Let's gush over Ornette Coleman's Science Fiction

science fiction (or 'the complete science fiction sessions', which i think was the last version available) seems to be OOP! which i didn't think happened so much, these days, not with people like coleman.

If you're going backwards after feasting on Ayler, Shepp, etc, as I 'm assuming you have, I can see how you might be initially disappointed, especially with an album called "Free Jazz" that's actually very tame - but try to put it in historical context. Also, if you haven't heard Twins or the Stockholm stuff, get ye those immediately. That's some fire music brother.

so, refresh my memory, what does Science Fiction sound like exactly? It's been a loooong time.

Ornette's Atlantic stuff (the "what-you'd-expect-from-Ornette") is really just quirky bop'n'blues — the free aspect is that a player is free to create (on-the-spot) based on whatever chord progression or rhythmic structure he or she wants, i.e. you don't have to adhere to the strict chords or structure or tempo of a bebop tune. That made it avant-garde for it's day, but it's pretty accessible for something that still, 40+ years after the fact carries that "avant-garde" stigma. A lot of the best 60's jazz owes something to Ornette.

And, no, it doesn't sound like Henry Cow. I'd say it's a lot more user-friendly.

i had thought that broken shadows was just a collection of bits from around 65-68 that weren't released at the time. that would explain the scattered sound. however still a great record (except for those vocal tracks). and science fiction is awesome (especially those vocal tracks).

i've thought of broken shadows / science fiction as like a reverse of free jazz. i listen to free jazz and don't hear the total freeness they were going for. if the idea is to break out of the format of a standard song played just for the purpose of improvising, well, why does the rhythm section sound so trad (at least to my ears). but on bs/sf it's the rhythm sections that sound so free.

My guess is that the group's origins were in the late 1950's — the drummers Blackwell and Higgins were essentially fully-formed hard-bop drummers, and the early stuff is going to sound boppish. That's both part of the charm of it, and the reason for the success in inspiring everyone else (Trane, Ayler, Shepp, and all who followed, including Ornette himself, post-'61) to make use of the freedoms that Ornette was proclaiming/evangelizing. Atlantic wasn't going to sign and market someone less accessible (e.g. Cecil Taylor, Eric Dolphy), after all, and someone less accessible wasn't going to be much of an evangelist.

[I would gush over Science Fiction, but my copy's packed away somewhere. Will gush later, perhaps.]

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/09/01/1338250

I know youre not trying to be patronizing here, but "just"??? also:

Atlantic wasn't going to sign and market someone less accessible

Atlantic Records was in effect an "indie" when the Erteguns signed Ornette. The label didn't hook up with Warners till the early 70s. Eric Dolphy recorded for Prestige and Blue Note, equivalent labels to Atlantic at the time.

[I heart Ornette to death, of course.]

Atlantic was an indie, but it shouldn't be compared to Blue Note and Prestige, because Atlantic had R&B as a relative cash cow (especially important later on as the jazz market tanked, post-New Thing), and I suspect having icons like Dizzy, Ray Charles, and the MJQ (including John Lewis, Ornette's Biggest Fan, circa 1959) on the label gave them more mainstream juice than the full-time jazz labels.

I wasn't trying to be patronizing; I was just sort of bristling at the continued use of "avant-garde" to describe the music — compared to what many others did with this newfound freedom, those Atlantic quartet recordings were just mainstream enough ("quirky bop'n'blues") to give them access to jazz audiences, and therefore allowed them to achieve a greater notoriety in 1960 than folks like Cecil, who could be laughed off or ignored by the powers-that-were in the jazz world.

Sorry but I think you're wrong about Atlantic Records position in the marketplace also. the R&B market in the early 60s was still singles oriented, and in fact Blue Note enjoyed huge pop crossover success with LPs like Lee Morgan's The Sidewinder.

The problem here, and yeah my comment about indie rock was condescending, is that you're applying the perceptions and categories of today to past events = anachronism in reverse. The classic Ornette Coleman quartet is avant-garde by definition, they upset the apple-cart like Stravinsky's Rite of Spring did earlier in the century. Why compare that to later free-jazz which as you said sprang from Ornette's work? It's not a competition. This is something that makes me bristle, the obsession with genre labels and musicians' relationship to the mainstream. the legacy of indie rock.

but hey, you got good taste. "peace out"

You have to remember: by 1959, Atlantic had already spawned a pop label (Atco), which had Top 40 hits from Bobby Darin, The Coasters, etc. Atlantic had already begun excelling at what Berry Gordy would do a few years later — sell "black music" (Leiber and Stoller to thread) to "white America". With the money from all those hit singles, they (i.e. Nesuhi) could easily afford to pay Coltrane (circa Giant Steps) more than Prestige and Blue Note could ever offer, for instance, and provide wider distribution. By the time "The Sidewinder" was a hit (1964?), the disparity between Atlantic and the full-time jazz labels must have been even greater, and Blue Note would soon be bought out (or bailed out?) by Liberty, a pop label. The home of Alvin and the Chipmunks.

