Ornette Coleman: Classic Or Dud?

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