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.

I didn't really notice much in the way of walkouts. Saw that Paul Morley walking in, though.

i saw morley as well. he didnt have very good posture.

It's terrible him trying to rip off Paolo Nutini at his age.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/6927534.stm

He recalled in particular the day his mother bought him a horn when he was a young boy.

"I thought it was a toy and I played it the way I am playing today," he said.

"I didn't know that you had to learn to play, I thought you had to play to play. And I still think that.

"I didn't know that music was a style and that it had rules and stuff. I thought it was just sound. I still believe that.

""I thought it was a toy and I played it the way I am playing today," he said."

poor mother.

i jest.

dud on record since the late sixties.

This track I got off of the S-S Records blog Crud Crud from Ornette's 1978 record Body Meta lead me to believe the above statement is false.

CONTROVERSIAL

"Song X" is so damn good that it almost makes me wonder if I should give Metheny another shot.

tickets are $76 at the cheapest to see him here in New York at Town Hall this Friday. I have some of his old LPs, like 'shape of jazz to come' and 'live at the golden circle in stockholm' vol.'s 1 & 2, but I'm not really a huge jazz fan anymore. Then again, this might be my last chance to see a honest-to-goodness jazz legend. What do I do?

He recalled in particular the day his mother bought him a horn when he was a young boy.

"I thought it was a toy and I played it the way I am playing today," he said.

"I didn't know that you had to learn to play, I thought you had to play to play. And I still think that.

"I didn't know that music was a style and that it had rules and stuff. I thought it was just sound. I still believe that.

-- Herman G. Neuname, Thursday, August 2, 2007 9:53 PM (7 months ago)

I prefer this from the back of "This is our music":

Learned technique is a law method. Natural technique is nature's method. And this is what makes music so beautiful to me. It has both, thank God.

How did everyone enjoy Meltdown? The last night had some particularly fantastic bits...left me feeling with a sense that I hadn't quite 'heard' his records, AT ALL.

What did he say at the very beginning...something about 'following the sound', but I didn't quite grasp.

i hope i get to see ornette some time ... as for not quite "grasping" what he said, haha, that's Ornette for you. his interviews are hilarious.

Sorry not grasp, meant to say I didn't quite hear. Was at the back and it sounded like he mumbled something real quick before getting on with playing.

dud on record since the late sixties.

― jon abbey, Friday, August 3, 2007 11:06 AM (1 year ago) Bookmark

Not just Body Meta, but Soapsuds, Soapsuds is brilliant, too. And Dancing in Your Head? Just two suggestions from a neophyte, too.

too too too too too

I haven't heard Tales from Captain Black, either, but Ulmer from that time period is killer. Is there any Ulmer that doesn't slay?

dud on record since the late sixties.

Total bullshit (but it's abbey, so who expects anything else?). The Sound Museum albums and Colors: Live in Leipzig (duets with pianist Joachim Kühn) are terrific, Sound Grammar kicks ass, and while I don't love Prime Time the way I do his acoustic stuff, Virgin Beauty and In All Languages are both great.

I was at Meltdown and Sunday and it was wonderful. It was billed as 'Reflections on This Is Our Music', and while he played a few tunes from that album, albeit quite radically transformed, the set spanned his entire career. I can understand what xyzzz means by not quite having 'heard' his records - hearing harmolodics in action live, where everyone almost seems to be playing a different tune or rhythm but it somehow all fits together, was quite a revelation and will help me hear the records in a new light. I have to say Flea did a fine job as the third bassist, laying down some fluid but muscular bottom end. Theme From A Symphony from Dancing In Your Head worked brilliantly in this format. The jam with Master Musicians Of Joujouka was amazing, with Ornette at first honking and swooping around their shrill tranced out sound, before finding a beautiful way to weave through it all. In the last five minutes Ornette's rhythm section locked in with the ecstatic trance drumming, with Flea dropping in a hypnotic two note bass riff. It sounded a bit like Can. Glorious stuff. The encore of Lonely Woman, with Charlie Haden on bass, was absolutely beautiful. I don't think I've ever heard the double bass played with such delicacy and tenderness.

i have to admit, i hated flea.

i didn't know it was flea at the time, i just kept thinking "who is this twat that sounds like he's trying to play like flea of all people"

then when i saw in the paper the next day that it was flea i was like "oh"

that encore was great, though. (was going to happen the previous night with haden's band; but didn't.) i hope i can get a recording of it from somewhere.

"Total bullshit (but it's abbey, so who expects anything else?). The Sound Museum albums and Colors: Live in Leipzig (duets with pianist Joachim Kühn) are terrific, Sound Grammar kicks ass, and while I don't love Prime Time the way I do his acoustic stuff, Virgin Beauty and In All Languages are both great."

we get it, Phil, you've swallowed the incomprehensible Kool-Aid, your loving hummer in the Wire showed us that (god knows why they still let you write there).

I continue to call bullshit on his last 40 or so years of recorded output, I don't especially care if anyone agrees with me. I also call bullshit on pretty much everything he's ever said in any interview ever, I think he made some incredible, essential music in the early sixties and has basically been a fraud ever since.

fuck you.

hahahaha

JAZZ DOUCHEBAG THROWDOWN

the incomprehensible Kool-aid

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I would like a musicologically-bent few reasons as to why you call bullshit.

OUT OF CURIOSITY

not out of fuck-you-ness

and I'd like an intelligent definition of harmolodics, but we can't always get what we want.

Really? I'm sure this could be arranged, dude.

we can't always get what we want
we can't always get what we want
we can't always get what we want

Pilin' up the platitudes.

I basically don't think he's had anything new to say since very early on (which is a big reason why he records so rarely), but people seem to be so in love with him that they don't care or seem to notice.

of course, I also think Bob Dylan's output of the last 25 years is worthless and embarrassing, so I'm not really in the majority on much around here (which is why I almost never post).

anyway, my first comment was two years ago, and was a simple answer to "Classic or Dud?". I'll stick by that and let whoever wants to think that I'm a brainless fool for said position.

Well, Jon, I respect this opinion (not that you care for my respect).

Although some people don't mind if someone sticks with a thing and doesn't say anything new.

"Although some people don't mind if someone sticks with a thing and doesn't say anything new."

sure, this is a position I see expressed more and more by jazz fans/critics/musicians these days, innovation isn't important. it has a lot to do with why I'm no longer a jazz fan, as innovation in music generally is pretty important to me (not that it's always possible, but at least try).

innovation in music generally is pretty important to me (not that it's always possible, but at least try)

How do you define innovation in 2009? Who is innovating, and what are they doing that is innovative? Are there new chords being discovered/invented? New scales? New meters? New instruments? Or are we just talking about advances in recording technology and/or incremental adjustments in technique applied to existing instruments?

Phil, that would be a pretty long and involved discussion, but you basically know my answer anyway and I'm pretty sure you don't agree.

I'd actually be interested in hearing the answer though.

(And you don't see any innovation in 70s Ornette?)

i was tempted to ask that

i don't know; at the RFH there was a sense of "look! i can ornette over any kind of music i want!"

"And you don't see any innovation in 70s Ornette?"

no, he just added electricity to the same ideas.

"I'd actually be interested in hearing the answer though."

OK, I'll take a shot, although it's stretching the original topic at best. for anyone who doesn't know, I run Erstwhile Records, and have for the last ten years specialized in electroacoustic improvisation. so while obviously that's my bias, previously to that I was just a fan (of many different areas of music), and the only reason I work with the musicians that I do is that I believe in their music, not because they were friends of mine or they live in my city. so with that in mind, Phil's questions:

"How do you define innovation in 2009? Who is innovating, and what are they doing that is innovative?"

actions speak louder than words, so I'll enter into evidence the 60 or so CDs I've released in the last decade, the best 30-40 of which I think qualify as genuinely new music. if you need a few specific names, Keith Rowe, Toshimaru Nakamura, Sachiko M, Burkhard Stangl, Ami Yoshida, Jason Lescalleet and a slew of others to various extents.

"Are there new chords being discovered/invented? New scales? New meters? New instruments?"

chords, scales and meters are all meaningless in this music (at least to the limited extent of my understanding of those terms). new instruments in some cases, yeah.

"Or are we just talking about advances in recording technology and/or incremental adjustments in technique applied to existing instruments?"

no, I'm (pretty much solely) talking about the end result, which at its best combines the energy of free improv with an extremely wide palette of sounds, whether they be electronics, extended techniques on conventional instruments, or whatever mixture.

it's really hard to talk in generalities like this for me, but there's a brief shot since Sundar asked.

Cool, thanks. I enjoy many of your releases and agree that these artists are innovative.

