# Pushing beyond the confines of jazz: Revisiting Ornette Coleman: Video, Photos

- Link: https://jazzblues.eu/2022/02/17/pushing-beyond-the-confines-of-jazz-revisiting-ornette-coleman-video-photos/
- Published: 2022-02-17T00:01:26+01:00
- Author: https://JazzBlues.EU

**In the Sixties, the saxophonist carried out a paradigm shift in jazz. A new album
collection tries to trace that change.**

If you asked [jazz](https://www.independent.co.uk/topic/jazz) firebrand Ornette 
Coleman about his music and philosophy, he probably would have referred you to an
obscure music book, _The Harmolodic Theory_. First cited in his own liner notes 
to his 1972 symphonic album _Skies of America,_ the alto saxophonist and composer
was also the book’s author. Only it was never published as a book and largely existed
in Coleman’s head. Such elusiveness illustrated Coleman’s own music and life outlook.
His melodies and compositions embodied whimsy and cosmic consciousness, all with
an ever-curious, childlike mentality, right down to the fart jokes. “Sound is as
free as the gas that passes through your butt,” he once told writer Philip Clark.

Starting with a sprint of albums made for Atlantic Records across a breathless 17-
month period from May 1959 through December 1960, Coleman seemed to arrive on [New York](https://www.independent.co.uk/topic/new-york)’
s jazz scene fully formed, like Athena from Zeus’s split forehead. Albums like _The
Shape of Jazz to Come_ and _Free Jazz_ – as dizzyingly complex or curiously hummable,
unhinged and considered as they might be – were full of new possibilities. Even 
a detractor like Charles Mingus described Coleman’s playing succinctly in _DownBeat_
magazine in 1960: “organized disorganization, or playing wrong right.” That ability
to invert expectations inspired generations of jazz composers and rockers alike 
who arose in his wake. Lou Reed and Patti Smith brought such sensibilities to their
own work, as did other New York punks, and critic Ben Ratliff could even hear an
echo of Coleman’s horn in Bob Dylan’s “plaintive crying rasp”.

But after that inaugural run of Atlantic albums, Coleman was in the wilderness. 
No tours, shows, no recordings. Legends abound of informal jams with fellow icons
Cecil Taylor and Albert Ayler. Even a titan like [John Coltrane](https://www.independent.co.uk/topic/john-coltrane)
sought to study with him, helping lead to his own creative breakthrough. And Coleman
in turn sat in, unrecorded alas, with Coltrane’s mighty quartet during that time.
Taylor, Ayler and Coltrane have all since died, but their estates continue to keep
their legacies current with a steady stream of archival releases.

That hasn’t been the case with Coleman. Since his death in 2015, there has been 
little music to emerge posthumously. Instead, upcoming box sets like _Genesis of
Genius_(Craft Recordings) simply repackage older albums with no new material. Same
goes for _Round Trip: Ornette Coleman on Blue Note_, a recent offering (released
as part of the label’s Tone Poet vinyl series) that documents a strange time for
Coleman. What should have been a pairing of a legend with the greatest jazz label
of the 20th century instead led to uneven results and some disparaging reviews as
both the man and label were undergoing great change. It’s a handy, if pricey, box
set of five albums Coleman made as a leader (plus a rare album as sideman), over
four years in the mid-to-late 1960s, at times anticipating Coleman’s breakthroughs
still to come.

After years of being the driving force behind Coltrane, you can hear Jones and Garrison
strain against Coleman’s dexterous music like heavyweight boxers taking up roller-
skating instead

Coleman’s paradigm shift in jazz didn’t occur in a vacuum. He grew up in a deeply
segregated Fort Worth, Texas, and while his schooling put him in early contact with
future collaborators and players ranging from King Curtis and John Carter to Charles
Moffett and Dewey Redman, it happened because IM Terrell was the only black high
school in town. “There was an urgency and dead seriousness in Ornette’s music that
said things weren’t going to be about Jim Crow, or a resigned black man or West 
Coast cool anymore,” his friend and fellow Texan, trumpeter Bobby Bradford, told
Coleman biographer Maria Golia. That quiet resolve can be heard from his earliest
recording dates. The Greensboro, NC, sit-ins started in 1960, months before he recorded
_This is Our Music_, and by the time of the audacious celebratory tumult of _Free
Jazz_, Freedom Riders were already being bloodied.

Aside from such societal pressures, the strain of the scene also weighed on Coleman
and band. His legendary quartet – trumpeter Don Cherry, bassist Charlie Haden and
drummer Ed Blackwell– all struggled with heroin habits. Nightclub life was unhealthy
and promoters were crooked, and even critically hailed recordings weren’t covering
the bills. After staging his own concert at Manhattan’s Town Hall in 1962, Coleman
fell silent for nearly four years.

