and the full-band jazz parts

Check out Chappaqua Suite, which has the Ornette/David Izenzon/Charles Moffett trio, plus Pharoah Sanders, plus strings. It's pretty wild.

“town hall 1962” also has the moffett / izenzon trio playing with a string quartet, it’s cool

the part in made in america that had a string quartet with denardo coleman on drums playing inside a buckminster fuller geodesic dome was fantastic

how could I have not known about this

https://valghent.com/emmanuel-ghent-ornette-coleman-man-on-the-moon/

thanks as per usual to hrvatski

& still haven't seen Made In America; but there's a complete 1987 live version with symphony + band including Dernardo. seems to artifically mix back and forth between symphony and band but in an interesting / compositional way

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Garvv6PPsaY

it's on the criterion channel and might be worth signing up for the free trial at least to watch

best featured article ever

I was pondering a Prime Time poll, and Of Human Feelings would have been my vote.

I didn't realize he recorded with Joe Henry:

https://americana-uk.com/interview-joe-henry-on-everything-from-ornette-coleman-to-bob-dylan-and-randy-newman

Martin Johnson: You’ve worked with an unbelievable number of other musicians over the years, but I have to ask, from a personal point of view, what was it like having the late great Ornette Coleman on one of your records?

Joe Henry: It was one of the great nights of my working life because I had been told when I first approached him by writing a letter and initially hearing back from somebody who worked for him that Ornette doesn’t really do that, and he has been asked by everybody but he feels that if he says yes to you after having said no to other people, it is like he is judging their work and he doesn’t want to do that. He wishes you well and you should keep doing what you are doing, he is going to keep doing what he is doing, and I thought that was the end of it, but the same person called me back a few days later and said “I’m really surprised to be calling you, I’ve never made this call before”, and Ornette had listened to my current record I’d sent him, I think it was probably Fuse that I sent him, and this person explained the Ornette knew exactly why I wanted to work with him, and he would be delighted. There was no one happier than me, it was one of the most exciting moments I’ve had in the studio, and one of the moments when I have been most honoured by an artist’s participation as I’ve ever been.

MJ: Were you intimidated, what did it feel like?

JH: Well of course I was, haha, but he treated me like a peer, which was incredibly humbling for somebody like me. He thought a lot about what his job was because he hadn’t been a sideman to anybody else it wasn’t just something he was doing by rote. The song is a blues in G Minor, he could have done that in his sleep, but he thought long and hard because I could tell, trying to figure out what his real job was, you know, what’s my role here. We talked about it, and he was playing as an overdub the last element we were adding to that song one evening in a studio in New York City, and he played many takes and they were all wonderful and interesting, but for him, he was looking for something very particular, he was looking to observe a real particular character. At one point he said to me at a break, “You know, I’m not doing badly for you but I know the saxophone so well and I can hear I’m still playing the saxophone, and if it is OK with you, I need to keep going until I’m just playing music. I thought that was the most generous thing to offer, both for his time because I was already happy, but also a life lesson that even he, the master that he was at that moment, needed to transcend the delivery system, the articulation machine that the saxophone was and just get to the point where there was nothing standing between his heart and the beating heart of the song. It was really wonderful to be in his company.

MJ: Finally, do you want to say anything to our UK and European readers?

JH: Yes, as an American I’m sorry, haha. We are doing the best we can, some of us. I will leave you with one last Ornette story, a couple of months after we recorded together I turned 40, and my wife and children brought me coffee to bed very early on that Saturday morning and the phone rang. I wouldn’t have answered it, but my wife said she was sure it would be my mom and dad and I should answer it. I picked the phone up, and nobody said anything but I heard the phone set down, and then Ornette plays me ‘Happy Birthday’ for two and a half minutes, and it was tremendous and I just had tears pouring down my face. I had so many friends when they heard about it later say to me it was too bad I wasn’t home because I could have recorded it on my answer machine, and I’m thinking how in the world could that be better than me hearing him in real-time.

He also recorded with Don Cherry early on. I joked with him years ago that he should seek out Billy Higgins and Charlie Haden (who were alive at the time) so that he could say he brag he played with the classic Ornette quartet.

Great stories, will have to check that Joe Henry album, thanks!

from Lou Reed's site:

THIS IS ONE OF MY GREATEST MOMENTS.
I had Ornette Coleman play on my song Guilty. He did seven versions- all different and all amazing and wondrous. I put up these different takes so you could share. Each take is Ornette playing against a different instrument- ie drum, guitar 1 guitar 2 etc. Listen to this!!!
LOU REED///////ORNETTE COLEMAN

i signed in, guilty as charged, and it's still the three. but thx a bunch these are terrific!

I remember this feature on Lou's website years ago, there were definitely more than 3 takes you could switch between at that point.

Yeah---now I'm finding quite a few informative posts by self on here, starting to feel like the dude with reminder tattoos in Memento:

This is fun: Ornette w Lou Reed and combo, on takes of Lou's "Guilty," with the words changing a little each time, along with the sax and one of the guitars, bass a bit less so. For total effect, my faves are the first and last versions---listen on headphones if you got 'em, but voice, sax and drums, or drum, come through even on tiny laptop speakers.
http://www.loureed.com/guilty/

― dow, Thursday, June 11, 2015

Listening to Virgin Beauty for the first time right now. I'm sure I'd have gotten to it sooner or later, but the Jerry Garcia connection did bump it up on my list. Ornette sounds fantastic and on those three tracks Garcia fits in nicely, I just can't help but imagine a less "of its time" rhythm section.

i've a Japanese release of that that's remastered and the music breathes so much compared to the extremely 2D sounding original issue.

https://store.acousticsounds.com/d/166996/Ornette_Coleman-Round_Trip_The_Complete_Ornette_Coleman-Vinyl_Box_Sets

incredible deal, not supposed to be buying records but couldn't resist