I guess 70s Ornette isn't innovative in quite the same way but "adding electricity" and applying free jazz ideas to funk grooves do seem like creative syntheses to me.

thinking about it a little more and trying to connect it a little more to this thread, the Giuffre/Bley/Swallow material from the earlier sixties (particularly Thesis and Fusion) and Bill Dixon's two Vade Mecum records were I believe pretty influential on the European wing of EAI, as well as trying to bring the ideas of Cage/Stockhausen/Xenakis/Feldman/Cardew/Lachenmann (and probably a few others) into a free improv context.

the overarching general genre history of EAI is that when the Tokyo 'onkyo' crew emerged in the late nineties (specifically when Hat Art released Taku Sugimoto-Opposite, a record every improv fan of any kind should hear), the European free improv scene at the time basically splintered into two general areas:

1) musicians who felt compelled to rethink at least to some extent what they were doing in light of the Tokyo crew (Sugimoto primarily, but also Otomo Yoshihide, Sachiko M, Toshimaru Nakamura). Otomo's 'Mottomo Otomo' festival in Wels, Austria, was a major galvanizing event colliding Europe and Tokyo in a live situation. (EAI)

2) musicians who either didn't notice or decided to keep on going as they had been. (EFI)

Keith Rowe and Radu Malfatti both fell into the former group, and both currently count Tokyo-based musicians as most of their primary collaborators (Rowe: Toshi Nakamura and Sachiko M, Radu: the two Takus, Sugimoto and Unami). Derek Bailey and Peter Brotzmann would be examples of the latter, plenty of others, label examples would be Emanem, FMP, Incus, Maya.

it also should be noted that some of these ideas were already percolating in Europe (Polwechsel, For 4 Ears, some of the early Random Acoustics releases), and that's why the Tokyo crew's approach connected so well. and of course it should also be noted that there were grey areas in between (Another Timbre have specialized in documenting this area in the last few years) and musicians like Cor Fuhler and Axel Dorner who would play in both styles in different projects (both are also jazz musicians, they play in Otomo's jazz projects among other things).

anyway, all that is leading to a more specific answer to Phil's question: "Who is innovating, and what are they doing that is innovative?". London saxophonist Seymour Wright (a Prevost/Rowe disciple who's been doing some great work of his own recently, specifically his given away for free solo disc 'Seymour Wright of Derby' and his duo with Sebastien Lexer on Another Timbre) asked me not that long ago what I thought the most radical releases in my catalog were, and I told him the four all-Tokyo musician projects I've done. as music historians, we all know that one sign of the 'new' is often extreme, angry pans, here's one for the Ami Yoshida/Toshimaru Nakamura record I put out a few months ago that I just saw today:

http://www.squidsear.com/cgi-bin/news/newsView.cgi?newsID=974

the flip side: http://dustedmagazine.com/reviews/4974

anyway, those are a series of four records that I'd describe as genuinely 'new' (013/024/042/056 in the Erst catalog) and the main reasons I would say would be the timing and the instrumentation (thus the palette). I also work with a lot of combos who are playing together for the first time, and in the case of Soba to Bara, it's actually before the first time they played, overdubbed solos recorded separately and layered on top of each other with no editing. I think you might even like this one, Phil, the Wire review (Bill Meyer) just compared them to Billie Holiday/Lester Young and Steve Lacy/Irene Aebi (eek), which is kind of amazing for a duo that not only wasn't actually playing together, but never had before.

"applying free jazz ideas to funk grooves "

to my ears, Fela and the best electric Miles dwarf Ornette's efforts in this area, he's never struck me as especially funky (more towards gospel), which is a problem when you're trying to make free funk.

along these lines, have people heard the Vernard Johnson record I'm Alive? DL immediately if you haven't, free sax on gospel songs, dude blows his ass off in service of the Lord and will make even the biggest haters believers sometimes, right up until the song ends. I'd love to hear more of him sometime, my friend is supposed to copy some cassettes for me if he ever finds them, but he didn't release much.

Peter Brotzmann's pretty awesome, too. I think jon and I have different aesthetics, because I'd rather hear Ornette or Brotzmann doing what they've been doing for decades than the innovative ashtray rattling with intermittent blips and bloops and the "oh-so-poignant" silences of EAI.

oh no, how wrong can you be. A jazzman like ornette really has to abandon his idiom and start making free improv electro acoustic bullshit if he wants to kick it in the 00s.

I wonder if jon abbey likes crabcore.

You should be more polite.

I'm actually really curious what jon abbey's reaction is to crabcore.

I've never heard of crabcore, sorry.

Then this is the thread for you!

someone can love seeing the Preservation Hall Jazz Band now (presumably they're still playing?), and they can indeed be pretty awesome.

but no one thinks they're playing the music of now, that's all that I'm saying, and I attempted to do it with minimal value judgments, just trying to explain my perspective.

one sign of the 'new' is often extreme, angry pans

I didn't find that review all that angry or extreme. I did think his questions ("What exactly does "music" like this accomplish? What is its innate purpose/function/meaning?") were kinda dumb, in that the majority of music has long been meaningless and purposeless (liturgical music played in actual churches/temples/synagogues/mosques during actual services, and military marching music, are the big examples of music with an actual purpose) and its only function is aesthetic. I also believe context is almost always moot anyway; each piece of music is a set of sounds, organized (to a greater or lesser degree), and should be taken on its own merits rather than placed into any larger context. This is one of the cornerstones of my approach to music criticism, as jon knows. One of the big disputes we've had in the past revolves around my refusal to accept the necessity of studying up on a genre before opining on a particular piece of music. If it works for me, it works for me, and deep reading of the composer's theories isn't gonna change the sonic product one way or the other. A listener who allows himself to be swayed by an artist's rhetoric is either gullible or insecure.

someone can love seeing the Preservation Hall Jazz Band now (presumably they're still playing?), and they can indeed be pretty awesome. but no one thinks they're playing the music of now

There's no such thing as "the music of now," though. Music doesn't move on a horizontal line. It's a string of moments, some of which are in reaction to others and some of which aren't. This is particularly true in the CD/internet era, when a huge amount of music exists in digital simultaneity.

There's no such thing as "the music of now," though.

Well, there is music that is more novel than other music, which is why I suggested jon familiarize himself with crabcore. It definitely has a "now-ness."

"There's no such thing as "the music of now," though."

amusingly, Radu Malfatti and Klaus Filip have titled their upcoming duo CD for my label 'imaoto' or 'now sound' in Japanese.

"Music doesn't move on a horizontal line. It's a string of moments, some of which are in reaction to others and some of which aren't. This is particularly true in the CD/internet era, when a huge amount of music exists in digital simultaneity."

I'd say yes and no. within areas, especially ones that are in their prime period of creativity, you have albums that vault everything that's come before and force people to deal with them or become yesterday's news. this was true for hip-hop and Public Enemy, for instance (I'd say with It Takes a Million... but maybe others here would say their first record), or when Charlie Parker showed up, or Albert Ayler.

and horizontal is too simplistic, but I do think there's an overall general lineage from jazz to EFI to EAI, just as there's one from big band to bebop to free jazz. this isn't saying free jazz is the best of those, but it was the music of the mid-sixties, not bebop.

within areas, especially ones that are in their prime period of creativity, you have albums that vault everything that's come before and force people to deal with them or become yesterday's news. this was true for hip-hop and Public Enemy, for instance (I'd say with It Takes a Million... but maybe others here would say their first record), or when Charlie Parker showed up, or Albert Ayler.

I think this is only true for listeners who were alive when these records were new. Both Charlie Parker and Albert Ayler stopped making records before I was born (1971). So to me, they exist simultaneously. As far as PE are concerned, much as I love them, they were more aberrant than pathbreaking. Nobody else could pick up where they left off - legal restrictions on sampling made it prohibitively expensive.

the majority of music has long been meaningless and purposeless (liturgical music played in actual churches/temples/synagogues/mosques during actual services, and military marching music, are the big examples of music with an actual purpose) and its only function is aesthetic.

The two examples you give are musics with a stated purpose; the lack of obvious statements-of-purpose with regards to other areas of music doesn't negate the face that they may have very specific purposes/functions (to paraphrase Little Richard, it's more fun to figure those purposes out than to have them spelled out for you).

I also believe context is almost always moot anyway; each piece of music is a set of sounds, organized (to a greater or lesser degree), and should be taken on its own merits rather than placed into any larger context.

Those merits are largely, if not entirely, defined and determined by larger (social, political, economic, what have you) contexts.

This is one of the cornerstones of my approach to music criticism, as jon knows. One of the big disputes we've had in the past revolves around my refusal to accept the necessity of studying up on a genre before opining on a particular piece of music. If it works for me, it works for me, and deep reading of the composer's theories isn't gonna change the sonic product one way or the other. A listener who allows himself to be swayed by an artist's rhetoric is either gullible or insecure.

Reading up on a composer's intentions isn't the same thing as, say, investigating what other artists in that particular area of activity (or, sometimes more revealingly, other areas of musical activity) were doing around that time. If "context" is strictly defined as background/theoretical study of a composer, that's only an extremely tiny part of the story. And reducing the potential results of such study to "Now I like it!" or "Now I hate it!" strikes me as limited/limiting. My own readings on, say, Anthony Braxton or Elvis Presley -- whether I've found them insightful or thought they were utter bullshit -- have given me different perspectives, new ways of approaching their work, new ways to listen; it's never resulted in a simple "Oh, I used to love this, but now I realize that it sucks," and I've never encountered anyone, in person or in print, for whom that's been the case, with any artist.

"I think this is only true for listeners who were alive when these records were new."

I'm giving you historical examples to explain to you what I mean. presumably you're alive now, right? :)

Right, but those albums were only leaps forward for the time; now, they're just drops in the ocean of sound. Are there records being released now that vault music forward in the way you're describing? Even if I accepted your framework, I'd say no.

OK, trying to work within your worldview is hurting my head a bit (do you also ignore chronology within the same artist's work?), but I think I explained my perspective, whether one agrees or not.

I think that some new music is judged too much by its procedure rather than its sonics.

Lately it seems that there has been a feedback loop in the musical dialectic, owing to so much instantaneous transmission and response to work. It is like cultural progress has become a buzz.

Would you (you=anyone here) say that different musics are part of different musical continuums? For instance, jazz, hip hop, etc.? Granting space for blending, of course.

If this is true, I haven't heard anything that seems new, that doesn't seem like some hybridization, synthesis or incremental progression of part of a musical continuum. I have been wondering what new thing will arise.

But I think owing to the wide vocabulary/syntax of jazz, classical and its compositional and improvisatory offshoots, new works produced in those and related genres are the least likely to seem fallow.

I have to admit to definitely being dismissive to new music for rehashing old ground. I have also been hard on music that seemed obvious - have you ever heard something completely of its time, or even seemingly ahead of its time, that nevertheless turned you off as if you were just waiting for it to come, waiting to be bored by it. I felt this way when Music Has the Right to Children.

Anyway, I go both ways on the time and music question.

"I think that some new music is judged too much by its procedure rather than its sonics."

