Ornette Coleman - Dancing In Your Head: Classic or Dud?

It’s great- totally agree with the descriptions

It’s great- totally agree with the descriptions

Classic.

Shannon Jackson is the only drummer listed, but that can't be him playing all of that unless it's overdubbed. The out-of-time stuff sounds like it's on an inflatable plastic kit, and there are, like, shaker bells separate from what sounds like two drummers.

i recently found a nm copy of “renaissance man” for $5. it has a cool catalogue inside of weird corporate-looking new age jazz. tacuma looks quite corporate too, but the music is anything but. there’s nothing disco-fied about it except maybe the instruments. it’s weird fast-paced herky-jerky prog jazz jamming. i don’t really know how to describe it. it’s not super far from zorn’s 80s stuff or griot galaxy, but there’s none of the skronky blowing. anyway, it’s great. check this out:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0_LJYychQ4

maybe imagine the herbie / laswell band trying to make a james blood ulmer album, that’s what it sounds like

that sounds great actually

I'm trying to stop being such a spotify parasite but it's frustrating how so much of this stuff is not so easy to hear. I do enjoy calvin weston's "of alien feelings" quite a bit although parts of it get more proggy than I tend to go for

whatever you call music in this lineage it seems to get brushed over far too often given its quality and influence, compared to both younger ornette and the more miles-adjacent electronic stuff. the relative lack of availability of much of it can't help

I always assumed denardo was the other drummer/percussionist but I guess there must be overdubbing unless the personnel list is incomplete. doesn't sound overdubbed to me (unlike some later stuff) but what do I know about recording

xp It's on Bandcamp (hopefully legitimately??)

https://jamaaladeentacuma.bandcamp.com/album/renaissance-man

awesome thx

No joke, I get this Jamaaladeen Tacuma track stuck in my head all the time:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ekyz6IDQlY

The tambourine and other rattling must be overdubbed; what sounds like "out-of-time stuff" might just be a product of a weird mix on different parts of the kit?

Also, the core of Prime Time worked with poet-performer Jayne Cortez, Ornette's ex-wife, Denardo's mother. She wrote several books, founded Bola Press, made an album with awesome bassist Richard Davis for Strata-East, and then

The first Bola Press recording, taped in October 1979, was called Unsubmissive Blues and included a piece "For the Brave Young Students in Soweto." Cortez delivered her poetry backed by an electro-funk modern jazz group called the Firespitters, built around a core of guitarist Bern Nix, bassist Al McDowell, and drummer Denardo Coleman. For years, the Firespitters and Ornette Coleman's Prime Time coexisted with Denardo as the axis and various players participated in both units.

During the summer of 1982, Cortez delivered There It Is, an earthshaking album containing several pieces that truly define her artistry. These include: "I See Chano Pozo," a joyously evocative salute to Dizzy Gillespie's legendary Cuban percussionist; a searing indictment of patriarchal violence called "If the Drum Is a Woman",[10] and, "US/Nigerian Relations," which consists of the sentence "They want the oil/but they don't want the people" chanted dervish-like over an escalating, electrified free jazz blowout. Recorded in 1986, her next album, Maintain Control, is especially memorable for Ornette Coleman's profoundly emotive saxophone on "No Simple Explanations," the unsettling "Deadly Radiation Blues," and the harshly gyrating "Economic Love Song," which is another of her tantrum-like repetition rituals, this time built around the words "Military spending, huge profits and death."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ii3_MBXqAqU

And I think maybe all or several tracks from Bern Nix's Alarms and Excursions are on YouTube. He uses harmolodic elements in several ways, for inst:

