# CD review: Ornette Coleman – Genesis of Genius: The Contemporary Recordings 2022: Video, CD cover

- Link: https://jazzblues.eu/2022/04/01/cd-review-ornette-coleman-genesis-of-genius-the-contemporary-recordings-2022-video-cd-cover/
- Published: 2022-04-01T16:01:46+01:00
- Author: https://JazzBlues.EU

**Continuing Contemporary Records’ 70th anniversary celebration, Craft Recordings
release the new box set, Ornette Coleman – Genesis of Genius: The Contemporary Albums
2-CD.**

The sets feature two seminal releases, 1958’s Something Else!!!! The Music of Ornette
Coleman and 1959’s Tomorrow Is the Question! The New Music of Ornette Coleman. These
albums transformed an unknown jazz visionary from the hinterlands into the talk 
of the New York scene. Both albums were originally recorded by legendary engineer
Roy DuNann, the man responsible for the famously pristine sound quality of Contemporary
albums, and have been newly mastered for this release by Bernie Grundman, who himself
got his start at Contemporary, mentored by DuNann.

The 180-gram vinyl set, which will be pressed at RTI, has been cut from the original
analog tapes to lacquer, with the original tapes also used for new hi-res transfers
and mastering by Grundman for the 2-CD and digital editions. The deluxe box sets
include a 32-page booklet with archival photos and extensive new liner notes by 
Grammy Award-winning music historian Ashley Kahn. The LP jackets also replicate 
the original tip-on versions.

Largely avoided by his colleagues on the L.A. jazz scene in the late 1950s, Coleman(
March 9, 1930 – June 11, 2015) found an open door at Contemporary Records, where
the label’s founder Lester Koenig was intrigued by his melodic sensibility and unorthodox
approach to phrasing. After his Contemporary albums, Coleman quickly went on to 
New York City and turned the jazz scene on its head, but it was Koenig who provided
the first glimpse of the saxophonist’s new approach to rhythm and harmony.

“These two recordings are the accessible gateway to Ornette Coleman’s music,” says
Nick Phillips, the producer of Genesis of Genius. “He’s expanding on the bebop vocabulary
and at this point he’s using traditional forms for most compositions, 12-bar blues
and AABA song form, but doing something totally different. With Ornette and Don 
Cherry’s trumpet in the front line, the way they play and phrase and shift rhythms
together, it sounds very loose but very tight.”

Featuring Coleman’s working band with Don Cherry on trumpet, pianist Walter Norris,
bassist Don Payne and drummer Billy Higgins, the album Something Else!!!! sounds
less radical today than strikingly individual and steeped in the blues. With nine
Coleman originals, the session introduced several tunes that became standards, including“
The Blessing” and “When Will the Blues Leave?” Featuring Cherry, Shelly Manne, and
either Percy Heath or Red Mitchell on bass, the emphatic, piano-less follow up Tomorrow
Is the Question! made it clear that Coleman’s concepts were both insistently innovative
and tethered to bedrock African American idioms. Consisting entirely of Coleman 
originals, the album introduced several more tunes that became an essential part
of the jazz canon, including “Tears Inside,” “Rejoicing” and “Turnaround.”

More than a seminal improviser and composer who exponentially expanded jazz’s rhythmic
and harmonic frontiers, Coleman embodied the playfully heroic duality-erasing ideal
at the center of African American musical innovation. Radical and rootsy, avant-
garde and populist, philosophical and visceral, genius and trickster, Coleman was
born and raised in Ft. Worth, and the wailing Texas blues was woven into his sound.
By the time he settled in Los Angeles in the mid-1950s he’d spent years on the road
playing blues and R&B, imbuing a gutbucket sensibility that he carried with into
every musical setting.

L.A. beboppers often treated him with disdain, perceiving his unorthodox note choice
as lack of chops, but he slowly found a brilliant cadre of musicians who embraced
his musical vision, including pianist Paul Bley, drummers Billy Higgins and Eddie
Blackwell, bassist Charlie Haden and Don Cherry. The Contemporary albums paved the
way for Coleman’s fall 1959 triumph in New York City, with Tomorrow Is the Question!
hitting stores the same month that his quartet started an extended run at the Five
Spot, arguably the most consequential and controversial gig in jazz history.

Alternately championed and denounced by his musical peers and critics, Coleman found
a new home at Atlantic Records, where he continued expanding his gorgeous, searing,
utterly human approach to music. But it was Lester Koenig who first recognized Coleman’s
genius when he walked into his Melrose office at a time when the saxophonist wasn’t
even welcome on most bandstands.

**CD1:**

1. Invisible (4:12)
 2. The Blessing (4:43) 3. Jayne (7:17) 4. Chippie (5:36) 5.
The Disguise (2:47) 6. Angel Voice (4:18) 7. Alpha (4:10) 8. When Will The Blues
Leave? (4:57) 9. The Sphinx (4:15)

**CD2:**

10. Tomorrow Is The Question! (3:08)
 11. Tears Inside (4:59) 12. Mind And Time (
3:07) 13. Compassion (4:35) 14. Giggin’ (3:18) 15. Rejoicing (4:00) 16. Lorraine(
5:54) 17. Turnaround (7:53) 18. Endless (5:16)

![Album Genesis of Genius: The Contemporary Recordings, Ornette Coleman | Qobuz:
download and streaming in high quality](https://i0.wp.com/static.qobuz.com/images/
covers/ea/66/c890n1av766ea_600.jpg?resize=640%2C640&ssl=1)

### _Related_