I was going to get into this, but I thought I was already going on too long.

just to be clear, 'newness' is important but the quality of the music is the primary thing. my goal is to make records that are still revealing new facets after dozens of listens, not the aural equivalent of a Michael Haneke film that shocks you initially but that you never feel like exposing yourself to a second time.

Sure. I just figured this discussion was not going to jump ship to another thread.

Plus I need to copy edit my posts. Sheesh.

(In other words, the idea was to go on too long.)

Haneke isn't just a 'shock' merchant, its a very willful misreading of what he is interested in. He clearly has interests and keeps coming back to them over and over -- the definition of non-shocking.

I don't need to expose myself to records dozens of times; the newness of a film/record can reveal itself fairly quickly -- and if it is new, it ought to do it with people who don't know that much about it. This is what's so attractive about improvisation in the first place, where you are looking for your precious art to be compromised by engaging with someone else. After spending enough time with some of the records improv is a mostly concert only occasion, as a listen once/treasure it-or-throw-it-away etc, so Jon coming over here like a mad studio scientist trying to make these AMAZING records that will REVEAL themselves should you want to LISTEN! makes you want to start thinking that how music should never that much of an effort.

The question what is or isn't harmolodics isn't THAT important when it comes to engaging with Ornette's music. The desire to want to unlock music does demand explanations from the people who make them but they can be terrible at providing them. That's where the work from the person at the other end comes in.

So music can be an effort. But I don't expect to get it from a guy who wears colourful clothing and says he comes from Saturn or this chess freak who titles his compositions by drawing squiggly signs, or from these 'normal' looking improv guys that make millions of CDs that get accused of sounding 'the same'.

To go back to Ornette I think Dancing in Your Head is probably my single favourite by him, and really coming in from a different angles to Miles or Fela. When thomp talks about a sense of (to put it slightly differently) 'Ornetting' that's where the sense that he has a system ('harmolodics', lets call it) to make this stuff comes from, surely. He has it, but its his own, because we will never know the 'it'.

So music can be an effort. But I don't expect to get it from a guy who wears colourful clothing and says he comes from Saturn or this chess freak who titles his compositions by drawing squiggly signs, or from these 'normal' looking improv guys that make millions of CDs that get accused of sounding 'the same'.

It seems like this paragraph is missing a word or two. Are you saying that you don't expect the people in the second sentence to provide explanations of their music? That you don't expect to perceive "effort" in these people's music?

i think the devotion of 60s avant-jazz heroes to THE SYSTEM is kind of interesting, be it a system of 'squiggly lines' or harmolodics or pretending to come from saturn

i think my comment about 'ornetting over whatever' was brought on by the bassist playing something vaguely baroque which i later read wz a fragment from one of bach's solo cello suites

i certainly got the impression that his playing was reaching for a set of rather crystallised gestures at how he plays a lot of the time, rather than a genuine conception of the moment: but, you know, he is a 79-year-old who had been playing pretty much every night that week. (when haden called him on to take a bow the previous night he looked utterly shattered.)

& it might be possible to say "oh, if only he'd spent years looking for collaborators who would push him in different directions" — his violin playing, for example, is over the top of what the rest of the band is playing on every record i've heard it on, rather than integrated with it — but he didn't, and it feels kind of ... uncharitable, at this point, to slate ornette ...

& if there's nothing wrong with the preservation jazz hall band being awesome i don't really see why ornette can't be awesome, which he was, despite all, in places.

(like: i can see why it might make some very angry that ornette holds this dual position as an elder statesman [which he is] and as an ambassador of the new [which he isn't] — but i don't see why that makes his records awful, it just means it'll take a while longer to arrive at an accurate assessment of them ...)

jon abbey, if you don't mind my asking, how do you feel about
i) blue series stuff
ii) the idea represented by derek bailey's 'guitar drums and bass'*

*rather than the actual record, which eh

sarahel -- What I meant was that I don't expect clarity from musicians in general.

Thomp -- I couldn't tell how 'good' or not Ornette's improv was at times. Thinking now there certain riffs that kept coming back. But I was just enjoying the cast of people he bought along, as in just the fact that they were there (like you, I don't think I could tell what Flea was doing apart from one piece). The thing I really thought about quite a lot was the first 3-5 mins of the section with Master Musicians of Jojouka.

I'd be inclined to agree on his fiddle playing: there is a type of improv person that basically 'trolls' and that seems to me to be what Ornette is up to. But because everyone else is playing with some other 'concept' of his there is a mis-communication.

there is a type of improv person that basically 'trolls' and that seems to me to be what Ornette is up to.

Henry Kaiser likes to do this a lot.

Sorry I'm not explaining properly (see how difficult these things are):

Thinking now there certain riffs that kept coming back

Basically, he seemed to get stuck in a certain 'riff' and a certain response that wore me out, but actually I'll strike this, I'm too far removed from that aspect of the performance.

"jon abbey, if you don't mind my asking, how do you feel about
i) blue series stuff"

dreadful music, although to be fair, I stopped paying attention after the first handful. like you imply with the Derek record, the idea is compelling in theory but the execution is generally quite poor. but then again, I believe that jazz is a dead language, much like Latin, and attempts to crossbreed it to other areas are pretty much doomed to failure.

"ii) the idea represented by derek bailey's 'guitar drums and bass'*

*rather than the actual record, which eh"

heh, well, that's a little hard to separate, but I think I know what you mean. the idea is admirable, but the problem is that Derek never moved much, no matter who he played with. he did his thing, and people were expected to adapt to him. drum and bass on the radio was just more source material for him to play against, not something to genuinely try to meld with and have it influence how he played, how he thought. there were occasional exceptions, like the live set I saw him do with the Ruins, where he was forced to play extremely loud, but for the most part that was his approach. I have tons of respect for Derek, saw him do plenty of great sets, and dedicated my last ErstQuake festival to him, as it took place at Tonic soon after his death, which was his home away from home in the final years, and his work as a musician, label owner, and festival curator (Company Week) was a crucial building block for all the styles of free improv that followed.

but I'll defer to my man Keith Rowe on this, in a piece that the Wire ran about him in 2001 (it should be noted that EAI had just begun to coalesce in the year or two before Keith's quote here):

"I have the very greatest admiration for Derek's work, but for me he's playing the old language. The structure, verbs and syntax are different but the language is the same. My work's always been oriented towards the future, finding a completely different language."

Keith and I don't agree on everything musical, but we're in total agreement on this kind of thing, and on the importance of at least trying to work in that direction.

"I don't need to expose myself to records dozens of times; the newness of a film/record can reveal itself fairly quickly -- and if it is new, it ought to do it with people who don't know that much about it."

yes, I agree, that's not what I meant. the newness part should reveal itself almost immediately, I'm talking about fully coming to terms with the content and the logic, and I think the best records continue to reveal new depths and facets after dozens of listens.

"This is what's so attractive about improvisation in the first place, where you are looking for your precious art to be compromised by engaging with someone else."

totally agreed, and why I primarily work with first-time combos that I've asked to play together, in the interests of pushing them out of their normal grooves. this isn't randomly throwing people together, like in Company Week, but trying to put together combos who have yet to play together but that I think could work well if given the chance.

"After spending enough time with some of the records improv is a mostly concert only occasion, as a listen once/treasure it-or-throw-it-away etc"

this is where I strongly disagree. records are very different from concerts, which everyone in most areas of music knows, but improv people seem to have an issue with. concerts are designed to be heard once live and not revisited except in your memory, records ideally should hold up to numerous listens, otherwise they're not a very worthwhile purchase.

"willful misreading"

This phrase is going around.

concerts are designed to be heard once live and not revisited except in your memory

Not always. There are plenty of concerts that are designed to be recorded, with the resulting document to be merchandised.

Sounds like it was good fun.

yeah this sounded like it was a pretty great show. i hope i get to see Ornette some day. Not to be morbid or anything, but time is running out! How old is he? Late 70s at least?

Tyler if you're in SF in nov. he's playing the jazz festival. I saw him 2 yrs ago, it was really good. Also he's 79...

hmm, yeah, probably not going to be in SF then ... Seriously, though I need to move there. It's not expensive, is it? ;) But yeah there are a few jazz living legends I really need to see before it's too late -- Rollins, Ornette, Hancock, Ahmad Jamal ...

Ahmad Jamal seems to play all the time. If you're in or near a major city you shouldn't have too much trouble seeing him. Sonny doesn't seem to travel much and Herbie (who is a mere lad at 69) hasn't toured in a while, from what I can tell.

yeah i'm in Colorado, we don't get too much in the way of the big jazz legends. I think Herbie played a big festival in the mountains a few years ago, but that wasn't really how I wanted to see him. Saw McCoy Tyner this year though, which was nice.

Posted this on the James Blood Ulmer thread, but when the hell does anyone open ILM threads about James Blood Ulmer these days, what with Azealia Banks runnin' things and whatnot. Anyway, my appeal:

At this point I'd probably pay one of my fingers for the elusive Ornette bootleg Lonely Woman Trio 66 / Quartet 74 (the latter of which has JBU on guitar and fucking SIRONE on bass!!!!!) = my most wanted LP. I think it's a 4xLP thing, on the Japanese label P-Vine. If anyone has this in digital form, I really just wanna hear the fuckin' thing at this point!!!

That does sound great ... and almost impossible to find. Looks like there are two versions, a 2LP on Craws the Italian no-label ('BAT') 4LP you're talking about.

Was psyched for a minute when I found Broken Shadows (the one on Moon) which promised to be another show as good as Crisis, my fave Ornette LP. The sound quality is absolutely awful though.

