Ornette Coleman: Classic Or Dud?

Great description! Another one I forgot, "Song X" with Pat M.

anyone recommend seeing him live these days? am thinking about going tonight...

I'm definitely going tonight. May or may not see you there!

ill be in the balcony cheap seats. ornette is probably worth forking out 35-40 quid for.

definitely. i saw his abbreviated set at bonnaroo last month and he sounded great right up until he collapsed. seeing him now is not some nostalgia trip, he's still doin magic.

I saw him ~3 years ago and would do so again in a heartbeat. Even for $80 or so, which is more than I've ever paid for a concert.

I've never seen him and it pains me. Just bought "Of human feelings" and "This is our music" on vinyl the other day and uploaded to a certain swine related site. The final paragraph in the notes on the back of the "This is our music" vinyl are quite classic.

"About myself. I'm thirty years of age and was born in Texas - Fort Worth to be exact. Since there isn't too much I haven't told you about my music, I really told you about myself through it. The other autobiography of my life is like everyone else's. Born, work, sad and happy and etc. We do hope you enjoy our music."

is quite classic even, bah.

ok im going now. paid the most i think ive ever paid for a ticket but ive always wanted to see him so cant wait.

Beefheart to Kid A via Kool Keith

please to essprain

Never apologise, never explain.

yeah probably in your best interests

2001 was such a funny place

does anyone know, when they say at the RFH it starts at 7.30pm does that mean doors open at that time or that the support is on at that time?

I would love to see him play sometime. I only own Change of the Century, Shape of Jazz to Come, Free Jazz, and Science Fiction, but based off of those four, completely classic. Science Fiction in particular is fantastic.

Yeah, I'd love it if he made it out to my neck of the woods sometime in the near future. I'd probably pay a pretty penny! He is indeed super-classic, though I haven't heard a lot of the Prime Time era stuff. Love the early stuff, Science Fiction and have just (after a year or two of having it) fallen heavy for Tone Dialing. Sort of hated it at first, but it's made a big impression the last few listens. Ridiculously melodic, shimmering production -- I'm even coming around to liking the raps!

royce hall los angeles 9/26 on sale to non-subscribers 7/23. be there!

Now that's what I call music!

That was the first time I'd seen him, can't think of anything clever to say other than wow. I can't work out if Denardo can actually play or not, but it seems to work so who cares? I believe they call that "some next level shit".

Can someone explain harmolodics to me?

I don't think anyone's really managed to explain harmolodics, apart from the basic premise (see Litweiler's The Freedom Principle) that (in theory) you improvise continuously on the melody rather than its harmonies and (in practice) everybody solos all the time and tries to keep out of everybody else's way. In my time I have asked Don Cherry, Dewey Redman and Charlie Haden what harmolodics involved and they couldn't really explain it either. But then it feels good and sounds right (even if it's "wrong") so I guess that's what counts.

I saw him many years ago (late 80s? early 90s?) at the Nottingham Royal Concert Hall, with Prime Time. Had no idea what to expect, and didn't know the first thing about harmolodics. Clearly, neither did the vast majority of the audience - I've never seen so many walk-outs at a music show (although a sell-out screening of Fellini's Casanova where a good 25% of the audience walked out still holds the record for that one).

They played for, God, what was it, must have been at least two and a half hours without a break. Yes, everybody soloed all the time, with (seemingly) multiple concurrent time signatures and harmonic clashes, and the result was a pretty dense and relentless squall - and yet played with such calm, centred expressions.

I was determined to sit it out and not to give in. So I sat there for the first two hours feeling fairly bemused - and then, and THEN, for the last half hour everything suddenly snapped into place in my head and I found myself utterly rapt and transported. I remember Ornette switching to violin for the final piece, only I had my eyes closed at the time - fuck, what's THAT? - and opened them to see him demonically scraping all hell out of the instrument.

About a quarter of the remaining audience gave them a stander at the end - the rest just looked dazed. Vivid memory of the big hairy dude on the sound desk stretched back in his seat as we filed out, with a massive blissed out grin on his face, like he was still buzzing off some humungous spliff.

I've never bought any Ornette Coleman albums. The experience was complete as it stood.

i went last night. im not sure if i enjoyed it. im not even sure if i thought it was 'good'. i dont have loads of his albums, only a few, but i like them. last night though, im not so sure about.

i did think 'emperors new clothes' quite a few times actually.

I didn't really notice much in the way of walkouts. Saw that Paul Morley walking in, though.

i saw morley as well. he didnt have very good posture.

