Best track on Ornette Coleman's The Shape of Jazz to Come

voted for "Focus on Sanity."

whenever the rhythm section lays out on "peace"... it's always so right

This was maybe my third or fourth jazz album and to be honest I did find it pretty challenging. Whacked it on today and was blown away at how many hooks seem to have made themselves felt since I last spun it.

Lonely Woman even though it's the obvious choice

Either this or Free Jazz was my first jazz record, at the age of about 14, after reading a Steely Dan interview where the interviewer called the latter "conventional" by modern (1980s) standards. This introduction probably distorted my view (not necessarily in a bad way) about what was normal in the genre.
I must admit that for a long time, I felt Cherry's soloing was a let-down on this record. It wasn't until I heard his playing on the two earlier Ornette records that I realized he was a very adept be-bop player. His tone is more humourous, he's sort of the Flavor Flav of the group.

this is a really tough one for me. The only track I'm even vaguely lukewarm on is "Eventually". "Lonely Woman" is the obvious choice because it is so distinctive, not just on this album, but in his whole catalog, but it isn't necessarily one of the ones that gets stuck in my head too often. I think today I'm leaning toward "Congeniality". I like how the melody jumps through a bunch of different moods and tempos.

first reactions on hearing this album, or the other early quartet stuff? on a scale of "whoa this is some wild avant garde shit (yay/boo)" to "hey this is just some bluesy melodic jazz (yay/boo)"?

is the first response even possible today, unless you somehow become a huge bop fan before hearing any newer jazz? it probably still is with free jazz, later 60s stuff, the electronic stuff. but this just feels like such approachable and emotionally generous music (disarmingly, if you're expecting him to be "difficult"- that reputation seemed to spread and persist way beyond any context where it might have made sense)

(and now his music from this period is canonised and there's an "oh it was just blues all along" counter-reaction which is also kind of unsatisfying. and the later stuff is still just kind of there, relatively unpacked. I hope these things are changing too)

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There is definitely something about his music that can sound *almost* straight ahead at times, esp if you don't come to it with a prior understanding of jazz -- something like this happened to me bc I was gifted the Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz as a kid -- early parts of it are just King Oliver and Armstrong and Big Band and as you get closer to the present it gets kind of compressed so that there's really only one volume (as I remember it) covering everything from Coltrane and Monk to Ornette and Cecil Taylor. And I do distinctly remember not really being sure if anything "avant garde" was going on in Congeniality, whereas something very out there was obviously going on in Enter Evening.

I don't think you could say the same about all his music from the era - certainly not Free Jazz or even some of the tunes on Shape of Jazz to Come, but he had a knack for writing catchy blues melodies. I think it would be a mistake to understand this as a function of being "early avant garde" in a progressive sense though (like "oh this sounded out back then but it doesn't now because things have progressed further). It's more just something unique to his music.

I always think of these Ornette albums, and a lot of Thelonious Monk's work, as really good "gateway jazz" in the sense that you could play them for a little kid and the kid would probably really like them because they sound fun and they have a lot of almost cartoony energy. I mean, close your eyes and listen to Thelonious Monk's Columbia quartet albums and picture Rowlf the Dog playing the music.

Programmed this in the proper order from the Beauty Is a Rare Thing box. (The mania for complete recordings boxes in the '90s produced some lovely packages, this one included, but I tend to wish I just had the albums these days). "Eventually" is a gas, and I voted for it.

unperson OTM.

(The mania for complete recordings boxes in the '90s produced some lovely packages, this one included, but I tend to wish I just had the albums these days).

Agree 100%. I have this box and the John Coltrane Atlantic box, The Heavyweight Champion, and I just wind up listening to my digital re-assemblages of the actual albums 99% of the time.

I also went in on the Beauty Is A Rare Thing box back then, easily one of the very best of these collections

I haven't listened to this in so long. I'd forgotten how much it swings. I've been watching Mad Men and the music they use makes it seem like the show is from the 30s or something. Meanwhile, this quartet are ripping it up in Texas and it feels like the next century.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Heh.

honestly a little bummed about no votes for "Focus on Sanity"

This is the Vinyl Me Please "Classics" title for October.

...and it's in MONO!