"of human feelings" from 1979 blew me away recently. like body meta & dancing in your head, but a little more corkscrewing, a little more cross eyed. it's wired.
was always in two minds whether i hated or loved the way he would always slip in a "colonel bogey" / "shortnin bread" or whatever in the middle of a "high minded" improv

This Lonely Woman Trio 66 / Quartet 74 does indeed sound cool! Are you just having trouble finding it on vinyl? Is it available for download or anything?

http://www.discogs.com/Ornette-Coleman-Trio-Quartet-Lonely-Woman-Trio-66-Quartet-74/release/2806651

There was a '74 boot put up on Dime some time back
There's also been this clip up on youtube for years
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5EOjTNtq1-k
which is Rome '74 with JBU .

http://www.dimeadozen.org/torrents-details.php?id=368173
live Padua '74

http://www.dimeadozen.org/torrents-details.php?id=335312
keystone San Francisco '74

So I heard Free Jazz for the first time today and... fuck, I couldn't get through the first five minutes. Just awful.

lol okay

Not my kind of music.

Can you elaborate? What else do you listen to from (roughly) the same era/area of activity? I'm only curious because, while I love Ornette's quartet records from this period, Free Jazz struck me as a missed opportunity (though it does feature much amazing soloing).

Skies of America is pretty bloody mental, innit?

no

:-(

That's you told

consider me pwned.

24-hour Ornette birthday broadcast today.

Thanks Tarfumes! A few minutes ago, they were streaming a big chunk of Science Fiction-era sextet sounds, live at Slug's. I swear at one point seemed like Rashaan showed up, with his mazello and stritch. Earlier posts, from What Are You Listening To?

Ornette Coleman Birthday Special, 24 hrs. This morning, I checked into "Focus On Sanity," and many more from The Shape of Jazz To Come. Had to go out, came back to a big dipper of Science Ficton, and now--back to "Focus On Sanity," and more from The Shape of Jazz To Come to come. Oh well, I'll stick with it for a while. Tomorrow, The Bix Beiderbecke Birthday Special (is there enough of that for 24 hours?), and this Tuesday's Afternoon New Music showcase is Carl Stone---stream it all here: http://www.studentaffairs.columbia.edu/wkcr/

― dow, Sunday, March 9, 2014 1:51 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Really good sound quality, on my def. sub-audiophile headphones even.

― dow, Sunday, March 9, 2014 1:53 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Whoa, I only found this now.:(

Happy Trails! ("manzello," I meant.)

Lots more where that came from, ye are not too late, man.

i wish i could share it here, but his appearance on saturday night live in 1979 with prime time is incredible. it's on hulu for subscribers.

been getting deep into his prime time era these days, that sound is so beautiful.

a world where ornette coleman plays SNL is possibly a better world than the one we live in. or so one would think.

otm, and add Sun Ra (who did the show the year before).

also in the SNL performance he has a really lovely, shiny purple suit on

Miles Davis did SNL in '81, he was having a stroke at the time.

like, actually during the performance?

davis was into his kind of pop-friendly comeback at that point, no?

did jazz have more cultural currency back then or was it just that SNL wasn't quite as big of the deal and so they could take more risks?

Davis was promoting The Man With The Horn, his much-hyped comeback lp. According to his autobbio, on the day of the taping he'd been in pain all day. He was taken to a doctor directly from the studio, and was quickly hospitalized for a stroke.

I had always assumed that Lorne Michaels had a thing for jazz, given his later executive production of that Night Music show.

Oh yeah, hadn't thought of that; good point. Also, Milton Berle hosted SNL the night Ornette was on, and they were chatting away while the credits rolled...
Xgau reviewed this recently, about a year after its release, but better late than never, esp. since I'd never heard of it:
The Road To Jajouka: A Benefit Album
(Howe)

The centerpiece is ghaita master Bachir Attar, inheritor by hustle of the stoned Moroccan aulos-and-oud-variants-plus-percussion that has fascinated kif-addled Westerners since Brian Jones traipsed into the dying mountain village of Jajouka with a tape recorder in 1968. Live there’s nothing remotely like its eldritch sonorities and impossible rhythms, and sometimes (not always) that’s enough in itself—more than enough. On record it’s dicier, with the Bill Laswell-produced 1992 Apocalypse Across the Sky the standard. Until this. The angel is drummer Billy Martin of Medeski, Martin & Wood. The other participants? Well, how can you not love desert-mountain weirdos who can make a single thing of, to name the ones I know in alphabetical order, [Ornette Coleman, Aiyb Dieng, DJ Logic, Flea, Mickey Hart, Bill Laswell, Medeski, Martin & Wood, Lee Ranaldo, Marc Ribot, Howard Shore & the London Philharmonic Orchestra, and John Zorn? Largely NY-avant, sure, but on one sonically coherent record whose sound recalls none of them? Further enhanced by a female Indian vocalist unknown to me and the bassist from Ween? And the greatest of these is—who else? Hint: turned 84 March 9. A MINUS

Despite "sound recalls none of them," think I could sense Ornette's effect in there, considering how he melded with the Jajoukans on Dancing In Your Head.

oy i can hardly parse that christgau review; can somebody translate that into english?

eldritch sonorities!

kif-addled Westerners

http://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/ZapandKif_8284.jpg

i hate the fucking coyness of who else? Hint:

I had always assumed that Lorne Michaels had a thing for jazz, given his later executive production of that Night Music show.

My guess is you can credit Hal Willner.

Willner was the music director of SNL, so that helped re Michaels & Night Music. Howard Shore was the SNL music/band director before Willner, and o course later did the Naked Lunch soundtrack with Ornette.

i did not know any of this

hope ornette sold a few records that night

I saw it when first broadcast, didn't know he was gonna be on: accompaniment was pretty bouncy, maybe even the disco beat from Of Human Feelings?

Really good!

Willner helped put together part of the Ornette tribute in Prospect Park this Summer, in which Ornette participated, and which Xgau attended.

Holy shit at this: https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=798627630174468&fref=nf

aaaaaahhhhh have waited so long to see this!! ripping shit up at the 2:30 mark

So amazing.

yeah, I saw that on Hulu a few months ago and was like yesssssssssssss; best thing on SNL ever, i think.

the episode only has one song from ornette, though, were there two in its original broadcast?

it's rare btw because lorne michaels refused to allow that episode in syndication; milton berle, the guest host, basically commandeered the show and was subsequently banned.

berle says "ornette coleman; let's hear it, once more!"

which implies there was a previous performance, but maybe it wasn't aired?

i like to imagine that uncle miltie was actually a huge fan of harmolodic funk

Okay that ruled

I saw that when it was broadcastL already trippin on Uncle Miltie---and then there was Ornette! Didn't know he was gonna be on. Always wondered what they were chatting about while the credits rolled; looked like old friends, and maybe they were. From WSJ---haven't ordered the album yet:

Completely New Yet Pleasantly Familiar
Ornette Coleman’s ‘New Vocabulary’ is his first studio album since 1996.
By
Martin Johnson
Jan. 7, 2015 6:10 p.m. ET
With shockingly little advance publicity, a new recording featuring jazz great Ornette Coleman has been released. The album, “New Vocabulary” (System Dialing Recordings), became available late last month via the label’s website, and it features the innovative saxophonist and composer in a collective ensemble that includes trumpeter Jordan McLean, drummer Amir Ziv and keyboardist Adam Holzman.
The release comes at a time when new music from Mr. Coleman has grown scarce. He made a guest appearance on one track of “Road Shows Vol. 2” (Doxy), a 2011 release by fellow saxophone legend Sonny Rollins. His last official recording was “Sound Grammar” (Sound Grammar), a live recording from 2006, which received the Pulitzer Prize for music the following year. His last studio recording was “Sound Museum: Three Women” (Harmolodic/Verve) in 1996.

Mr. Coleman, who is 84, is one of the most pivotal figures in jazz history. In the late ’50s, he arrived on the scene, first in Los Angeles and then in New York, with an approach to music that loosened the rules of harmony and freed musicians to play more of what they felt. The approach was often called free jazz, a name taken from one of Mr. Coleman’s best recordings of the time. Later in the ’60s, he was one of the first jazz musicians to compose string quartets. His band in the ’70s produced classic recordings like “Science Fiction” (Columbia, 1971), and in 1976 he released his first recording with Prime Time, a band featuring electric guitars and basses that seamlessly combined jazz and funk.
Although its arrival was a surprise, the timing of the release of “New Vocabulary” is entirely appropriate. Mr. Coleman’s music was the subject of two heralded tributes in 2014. In October, The Bad Plus performed the entire “Science Fiction” recording in a series of concerts; in June, music luminaries including Mr. Coleman himself played his works in a Celebrate Brooklyn concert called “Celebrate Ornette.”
The new album was recorded in 2009. A year earlier, Mr. Coleman had attended the musical “Fela!” Afterward, he went backstage and met Mr. McLean, who was assistant musical director for the production and is a member of Antibalas, the Brooklyn, N.Y.-based Afrobeat band that arranged and performed the show’s music. The two men became friends, and Mr. Coleman invited Mr. McLean, who is 40, to his home to play music. Those sessions evolved to include Messrs. Ziv and Holzman, Mr. McLean’s bandmates in an electronic music group called Droid. Mr. Ziv, who is 43, has been a leading sideman for more than 20 years; his credits include work with Sean Lennon, Lauryn Hill, and Medeski, Martin and Wood. Mr. Holzman, who is 56 and leads several bands, has played with Miles Davis and Chaka Khan. Informal jamming gradually became more rigorous rehearsals as the musicians honed the 12 songs that appear on the recording.
“New Vocabulary” is a concise 42 minutes, and it begins with two spare tunes, “Baby Food” and “Sound Chemistry,” that contrast Mr. Coleman’s bright, often gleeful saxophone tone with electronic effects by Mr. McLean and piano from Mr. Holzman. From there the intensity picks up on pieces like “Alphabet,” “Bleeding,” “If it Takes a Hatchet” and “H20” as Mr. Ziv’s drumming becomes more prominent and both Mr. Coleman and Mr. McLean accent and play off of his driving rhythms. The album ends with “Gold is God’s Sex,” a ruminative piece that lends the recording a bit of symmetry.
Most Ornette Coleman projects offer either something completely new or something closely related to what he has done in the past. Prime Time and the band on “Sound Museum” were radical shifts. “Science Fiction,” built on the Blue Note recordings that preceded it, and “Sound Grammar” placed Coleman in a familiar setting—a quartet—with repertoire from his lengthy career. “New Vocabulary” does a little of both. Without directly quoting melodies, Mr. Coleman’s playing at times recalls his work in the early ’60s, early ’70s and late ’80s. Yet the backing is completely new for those who know his work only via recordings, and Mr. Coleman sounds energized by his bandmates. One can only hope it is a direction he will continue to pursue. Despite its under-the-radar launch, “New Vocabulary” is a valuable addition to Ornette Coleman’s extraordinary discography.

wait what? new ornette? !!

http://systemdialingrecords.com/market/albums/new-vocabulary/

kind of annoying that it's not on CD(?), but i guess i can buy the WAVs and burn them to a CDR.