It's terrible him trying to rip off Paolo Nutini at his age.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/6927534.stm

He recalled in particular the day his mother bought him a horn when he was a young boy.

"I thought it was a toy and I played it the way I am playing today," he said.

"I didn't know that you had to learn to play, I thought you had to play to play. And I still think that.

"I didn't know that music was a style and that it had rules and stuff. I thought it was just sound. I still believe that.

""I thought it was a toy and I played it the way I am playing today," he said."

poor mother.

i jest.

dud on record since the late sixties.

This track I got off of the S-S Records blog Crud Crud from Ornette's 1978 record Body Meta lead me to believe the above statement is false.

CONTROVERSIAL

"Song X" is so damn good that it almost makes me wonder if I should give Metheny another shot.

tickets are $76 at the cheapest to see him here in New York at Town Hall this Friday. I have some of his old LPs, like 'shape of jazz to come' and 'live at the golden circle in stockholm' vol.'s 1 & 2, but I'm not really a huge jazz fan anymore. Then again, this might be my last chance to see a honest-to-goodness jazz legend. What do I do?

He recalled in particular the day his mother bought him a horn when he was a young boy.

"I thought it was a toy and I played it the way I am playing today," he said.

"I didn't know that you had to learn to play, I thought you had to play to play. And I still think that.

"I didn't know that music was a style and that it had rules and stuff. I thought it was just sound. I still believe that.

-- Herman G. Neuname, Thursday, August 2, 2007 9:53 PM (7 months ago)

I prefer this from the back of "This is our music":

Learned technique is a law method. Natural technique is nature's method. And this is what makes music so beautiful to me. It has both, thank God.

How did everyone enjoy Meltdown? The last night had some particularly fantastic bits...left me feeling with a sense that I hadn't quite 'heard' his records, AT ALL.

What did he say at the very beginning...something about 'following the sound', but I didn't quite grasp.

i hope i get to see ornette some time ... as for not quite "grasping" what he said, haha, that's Ornette for you. his interviews are hilarious.

Sorry not grasp, meant to say I didn't quite hear. Was at the back and it sounded like he mumbled something real quick before getting on with playing.

dud on record since the late sixties.

― jon abbey, Friday, August 3, 2007 11:06 AM (1 year ago) Bookmark

Not just Body Meta, but Soapsuds, Soapsuds is brilliant, too. And Dancing in Your Head? Just two suggestions from a neophyte, too.

too too too too too

I haven't heard Tales from Captain Black, either, but Ulmer from that time period is killer. Is there any Ulmer that doesn't slay?

dud on record since the late sixties.

Total bullshit (but it's abbey, so who expects anything else?). The Sound Museum albums and Colors: Live in Leipzig (duets with pianist Joachim Kühn) are terrific, Sound Grammar kicks ass, and while I don't love Prime Time the way I do his acoustic stuff, Virgin Beauty and In All Languages are both great.

I was at Meltdown and Sunday and it was wonderful. It was billed as 'Reflections on This Is Our Music', and while he played a few tunes from that album, albeit quite radically transformed, the set spanned his entire career. I can understand what xyzzz means by not quite having 'heard' his records - hearing harmolodics in action live, where everyone almost seems to be playing a different tune or rhythm but it somehow all fits together, was quite a revelation and will help me hear the records in a new light. I have to say Flea did a fine job as the third bassist, laying down some fluid but muscular bottom end. Theme From A Symphony from Dancing In Your Head worked brilliantly in this format. The jam with Master Musicians Of Joujouka was amazing, with Ornette at first honking and swooping around their shrill tranced out sound, before finding a beautiful way to weave through it all. In the last five minutes Ornette's rhythm section locked in with the ecstatic trance drumming, with Flea dropping in a hypnotic two note bass riff. It sounded a bit like Can. Glorious stuff. The encore of Lonely Woman, with Charlie Haden on bass, was absolutely beautiful. I don't think I've ever heard the double bass played with such delicacy and tenderness.

i have to admit, i hated flea.

i didn't know it was flea at the time, i just kept thinking "who is this twat that sounds like he's trying to play like flea of all people"

then when i saw in the paper the next day that it was flea i was like "oh"

that encore was great, though. (was going to happen the previous night with haden's band; but didn't.) i hope i can get a recording of it from somewhere.