![](https://i0.wp.com/static.independent.co.uk/2022/02/02/14/music-coleman-87374500-
82a9-11ec-ac67-768b3559a527.jpg?resize=640%2C640&ssl=1)

(Blue Note Records)

When he emerged with his new trio in Stockholm in December 1965, it marked a welcome
return, and Blue Note presented two volumes of _At the Golden Circle Stockholm._
His new trio featured double bassist David Izenson and drummer Charles Moffett. 
While other saxophonists of his era like Coltrane or Sonny Rollins were prone to
extended peregrinations, Coleman’s solos were usually coiled and compact wonders.
But Moffett’s ride cymbal work and shouts on _Faces and Places_ not only levitate
the bandstand but provide plenty of Texas-size space for his friend to toggle between
bop and Texas blues. Coleman roams at his leisure, adding in playful quotes of other
tunes along the way. Izenson remains one of jazz’s more curious characters, a future
PhD in psychotherapy and co-founder of Potsmokers Anonymous, and a worthy foil for
Coleman. With his deft uses of bow and plucking, he shadows and offers stunning 
counterpoint, from the drunken bumblebee zags around “Morning Song” to a solo that
makes “Dawn” one of the most breath-halting moments in Coleman’s catalogue.

The second night introduces previously unglimpsed iterations of Coleman. On “Snowflakes
and Sunshine,” he careens between two new instruments, trumpet and violin. Squeaking
and rheumatic, Stephane Grappelli he’s not. Self-taught on both, Coleman played 
violin left-handed, as if to ensure that he wouldn’t fall back on any cliches in
his playing. In hitting all four strings at once, biographer John Litweiler noted,
Coleman “(bypassed) not only the jazz tradition, but western musical traditions 
together”. Noisy new vistas came into view, as composer Laurie Anderson once recalled:“
I want to play like that, I want to talk like that.” For Coleman, the “ability to
play” a particular instrument was trumped by an emphasis on “play”.

That quest for naivete and unfiltered expression carried over to 1966’s _The Empty
Foxhole_. Newly sober Haden returned on bass, but Coleman brought in a new drummer
for the session – his 10-year-old son, Ornette Denardo Coleman. “A little kid fooling
around” is how trumpeter Freddie Hubbard labelled it, while another former Coleman
drummer was more blunt: “Unadulterated s***.” There are wobbly tom rolls, starchy-
stiff snares and unexpected cymbal hits, the closest an album by a jazz legend gets
to sounding like the Shaggs and Beat Happening. “I felt the joy of playing with 
someone who hasn’t had to care if the music business … would help or destroy his
desire to express himself honestly,” Coleman, the proud parent, said in a 1967 _DownBeat_
magazine interview. (Denardo would go on to be a key member of Prime Time and his
father’s manager.) And _The Empty Foxhole_ remains one of the freshest albums in
Coleman’s long discography: open-ended, patience-testing, and astonishing. Like 
any sort of playtime with a child can be.

Jackie McLean’s 1967 album _New and Old Gospel_ is the rare session with Coleman
serving as sideman on trumpet, but McLean was one of the old-guard bop players to
get hip to Coleman’s revolution at the start of the new decade. McLean’s mid-’60s
work like _Destination … Out!_ and _One Step Beyond_ willingly embraced the vast
freedoms of the New Thing. For this ambitious session, featuring a sidelong suite
and two Coleman originals, the two hornmen temper their outward tendencies by leaning
back into their roots of blues and a raucous Pentecostal church gospel. While his
trumpet work tends toward the competent, it’s also a rare treat to hear Coleman 
wrangling with pianist LaMont Johnson’s rollicking and ecstatic lines on the cut“
Old Gospel”.

Four months after that session, Coltrane died of liver cancer. It was a blow to 
the jazz world from which – it could be argued – it never fully recovered. Coleman
played at the funeral, and for his last two Blue Note albums, both recorded in 1968,
he recruited half of Coltrane’s legendary quartet – drummer Elvin Jones and bassist
Jimmy Garrison. Coleman had also encountered an old high school friend, Dewey Redman,
out in San Francisco and added his tenor horn to the group. While a newcomer, Redman
took to growling through his reed, eliciting the kind of guttural sound that harks
back to his and Coleman’s time down in Texas and draws on the blues, honking R&B,
and church music. The two recording sessions might have made a strong single album,
but Blue Note decided to split them across _New York Is Now!_ and _Love Call_.

![<p>Coleman performing in New York later in life </p>](https://i0.wp.com/static.
independent.co.uk/2022/02/02/14/GettyImages-2279267.jpg?w=640&ssl=1)

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