Wow $30 for FLAC files. Ornette is approaching Neil Young levels of album pricing.

wooo, yeah that SNL ornette clip smokes.
friend said the "new" ornette record is great, but I haven't heard it.

it steams maybe

shit is positively dry cleaned

i doubt ornette himself has much to deal with the album's release much less its pricing, but yeah, it's not cheap. i guess i'm willing to pay the premium considering the album has a small niche and is being released by a tiny boutique label. that seems to be the way things are.

Oh man thanks for letting us know there was a new (2009) Ornette record. It is pricey but hey, it's Ornette and he could probably use the cash.

Wait this record is from 09?

upthread: The new album was recorded in 2009.

Interestingly the band behind him was into live drum and bass circa 99-2000 (in the 'market' section of that website) - now there was a Prime Time direction I would have liked to have heard

can't remember where I read it, but I think ornette has built up a LOT of unreleased material over the past two decades or so...
so who knows, maybe there is a drum n bass thing somewhere lurking in the archives.

Ornette there is this thing called Bandcamp

yow that SNL performance is/was bonkers

Getting Bill Dixon "Vade Mecum" vibes off this new one so far

Getting Bill Dixon "Vade Mecum" vibes off this new one so far

OK, now I'm definitely gonna check this out.

In terms of the sound I mean. It's a lot less intense

That SNL clip is tremendous. Does anyone know what piece that was and if its on an LP? Thx.

"Times Square," from "Of Human Feelings."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dA5qoTOa3Q

i love "on human feelings," but i think the SNL performance nearly smokes the studio version

yeah i think so too. so was that the only thing he played that night?

and what did milton berle think?

milton berle says "let's hear it again, once more!" which implies there was a previous performance, but the only in the episode as it appears on hulu is "times square"

someone on Facebook was saying that (speaking of early TV legends) Ernie Kovacs was a big fan of avant-garde jazz (!) -- if only he hadn't died in a car crash, he could be hosting SNL with Ornette as a guest. wouldn't that be somethin'?

bizarrely, just before the prime time performance, Milton Berle does a "joke" in which he speaks to a bunch of suited japanese businessmen in a kind of pidgin Japanese.

Buck Henry seemed genuinely reverent in his introduction to Sun Ra's performance in season 3.

man, people on youtube be shittin' all over denardo's playing. he's great! he also seems like an incredibly cool guy.

Thx Josh. Just got it on Discogs.

I've never understood the rap against Denardo. He was literally born to play drums for Ornette.

I wasn't aware there was a rap against him?

Denardo's fantastic to watch live. They put him behind those big plexiglas baffles and he just demolishes the kit.

Yeah he's great. I'm sure for ornette detractors back in the day it was more ammunition -- ornette got his 10 year old to play drums! But he's plenty talented.

Digging the musical excerpts in this review:

http://www.npr.org/2015/02/20/387772281/ornette-coleman-returns-with-his-unmistakable-sound

85th all-day birthday broadcast today:
https://www.cc-seas.columbia.edu/wkcr/story/ornette-coleman-birthday-broadcast-monday-march-9

(fair warning: Phil Schaap is currently on minute four of a wall of speech)

schaap is gonna tell us what ornette had for dinner the night before he recorded skies of america

happy b-day ornette!!!!!

I clicked their Listen Now link but this chamber music doesn't seem very Ornetteish?

Huh, my mistake, I'd never heard "Sounds and Forms" before.

I just watched Ornette: Made in America recently. Great movie, just love the man.

if i liked the harmelodic funk insanity of that live tv appearance posted upthread, what else should i check out?

body meta!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=23QVY94tAj0

happy b-day ornette!!!!!

― tylerw, Monday, 9 March 2015 17:36 (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

"sulk"

love ornette and tbh i love phil schaap

ha i kid but i kind of love phil schaap too, in all his ridiculousness.

Yeah, I do too...honestly, my first thought when I tuned in yesterday morning was, "When does Phil's shift start?"

did anyone end up taking the $$$ plunge for the new vocabulary record? is it worth it?

I haven't bought the New Vocabulary disc, and honestly now I'm more excited to get this previously unknown to me 2014 expanded remaster/reissue of the Naked Lunch soundtrack.

one of the best

>if i liked the harmelodic funk insanity of that live tv appearance posted upthread, what else should i check out?
>
>― nuumerykah (dog latin), Tuesday, March 10, 2015 2:06 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

'of human feelings' is so good I can not believe I'd never even heard of it before that SNL link made the rounds, the intensity of 'dancing in your head' boiled down into eight little mutant tunes. I'd heard the later prime time records and I liked them, but this is a little crazier

want to hear that Naked Lunch reissue

You'll want to hear James Blood Ulmer's 'Tales of Captain Black' as well since it has essentially the same band as Of Human Feelings.

will do!

have we ever dealt with this? via the revenant records facebook page (a couple years ago)

REVENANT ARCHIVES, #3 in a Series
<<tracks we planned to release but never did>>

Ornette Coleman (alto sax solo): Who Do You Work For? (1972)

Concert: "The Art of the Solo," Berliner Jazztage, Philharmonie, Berlin - November 4, 1972.

When Fahey and I were scheming about starting a new "raw musics" label in 1994-95, Ornette was a rallying point for us, as totemic a figure as we could think of for what it meant to be uncompromising, fearless, idiosyncratic and great. We set to work trying to license some of his out-of-print records like Forms and Sounds, Who's Crazy, and some 1965 recordings from Swedish TV. Nothing worked out.

In about 1999 or 2000, we began a conversation with Ornette and his son Denardo about a Secret Musics series - unissued, mostly unheard (sometimes unheard of) recordings from all stages of his career, culminating (perhaps - who knew?) with a set of his Moroccan recordings with the Master Musician of Jajouka. More about those in a later edition of this series. The point is, a ridiculous stockpile of rare recordings (including this one) was heaped, we haven't issued anything yet, and this remains a project near and dear to my heart. I'm hopeful it can still happen.

This recording is from a concert called "Art of the Solo" for a TV broadcast in Berlin, in which Ornette alternates between piano and alto. There are some excerpts of the TV footage in circulation on the web if you look around, but I didn't see this track among them.

In 1971, Ornette had been performing "Who Do You Work For?" in a series of live shows in Europe with one of his best-ever ensembles - the quartet with OC on alto, Dewey Redman on tenor, Charlie Haden on bass, and Ed Blackwell on drums. Blisteringly intense, this run of shows is also a real primer on intuitive ensemble play. "Song for Che," "Street Woman," and "Who Do You Work For?" are consistently crackling. Check out the show from Belgrade, Yugoslavia on November 2, 1971 if you can track it down - a real jawdropper.

By the beginning of '72, Ornette was onto other things - the orchestral stuff of Skies of America, some woodwind pieces that would appear on Broken Shadows. But for November, at least, he returned to "Who Do You Work For?" in a brief solo workout that seems like a natural bridge of the lyrical and the ass-kicking. To my knowledge, a studio version of this track was never recorded.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYSlJK5ytlY

Wow, never heard of that -- the solo or the Revenant project! Thanks for posting!

I remember they announced a Milford Graves/Derek Bailey duo record as "coming soon!" when the label first started, but evidently nothing came of it. And nothing on youtube.

hadn't heard of it til today! seems amazing -- rumors of 30+ hours of unreleased material.

Years ago I read a book that featured a long section on Ornette, and his approach to the music business, interpersonal relationships, etc. It detailed the times he'd gone bankrupt, and hinted at a number of projects which never saw the light of day. The quote I remember (though I don't recall who said it) was an associate saying "He must have spent all his money on music, because I never saw any women and I never saw any drugs."

Yeah, somebody (Giddens?) wrote something in The New Yorker, years and years ago, about Ornette having gone through a lotta money from time to time, also in the same piece which mentions that he signed with a promoter of Beatles concerts in the US (and-slept in the guy's office on occasion? Don't quote me, I'll have to look that up.)
Meanwhile,
Links within links(or within this link), appropriately enough:

http://www.openculture.com/2014/09/jacques-derrida-interviews-ornette-coleman.html

Nosing around The New Yorker's Ornette stash, more on the Derrida X Ornette:
http://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/a-thing-the-existence-of-which-jacques-derrida-interviews-ornette-coleman
Looks like you've got to subscribe to get anything as ancient as the profile I'm looking for, but here's something (with its own link to more detail) about the restored version of Shirley Clarke's movie about Ornette, Made In America:
http://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/ornette-colemans-big-adventure

Now that you say it I think it may have been in Giddens' Visions of Jazz. It's been a while (xpost)

Oh yeah, I'll have to dig up my Giddins books, maybe not today though...

Ornette Coleman's Beauty Is A Rare Thing: The Complete Atlantic Recordings box is being reissued on 3/31, in less-lavish packaging (a clamshell case, with the discs in slim cardboard sleeves). You do get the original booklet, though, and Amazon's got it for $40. If you don't already have it, it really is a must-own.