And Miles knew damn well what Ornette was doing — Miles' public pronouncements should always be taken with a grain of salt. A good example of his later borrowing from Ornette would be the Plugged Nickel recordings, which sat in the CBS vaults for 20 years: much of it is essentially Miles' late-50's/early-60's repertoire performed by a young band that was very Ornette-aware.

Certainly Ornette was avant-garde (but how could "avant-garde" be so much fun???), but, more importantly, he was controversial — many detractors, but, seemingly forgotten now, many muso and jazz-crit defenders (Nat Hentoff, Martin Williams, John Lewis, Gunther Schuller, Red Mitchell, etc.) — which made him a better commercial proposition than Cecil (who, as I said earlier, could be dismissed for being "too weird", bypassing any kind of discussion that might lead to controversy, notoriety, and sales), who still had to work day jobs well into the 60's.

Ornette fit in — far more than Cecil — with that pre-Ornette, pre-free-jazz avant-garde — Monk, Mingus, Trane, Dolphy (still in 1959 a sideman for Chico Hamilton, recording for Warner Bros), George Russell, etc. Atlantic had already done a one-off release with rising-star-after-15-years Monk, pairing him with Blakey and the Jazz Messengers (I still have my father's copy from back then), and had done several Mingus LPs.

But that pre-Ornette avant-garde still had one foot firmly in bebop (hell, Monk invented it, to some extent), as did Ornette himself, to a slightly-lesser degree. The unintended consequence of John Lewis convincing Nesuhi Ertegun to sign Ornette was that it created a tangible, accessible example of "postmodern jazz" for others to follow. Ornette was the Trojan Plastic Alto, bearing gifts that would hasten the transition of jazz from a genre of "popular music" to a genre of "art music", leaving a lot of the casual jazz-listening audience perplexed. The few full-time jazz radio stations that remain
(in the US) still strenuously avoid playing material from the "wrong" side of the schism that Ornette's notoriety abetted; one of WBGO's most-hyped premiums during their last begathon was a Prestige box-set of Miles recordings from '55/56; I seriously doubt they play much of anything from the Plugged Nickel recordings. And don't get me started on "smooth jazz", another outgrowth from that schism, and from the popularity of fluke hits like "The Sidewinder".

I guess what I was trying to say is: Bird/Diz/Monk were also avant-garde for, say, 1944, but I don't think the perception of their musics nowadays is as something "avant-garde" (i.e. "difficult-listening music" on par with, say, AMM or Ayler or Merzbow). I'd like Ornette's stuff (at least the early recordings) to be someday seen the same way.

bottom line: I'm gonna listen to Science Fiction and Skies of America again this week. which was where we came in...

Haden uses a wah-wah pedal on an amplified double bass on "Rock The Clock" (which is number one on my current Desert Island Discs list) but I'm not quite sure of the mechanics.

The original Liberation Music Orchestra album is the beginning of time. Listen to "Song For Che" - you'll believe that a bass solo can make you cry. Or the moment when Bley's organ suddenly comes into the chaos of "Circus '68/'69," right at the front of the mix and starts to play "We Shall Overcome" if you're talking spine-chilling...not to mention Rudd's beautiful playing of that same theme right at the end of the record.

Charlie Haden kills on this record. No one's mentioned "Street Woman" yet, but the part near the end where it's just bass and drums is a beautiful, serene moment. Someone needs to put it on a loop and send me a copy (YSI?), along with some new warm socks, and a cup of coffee.

He also fundamentally changes the character of "Rock the Clock" with the wah-bass that Marcello mentions just above. I really need to check out the Liberation Music Orchestra that everyone repeatedly namechecks on this thread.

street woman is easily my favourite thing on this record. such an incredibly tense buildup. so funky.

"rock the clock" is so classic

haden's drive is just endless

like, you never feel like you stand anywhere:

there's no stopping to feel your feelings, you gotta feel some more of em

"what reason could i give" still sounds like the future

This is such a rad album, I love every second of it.