While he was growing up Nix heard blues guitarist Freddie King play “Driving
Sideways.” Nix drew on the song's title to develop his harmolodic concept on “Driving
Sideways Backwards.” Employing his own melody, Nix juxtaposes his dark single lines
with bright playful refrains to develop motives, melodic paraphrases, and permutations
that give “Driving Sideways Backwards” a dense, rhythmical feel. Hopkins's bass
rumbles underneath Nix's scalar runs and the trio repeats refrains turned forward and
backward before restating the opening theme and slowing down at the end. “The tune has
some harmonic free association even though there was no coke or cigars on the date,”
laughs Nix.
Both “Pat's Theme” and “Ballad for L” were written from 1975 to 1976 when Nix
was living in a loft with Ornette Coleman on Prince Street in New York City's SoHo
district. “I dedicated 'Pat's Theme' to a friend who's been supportive of my artistic
development over the years,” Nix says. The trio plays out front before stating a melody,
with Hopkins's arco bass and Nix's pitch variations and bent notes. Nix combines single
note lines against scalar refrains and chordal strumming. The tone of the piece darkens,
punctuated with bright notes and descending chordal refrains. Baker's cymbal roars like a gong. “We play off the chord changes. It's a simple straight-ahead tune. We extend
melody and harmony. I like to integrate harmolodics with tradition. The song itself
sounds like an introduction to something. So you could think of it as an intro within an
intro,” Nix says.

oh yeah, here's the whole thing:
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_lF9Glu71ODlSTI09RkwQqJ7TUuGUfTuJ4

My dad had Dancing in Your Head when I was a kid. I found it absolutely hypnotic. When I found it years later, in a used record store in Boulder, I was beyond delighted.

100% classic.

I need to go back and listen to this record again. It's kinda always been my least favorite Prime Time album — Of Human Feelings is my favorite, followed by Body Meta, followed by the utterly bizarre '80s slickness and Fairlights of In All Languages. Even Virgin Beauty is pretty good. (I've never heard Tone Dialing.)

When I went to Ornette's apartment to interview him for The Wire, I saw the real painting that's on the cover of Dancing In Your Head. It was leaning against the wall on the floor of his rehearsal room, which had a heavy sliding glass door and a drum kit and keyboards set up inside.

Wow. Would like to see that.
Tone Dialing has some variety that the previous PT albums don't (and vice-versa, like Body Meta's bluesoid moves); anybody who likes them will prob like this. Opening the Caravan of Dreams is a rough-edged live album: not the one to start with, but good of its kind. Yeah, Vigin Beauty, with Jerry Garcia the guest whp earns his keep, is a relatively mellower side of Prime Time, with some good tunes. Tune dialing.

*Virgin* Beauty, geez. *who* earns his keep.

Naked Lunch was my gateway.

Yeah, that was good, with Howard Shore's scoring, and maybe OC wrote some of the string parts too? Anybody heard Prime Time/Prime Design, with Denardo and a string quartet? I've never even seen it. Enjoyed Skies of America, with the London Symphony Orchestra; one of the themes became the basis for Dancing In Your Head.

There's a CD of the Naked Lunch score on Howard Shore's own label, Howe Records, with a bunch of extra music included in the film but not on the original soundtrack release. It's worth picking up if you can find it.

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/81Jc+igfBpL.jpg

I've spent all week listening to Prime Time, Shannon Jackson, Blood, and Tacuma. I feel like we need a catch-all Prime Time tree thread.

Looks like this one is growing that way, but go ahead if you wanna, NTI.

(Tacuma mentioned recently on Twitter that he taped a bunch of his Prime Time gigs: noisy tapes, but he still listens.)

(Think it was his Walkman!)

That's so awesome. It's possible I mentioned this upthread or elsewhere, but bunch of years ago, Tacuma mistakenly emailed me asking if I could engineer a recording of his because he had flown a bunch of dudes out to do a record and the studio had double-booked with John Zorn. I told him he had the wrong me (I have kind of a generic email address) but that I knew who he was and was a big fan. He seemed kind of both shocked and touched.

Re. the thread, I may do that ... or not. I just feel like the harmolodic funk scene is on some level an important body of work that hasn't really gotten the full-on critical reassessment other records of the era have (I still remember John Litweiler in A Harmolodic Life hilariously describing Prime Time's drummers "emphasizing the two and the four" as if using terms like "4/4" or, gasp, "funk" was verboten).

(Maybe he got some pushback for describing, I think it was Of Human Feeling, as an amazing disco record in The Freedom Principle?)

Great story! Yeah, do the thread!

Or not---no pressure---but at least we got this one.