― the top man in the language department (誤訳侮辱), Sunday, March 15, 2015 1:01 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Oh sweet! I want that.

A federal lawsuit has been filed on behalf of Grammy® Lifetime Achievement Award recipient Ornette Coleman against Jordan McLean of the band Antibalas and Amir Ziv. The complaint alleges that McLean and Ziv recorded Coleman, then age 79, at his home in 2009, and then recently released these recordings to the public without his consent or knowledge as the album New Vocabulary on System Dialing Records.

Coleman, who is now 85 years old, was introduced to the band Antibalas and their trumpeter McLean through their association with the Broadway musical Fela, which Coleman attended. The complaint asserts that, following the introduction, McLean asked Coleman if he would talk to him about music and Coleman graciously invited him over to his house to share his knowledge. McLean brought his partner, drummer Ziv, whom he introduced as a teacher at the New School. Years after making the recordings of Coleman's teaching sessions, McLean asked if he could release them. Coleman denied the request both directly and through his attorney and asked that the material be turned over to him. McLean instead released the recordings, forcing Coleman to seek legal recourse.

The complaint further alleges that:
An individual not recorded at the sessions is credited as having participated
Music was added to the recordings after the fact
The public is likely to be misled into believing that Coleman approves of, or is affiliated with, the public release of these recordings.

Last year's Celebrate Ornette tribute concert that featured Sonny Rollins, Patti Smith, Flea, Savion Glover and many other artists including a performance by Coleman himself, is being readied for a fall 2015 deluxe box set release. This official and authorized release by Coleman will be his first since 2006's Pulitzer Prize-winning Sound Grammar.

weird

The "special thanks to" for this record includes Maggie Gyllenhaal and Peter Sarsgaard...closet Ornette fanatics?

http://systemdialingrecords.com/market/albums/new-vocabulary/

If Maggie did her own playing in Frank, she'd be a fine Free Jazz keyboard player.

I noticed that Peter Sarsgaard and Maggie Gyllenhaal contributed to the press release and are thanked on the LP. I'm curious about their involvement—are they just friends of yours/Ornette's, or did they have some hands-on role in New Vocabulary?
We have been friends with them for years and they love Ornette's music (DROID [which features McLean, Ziv and Holzman] was probably Peter's favorite band for a while there). Thanking them and including their thoughts on the music in our press release is recognition of the moral support they have loaned us through everything. This is the case with all of the other folks mentioned in our thank yous and who have contributed various press quotes. None of them is more or less important than the other.

http://www.timeout.com/newyork/blog/a-new-ornette-coleman-album-our-exclusive-q-a

just seems like there must be some misunderstanding behind the scenes -- would someone really just release a new ornette coleman record w/o his permission, pretending as though they had his blessing? maybe, who knows.

Yeah, it seems pretty weird. Ornette doesn't seem like the kind of artist who'd consent to a low-key release of 5-year-old home-recorded casual rehearsals.

The question comes to mind---as with Harper Lee---is the elderly, perhaps infirm artist being manipulated by one side or the other? Both sides, maybe? A musician here, an attorney there? Or is there honest misunderstanding? Apparently the resulting album is fairly good, whatever the backstory.

But I'm not going to buy it 'til this is straightened out.

some new info: http://www.npr.org/2015/05/27/410065414/ornette-coleman-sues-over-new-vocabulary

The lawsuit was filed in federal court in White Plains, N.Y. last week by Coleman's son, drummer Denardo Coleman, who has been his father's guardian since 2013. News of the suit was announced in a press release today by Coleman's representatives. The filing includes claims for injunctive relief, actual damages, punitive damages and attorney fees for violations of both the federal Anti-Bootlegging Act and a section of the federal Lanham Act, which concerns trademarks.
...
Update at 6:40 p.m. ET: Defendants' Response:

In an email to NPR late Wednesday afternoon, Ziv wrote, "New Vocabulary is a collaborative, joint work by professional musicians Jordan McLean, Amir Ziv, and Ornette Coleman, made with the willing involvement of each artist. The album is the end result of multiple deliberate and dedicated recording sessions done with the willing participation and consent of Mr. Coleman and the other performers. Any suggestion to the contrary is unfounded and we deny any allegations of wrongdoing. For any further comment, we refer you to our attorney Justin S. Stern at Frigon Maher & Stern LLP."

hmm I would think Denardo's pretty trustworthy in regards to his father's wishes

Yeah, I would assume so. Also, the response only says Ornette was a willing participant in the sessions, not that he consented to actually releasing them.

my uninformed guess is that there's a dispute over royalties luring behind all of this

My uninformed guess (and this is based on an in-person interview with Ornette I did in 2006, as well as rumors I've been hearing for a while now) is that Ornette may not be in a condition to consent to things. Note that Denardo is his dad's guardian at this point. That seemed to be the case back in '06, too, even if it wasn't official.

yeah a bummer if true, but ornette is 85....
guess i just hope that these people aren't (knowingly at least) taking advantage of an aging free jazz legend

Maybe they're in cahoots with the guy that stole Cecil Taylor's Kyoto Prize money.

Good stuff on Denardo's Twitter feed. For instance:

Denardo Coleman
‏@denardocoleman

The Official Ornette Coleman Facebook page has been launched!
https://www.facebook.com/officialornettecoleman

And can't resist this:

Denardo Coleman
‏@denardocoleman

Ali Coleman (grandson), Ornette Coleman, Sonny Rollins, Denardo Coleman

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BrGGUBFCIAAUdqL.jpg:large

Sonny looks like Johnny Cash

ornette always has the best suits.

sonny looks like he should be in the matrix! almost looks like a leather shirt.

I'd really love for Denardo to write a book.

this hurts

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/12/arts/music/ornette-coleman-jazz-saxophonist-dies-at-85-obituary.html?smid=tw-nytimes&_r=0

OH NO!

oh fuck it. ornette, you were the best

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7TJmk-2huoI

first ornette piece i ever heard :-(

If I were to choose a favourite piece of jazz music, it would almost certainly be Lonely Woman.

You are kidding me? What a day, RIP Ornette :(((

What a great body of work. RIP

RIP

;_;

RIP

Goodbye, Ornette.

the best -- we were all lucky that he shared so much with us.

(posted this to the obit thread, meant to post it here)

http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/music/ct-ornette-coleman-dead-20150611-column.html

This bears repeating, loudly and frequently:

“Now I didn’t call the music I was doing ‘free jazz,’” Coleman told the Tribune in 2003. “Someone [at the Atlantic record label] named it that, put a Jackson Pollack painting on it and called it ‘Free Jazz.’”

Thank you, Ornette, for everything.

holy shit, he obviously wasn't young, but I was not prepared for this. I love those Atlantic albums so much. Such a great and original musician.

RIP Ornette, decent innings but always sad to see such a brilliant musician pass.

RIP beautiful dude. v glad I got to see him play a few years ago at the Masonic Hall, incredible stuff.

more like ornot aliveman

this one trips me out, there's basically a full-on funk breakdown in the middle (in 1960!):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=405MdvmBoAU

starting when the trumpet comes in at around 2:50

i LOVE the (not sure if terminology is right) coda thing (around 5:38)that brings una muy bonita to an end. a moment of pure genius imho

man, my facebook is wall to wall ornette. it's nothing but ornette clips and one video of a dolphin and a kitten.

sad that a dolphin and a kitten died

Sorry for lack of visual interest, but this was provided to YouTube by Universal Music Group, so won't be taken down, I hope. Ornette lives.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JFCWU0n1jLE

I was at that show. The feeling in the room immediately before, and when, Ornette came onstage gives me goosebumps now, thinking about it.

Saw him at the Barbican probbaly ten years ago - lots of warmth, no imcomprehension.

:-(

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/

WKCR is all-Ornette through next Wednesday:
https://www.cc-seas.columbia.edu/wkcr/story/ornette-coleman-memorial-broadcast

Looks like xyzzzz went to the same gig I went to. Ornette also came on stage at the end of the Charlie Haden gig, but sadly they didn't play together that evening. Dancing in my head, always. RIP

http://i1194.photobucket.com/albums/aa362/Andrew_Littlefield/179479_185726988128819_3151412_n_zpsi29np0kb.jpg

RIP, he did good.

=(

Along with James Brown, a legend I never saw live simply because I mixed up my dates.

I used his Free Jazz album during a presentation for a Buddhist class. I think the idea of Now! might be described on the liner notes. Powerful music.

https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=798627630174468&fref=nf

http://www.freejazzblog.org/2015/06/ornette-coleman.html

I have two Ornette Coleman stories.

1) In 2003 or 2004, I saw him on 7th Avenue & 36th or 37th Street, near his apartment, & ran across the street in total fanboy mode. He asked me if I played an instrument, & I told him I’d played the trumpet for awhile, but given it up to stay focused on writing. He said, “You should have kept at it, ‘cause you can make the same mistakes either way.”

2) When I interviewed him at his apartment in 2009, two ladies who lived in the building stopped by to visit. There was no occasion that I knew of, but they’d brought chocolate cake, and Ornette cut me a slice. It was great. Before I left, he gave me autographed sheet music for two pieces, and signed my BEAUTY IS A RARE THING booklet.

Great stories both

RIP

yes, great stories

much love and good feeling to ornette's loved ones

Classic

this is making me very sad

i wonder if there will be a tribute show somewhere in chicago

if anyone knows, please let me know.

i've probably listened to ornette as much or more than any other musician in the past decade

1) In 2003 or 2004, I saw him on 7th Avenue & 36th or 37th Street, near his apartment, & ran across the street in total fanboy mode. He asked me if I played an instrument, & I told him I’d played the trumpet for awhile, but given it up to stay focused on writing. He said, “You should have kept at it, ‘cause you can make the same mistakes either way.”

So awesome.

RIP to the best.

2) When I interviewed him at his apartment in 2009, two ladies who lived in the building stopped by to visit. There was no occasion that I knew of, but they’d brought chocolate cake, and Ornette cut me a slice.

I love this one too, what a beautiful memory to have of someone.

Sadness w the gladness here: on Ornette last summer, at celebration of his music in Prospect Park:
http://robertchristgau.com/xg/music/coleman-14.php

he seemed very shaky at that show but he still played excellent

My friend John_W found Ornette with Grateful Dead (during "Space"):http://bit.ly/1QQh42Y

Just heard on NPR that today's Fresh Air will reprise interviews w Ornette, Denardo, and some of the musicians who played with them (think earlier announcement specified Haden and Cherry, but the news isn't yet on FA;s NPR or Twitter pages).

I noticed some Free Jazz naysayers upthread, is that a commonly held view among "free music" fans? Because I listened to it for the first time in years yesterday, and I'm always surprised how playful it is (and even danceable in my mind; must be the walking bass line in much of it.) I love how the composed themes pop up out of the skronk - and it's not really even all that skronky to me. Like, I can't hang with a lot of later period Coltrane and similar stuff, but I really love Free Jazz. RIP Ornette.

The only personal knock I have on the album Free Jazz is that is a little tentative, and sometimes it feels like guys waiting to solo and not really playing together, exactly. I mean this kind of me quibbling, like I'm not ever going to get rid of my copy of it and it's hard to dislike a record that has Ornette and Dolphy and Freddie Hubbard on it.

I dig the heavy Coltrane blowouts and I dig Ornette.

Also I haven't listened to it in a while so I might be talking out of my ass

I was listening to Body Meta this morning...I'm not sure what kind of music it is exactly (no-wave-jazz-funk?) but man it is so good

Listened to "The Shape of Jazz to Come" and "Tomorrow is the Question!" both I'd never heard before. Really great stuff! I don't know much about jazz but I like this.

Listened to "Shape of Jazz to Come", "Body Meta" and "Dancing in Yr Head" last night... and some James Blood Ulmer for good measure!

I listened to Body Meta too! Never knew it existed until yesterday, I'd never seen a copy. Yeah, no wave jazz funk is about right.

It's nuts

I remember one summer being obsessed with Body Meta and the first Contortions record....haha I was really popular at parties

I've never really been able to get a grip on the Prime Time records.

That seems to be the point of them, in some ways?

Didn't know this existed until today, and it's pretty fantastic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ANUvI297Eig

This quote (from the Times obit) is very harmolodic.

“One of the things I am experiencing is very important,” he said in his Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award acceptance speech. “And that is: You don’t have to die to kill, and you don’t have to kill to die. And above all, nothing exists that is not in the form of life, because life is eternal with or without people, so we are grateful for life to be here at this very moment.”

love that speech
Ornette's remarks after getting his lifetime achievement grammy

aw man I was wondering why this had 60 new answers

RIP

very #based acceptance speech

Would have loved to been there to take the tenor of the room when he finished the speech.

Or even the alto of the room

Ornette did appear briefly on the telecast as a presenter (after a cursory "here's the lifetime achievement award recipient, and here's why, in 30 seconds" video). iirc, he handed the Best New Artist award to Chris Brown.

Carrie Underwood actually!

Is all of his catalogue in print? Keep hoping that people's deaths will prompt companies to make sure that the good hard to get stuff reappears.
NOt sure on the state of the early-mid 70s electric stuff Body meta and Dancing In Your Head which seems to be viewed as near classic by a lot of people.
I think you can get an expanded Science Fiction which is pretty good.
Also just seen there's a Paris set from '71 that appears to be readily available on cd.

Anyway sad to see him go but glad to have seen him, even if it was only once 20+ years ago

Is all of his catalogue in print?

no way

A lot of Prime Time stuff has been hard to find forever, esp the Artists House and Caravan of Dreams stuff, not to mention "Of Human Feelings" which is awesome, but Island/Antilles bungled it

bungled it how?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLbTdhUF8Ac

Listening to "Shape" last night first thing that became clear was Yoko Ono basically does a deconstructive a capella version of Ornette Coleman on all her early records. They did this song together in 1968.

Tons of great stuff is out of print: Ornette at 12 and The Empty Foxhole (both on Blue Note); Crisis (on Impulse); all the Prime Time albums, I think; the '90s albums on Verve (Sound Museum: Hidden Man and Three Women, the duo album with Joachim Kühn, Colors)...hell, I think a lot of the original Atlantic albums are out of print individually, but now that the Beauty is a Rare Thing box is only like $40 there's really no reason not to just get that.

seems like ornette signed some pretty specific deals, post-atlantic -- might be his own estate that is responsible for getting those albums in print?

related, it's interesting to read his section in spellman's 4 lives in the bebop business --where he's presented as totally *not* the mystical sage he'd come to be in the later years.

Yeah, I remember Spellman's description of that ultra-boondocks tent show band the young OC toured in (Spellman had seen such shows first-hand, as a kid in ultra-boondocks Mississippi, I think). Coleman showed one of his colleagues some stuff he'd come up with, and got reported by the guy for trying to lead him astray, musically.
This just up: the Trio, of Golden Circle fame---OC, David Izenzon, Charles Moffet---Bremen '65, Paris '66:
http://bigozine2.com/roio/?p=2372

Tons of great stuff is out of print: /Ornette at 12/ and /The Empty Foxhole/ (both on Blue Note); /Crisis/ (on Impulse); all the Prime Time albums, I think; the '90s albums on Verve (/Sound Museum: Hidden Man/ and /Three Women/, the duo album with Joachim Kühn, /Colors/)...hell, I think a lot of the original Atlantic albums are out of print individually, but now that the /Beauty is a Rare Thing/ box is only like $40 there's really no reason not to just get that.

Was Ornette At 12 Blue Note? I thought it was Impulse. Weirdly, I don't think his Impulse stuff has ever been reissued, in any format. Empty Foxhole is out of print, but Blue Note reissued it in the 90s and the CD shouldn't be too hard to find.

But yeah, Atlantic box is indispensable.

Was there any significance to the reissue of Beauty is A Rare Thing this year? Did it tie in with anything?
It just seems to have predated his death by about a month.

I feel extra angered by the guys who released the 'new' record without his permission. I wish he would have put out something after Sound Grammar, but obviously he didn't do anything he didn't want to.

Was there any significance to the reissue of Beauty is A Rare Thing this year? Did it tie in with anything?

No, I think it just got scooped up in Warner Music's recent series of (relatively speaking) budget priced boxes - they re-did Mingus's Passions of a Man not that long ago, too (which I just found out about this week).

The Fresh Air reprise is comprised of excerpts of an '87 interview with Ornette, with Haden and Cherry, apparently sep, then Ornette & Denardo in '97, or whenever Tone Dialing was released (bits of that and other albums are included). About 30 minutes in all, but good (room is reserved for a Christopher Lee interview and a Kevin Whitehead review of the new Michael Gibbs big band record with Bill Frisell, who sounds a lot more robust than usual, without losing his signature sound o course)
http://www.npr.org/2015/06/12/413914118/fresh-air-remembers-jazz-innovator-ornette-coleman
Tons of Ornette-related stuff in the NPR archives, but not seeing the original interviews.

Red Sox organist Josh Kantor:

@jtkantor 18h18 hours ago

2nd inning at Fenway: Ornette Coleman's "Lonely Woman," in memoriam.

Crisis was reissued on vinyl about 5 or 6 years ago in places like Spain and France and promptly disappeared and the reissues are probably just as hard to find as original copies. which doesn't really do anybody any good at all. i love that record.

i remember seeing Science Fiction in record stores all the time for years and now that i want one...

never even put out on cd in the u.s.? i don't think? what up with that?

CBS put out a 2CD Complete Science Fiction Sessions set in 2000.

Oh yeah, that's good, and Crisis was one of the first jazz records I bought, a fave right away. My buddy xpost John_W just found this at a university radio station---I'd never heard of it:

(from discogs)
Ornette Coleman Quartet, The ‎– The 1987 Hamburg Concert
Label:
Domino Records (7) ‎– 891214
Format:
2 × CD, Album
Country:
Europe
Released:
2011
Genre:
Jazz
Style:
Modal, Free Jazz
Tracklist
1-1 Chanting 2:24
1-2 Africa Is The Mirror Of All Colours 10:46
1-3 Word For Bird 10:52
1-4 Lonely Woman 10:24
1-5 The Art Of Love Is Happiness 8:13
2-1 Storytellers 10:12
2-2 Peace Warriors 6:11
2-3 The Sphinx 10:23
2-4 Latin Genetics 7:03
2-5 Today, Yesterday And Tomorrow 6:54
2-6 City Living 10:07
2-7 Turnaround 9:22
Credits

Alto Saxophone, Composed By – Ornette Coleman
Bass – Charlie Haden
Cornet – Don Cherry
Cover Photo – Guy Le Querrec
Drums – Billy Higgins
Liner Notes – Leo Urban

Notes
NDR Jazzworkshop 219, Hamburg, Germany, October 29, 1987.

Also from '87, quite a diff situation: Big O has reposted downloads of Skies of American live, at the Verona Jazz Festival, performed by OC & Prime Time x Symphony Orchestra of the Verona Arena:
http://bigozine2.com/roio/?p=119

And from 2009, the Meltdown Festival set:

Disc 1
Track 101. Intro 2:39 (4.5MB)
Track 102. Following The Sound 3:25 (5.7MB)
Track 103. Blues Connotation 4:50 (8.1MB)
Track 104. Jordan 4:59 (8.4MB)
Track 105. Sleep Talking 4:12 (7.1MB)
Track 106. Chronology 5:43 (9.6MB)
Track 107. Bach, Cello Suite No. 1 5:40 (9.5MB)
Track 108. Turnaround 5:00 (8.4MB)

Disc 2
Track 201. Call To Duty 4:58 (8.3MB)
Track 202. Peace 7:44 (13.0MB)
Track 203. Untitled (with Patti Smith) 9:19 (15.7MB)
Track 204. Congeniality 9:06 (15.3MB)
Track 205. 911 (with Master Musicians of Jajouka) 18:38 (31.3MB)
Track 206. Theme From A Symphony (Song World) 5:49 (9.8MB)
Track 207. Song X 8:30 (14.3MB)
1 hour 41 mins

Lineup:
Ornette Coleman - sax, trumpet
Bill Frisell - guitar
Tony Falanga - dbl bass
Al MacDowell - bass guitar
Denardo Coleman - drums

http://bigozine2.com/roio/?p=1721

i think i forgot about that complete sci-fi cd set! i probably wasn't looking for it 15 years ago. i might buy that online cheap when i have the money. i see some on ebay.

yeah that 2 cd complete sci fi set (science fiction + broken shadows + i think a few other things) is maybe my most listened to ornette. covers a lot of ground!

Yeah picked up the 2cd Science fiction a few years ago whyich is why I thought you could get it. But a lotof things slip out of print , which is why I wasn't sure.

Dime has been having several sets upped to it. A lot of the mid 60s trio as well as prime Time and a bit of whatever the band is in '72.
I have a live set somewhere that I think has James Blood Ulmer very early on and not sounding that great. There was a video from Italy from that tour up on Youtube for ages

actually on finding it Iit turns out to be '74
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=na_3r_bf5gA
which I think was when the live set I have is from.

& I was thinking about the Paris '71 set when I was thinking of that year. Still not sure what that is. Did he reunite an earlier band in the early 70s before going electric?

ornette coleman records (save for the early atlantic stuff and the most recent ones) seem to float in and out of print randomly. esp. a whole bunch of grey-market live CDs, most of which i've managed to get over the years.

not sure if "ornette at 12" ever was on CD, but i really adore that one.

btw the shirley clarke documentary about coleman is critical viewing, and it's on blu-ray now so no excuses folks:

http://www.milestonefilms.com/collections/shirley-clarke/products/ornette-made-in-america

has a 30 minute interview w/ denardo

Did he reunite an earlier band in the early 70s before going electric?

guessing this would have been the same tour that produced the (probably non-legit) get back release whom do you work for?. band for that was haden, blackwell & dewey redman.

have this on another semi-legit lp that i think got an official fuller release later, love it:

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

So it is reunited late 50s/early 60s rhythm section & new horn. Since I think that was Don Cherry in the Atlantic era?

Robert Wyatt on Ornette the Wire:

http://www.thewire.co.uk/in-writing/essays/ornette-coleman-1930-2015_robert-wyatt

I'm really enjoying the week-long WKCR tribute but damn Phil Schaap like to hear himself talk...

**likes**

He's spent about 20 minutes talking about mono and the history of stereo. "We have two ears." Yes. Yes, we know, Phil.

speak for yourself!

http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/gogh/self/gogh.bandaged-ear.jpg

WKCR just finished Art of the Improvisers, the outtakes collection. Always did love a couple tracks, but don't remember the rest as being nearly this good! So robust, intricate, and immediately engaging, in an almost off-handed way. just rolling right out and taking me with it. Even ff they were just warming up with some of this, they succeeded.
Could have something to do with HD sound and decent headphones, compared to my old set-up. Also maybe my ears have grown out a little more.

Listened to In All Languages yesterday. The stuff with the reunited 1959-60 quartet is terrific; the compositions are all bite-sized (I don't think there's a track over 4 minutes), with really strong melodies, and the sound is just slightly '80s-ized (mostly on Don Cherry's part - he's playing through a lot of echo and reverb at various points and it sounds great). The Prime Time material, though, just doesn't work for me. Prime Time never does. I feel about them the way a lot of old jazz critics felt when Miles Davis went electric - what the hell is this clattering shit, get back to what you're good at, etc., etc. Oh, well.

but it's so beautiful!

Came back to the 1971 Paris concert, in progress: really good acoustics, and Ornette sounds good on trumpet and even violin, in a way (kind of a truly juicy juice harp effect at the moment, like he's chewing it); Redman on musette as well as sax (rich, contoured sax tones right now), Haden and Blackwell great of course---as described here (OMG return of the musette):
http://www.allmusic.com/album/live-in-paris-1971-mw0001208289

("Rock The Clock")

The Empty Foxhole! I've never heard this one before either. Denardo's already good, really listening, OC's trumpet is good again, though obv. fairly new to him in '67. Haven't heard much violin yet. Alto slow & soulful right now. Good sound quality re bass, especially.

denardo is like ten there isn't he?

yeah, i think so!

been reading a lot of well-intentioned but very poorly written and ahistorical "tributes" to OC recently, probably by people who don't know much about jazz.

Managed to get "What Reason Could I Give" played by request on a local jazz show last night -- sounded great on the car radio! (In Ornette Coleman Heaven, there is a radio station that plays nothing but Science Fiction.)

http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2015/jun/20/torrential-ornette-coleman/

i) he doesn't like free-playing (he calls it 'still new-sounding' which tells me he doesn't listen to a lot of it), ii) calling current R&B pap is the usual bogus. Especially from a guy that struggles with anything too 'far out'.

also: torrential, especially about Ornette who was so good with melodies.

Wanker.

yeah... i think he's thinking of albert ayler or something.

like i said upthread, ornette's death has occasioned a lot of clueless "tributes"

Wow did you guys misread that piece.

I love Ornette and I think "torrential" is a great way to describe him.

Dyer's But Beautiful is a lovely book.

I like Dyer generally (it's hard not to warm to someone who reps hard for Raymond Williams and John Berger) but he has a lot of wrong-headed ideas about avant-garde jazz (see also his NYRB piece on the late Coltrane) and the idea of freedom. He's clearly swallowed a lot of Stanley Crouch and Wynton Marsalis's arguments. His comments about the Art Ensemble representing the nice guys and not the scary black revolutionaries is really problematic. Somebody should beat him over the head with a copy of George Lewis's AACM tome.

Posted by Vernon Reid -- Cecil Taylor's tribute at Ornette's memorial service.

https://www.facebook.com/vernon.reid.75/posts/10206661142824181:2?fref=nf

Yeah and his Instragram of the line-up performing "Lonely Woman"---incl. Al McDowell, Lovano, Denardo, Charnette, David Murray--is a reminder that OC's music and influence extends to generations of artists not yet in their 70s (liked Dyer's piece, but he presented it as still-fresh sounds of the ancient ones). Also a sound and sensibility sometimes extending beyond the jazz world, though would love to see Guerilla Toss, for instance, getting Newport Jazz to dance in heads and all other parts.

nice piece in the lrb

Was just catching up w/that. Need to listen to Cecil performing at his funeral later.

And a very rouching report of the funeral by Howard Mandel in the new Wire.

touching, even

Dude, I read that as Howard Mandel's funeral and was very confused

yeah that post was not my finest piece of work, sry

From '75, an Arista 2-LP I don't remember at all, though I called myself keeping up with him in the 70s---anybody heard it? Several other OC LPs here, ones I've got, and ones from other artists:
https://soundsoftheuniverse.com/product/ornette-coleman-the-great-london-concert

Some Saturday nights there were barn dances, way out in Elgin or Sonoita. In barns. Everybody from miles and miles would go, old people, young people, babies, dogs. Guests from dude ranches. All of the women brought things to eat. Fried chicken and potato salad, cakes and pies and punch. The men would go out in bunches and hang around their pickups, drinking. Some women too, my mother always did. High school kids got drunk and threw up, got caught necking. Old ladies danced with each other and children. Everybody danced.
Two-step mostly, but some slow dances and jitterbug. Some square dances and Mexican dances like La Varsoviana. In English it's "Put your little foot, put your little foot right there," and you skip and whirl around. They played everything from "Night and Day" to "Detour, There's a Muddy Road Ahead," "Jalisco no te Rajas" to "Do the Hucklebuck." Different bands every night but the same kind of mix.
Where did these raging wonderful musicians come from? Pachuco horns and guitar players, big-hatted country guitarists, bebop drummers, piano-players that looked like Fred Astaire. The closest I ever heard anything come close to those little bands was at the Five Spot in the late fifties. Ornette Coleman's "Ramblin'." Everybody raving how new and far-out he was. Sounded Tex-Mex to me, like a good Sonoita hoedown.

------Lucia Berlin, "Homing"

http://www.ebay.com/itm/ORNETTE-COLEMAN-HUMAN-FEELINGS-ANTILLES-AN2001-STEREO-LPs-/331961376705?hash=item4d4a709fc1:g:crYAAOSw7s5Xgs5s

This excellent record is only $5, someone should buy it

Or if you have a bit ore money: https://thebluemoment.com/2016/09/13/harmolodics-the-truth-at-last/ (this is interesting I think, though I'm nowhere near musically knowledgeable enough to make proper sense of it).

was just jamming To Whom Keeps A Record this morning
Side A
1. Music Always
2. Brings Goodness
3. To Us
4. All

Side B
1. P.S. Unless One Has
2. Some Other
3. Motive for Its Use

saw the Made in America doc recently, captures his essence nicely it seems

yeah! i just rewatched that -- some really great stuff in there, and an appropriate overall approach. aways surprised when i hear ornette's speaking voice for some reason.

love that movie- it really cemented my love for him

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

Full concert from '71 with Dewey Redman, Charlie Haden, Ed Blackwell:

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

righteous

Oooh, I'll watch this later.

I got a push notification from Youtube about this on my phone, algorithm works!

This must be from the same run as the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Live_in_Paris_1971 and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Belgrade_Concert, love this line up

Hot concert. I follow the poster too, he’s got an amazing archive.