"Total bullshit (but it's abbey, so who expects anything else?). The Sound Museum albums and Colors: Live in Leipzig (duets with pianist Joachim Kühn) are terrific, Sound Grammar kicks ass, and while I don't love Prime Time the way I do his acoustic stuff, Virgin Beauty and In All Languages are both great."

we get it, Phil, you've swallowed the incomprehensible Kool-Aid, your loving hummer in the Wire showed us that (god knows why they still let you write there).

I continue to call bullshit on his last 40 or so years of recorded output, I don't especially care if anyone agrees with me. I also call bullshit on pretty much everything he's ever said in any interview ever, I think he made some incredible, essential music in the early sixties and has basically been a fraud ever since.

fuck you.

like a jerk, I never saw him play…but one time I spotted him getting off the A or E at the West 4th st station…he was carrying a pearl paint bag… absolutely no one around the station had any notion, so I greeted him, shook his band and made small talk for a bit… he was lovely and completely OK with talking to some stranger…

I’ve been after a copy of that one for a while. I have an mp3 rip, definitely a cool one. Memory days it’s in the vein of ‘Of Human Feelings’

Prime Time finally started to click for me in the last year or two. Listening to Body Meta now, though Of Human Feelings is my favorite.

a thing i liked abt prime time is that whenever you bought a physical copy of the village voice from the mid-80s thru the 90s bern nix always had an ad in the classifieds offering guitar lessons

that’s delightful.

Of Human Feelings ranks among my top Ornette LPs.

my favourite Prime Time is probably Opening the Caravan of Dreams

saw ornette with group from the 'sound grammar' album when they headlined newport in 2004, it started raining and everyone left except the real headz lol

i watched "ornette: made in america" the other night and i loved it, particularly the musical performances with ornette/prime time playing with orchestras. so i'm listening to "skies of america" and it's great but doesn't have any of ornette's band on it. i'm wondering if there are any albums or live recordings that are closer to the performances in the movie with orchestral parts and the full-band jazz parts

Check out Chappaqua Suite, which has the Ornette/David Izenzon/Charles Moffett trio, plus Pharoah Sanders, plus strings. It's pretty wild.

“town hall 1962” also has the moffett / izenzon trio playing with a string quartet, it’s cool

the part in made in america that had a string quartet with denardo coleman on drums playing inside a buckminster fuller geodesic dome was fantastic

how could I have not known about this

https://valghent.com/emmanuel-ghent-ornette-coleman-man-on-the-moon/

thanks as per usual to hrvatski

& still haven't seen Made In America; but there's a complete 1987 live version with symphony + band including Dernardo. seems to artifically mix back and forth between symphony and band but in an interesting / compositional way

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Garvv6PPsaY

it's on the criterion channel and might be worth signing up for the free trial at least to watch

best featured article ever

I was pondering a Prime Time poll, and Of Human Feelings would have been my vote.

I didn't realize he recorded with Joe Henry:

https://americana-uk.com/interview-joe-henry-on-everything-from-ornette-coleman-to-bob-dylan-and-randy-newman

Martin Johnson: You’ve worked with an unbelievable number of other musicians over the years, but I have to ask, from a personal point of view, what was it like having the late great Ornette Coleman on one of your records?

Joe Henry: It was one of the great nights of my working life because I had been told when I first approached him by writing a letter and initially hearing back from somebody who worked for him that Ornette doesn’t really do that, and he has been asked by everybody but he feels that if he says yes to you after having said no to other people, it is like he is judging their work and he doesn’t want to do that. He wishes you well and you should keep doing what you are doing, he is going to keep doing what he is doing, and I thought that was the end of it, but the same person called me back a few days later and said “I’m really surprised to be calling you, I’ve never made this call before”, and Ornette had listened to my current record I’d sent him, I think it was probably Fuse that I sent him, and this person explained the Ornette knew exactly why I wanted to work with him, and he would be delighted. There was no one happier than me, it was one of the most exciting moments I’ve had in the studio, and one of the moments when I have been most honoured by an artist’s participation as I’ve ever been.

MJ: Were you intimidated, what did it feel like?

JH: Well of course I was, haha, but he treated me like a peer, which was incredibly humbling for somebody like me. He thought a lot about what his job was because he hadn’t been a sideman to anybody else it wasn’t just something he was doing by rote. The song is a blues in G Minor, he could have done that in his sleep, but he thought long and hard because I could tell, trying to figure out what his real job was, you know, what’s my role here. We talked about it, and he was playing as an overdub the last element we were adding to that song one evening in a studio in New York City, and he played many takes and they were all wonderful and interesting, but for him, he was looking for something very particular, he was looking to observe a real particular character. At one point he said to me at a break, “You know, I’m not doing badly for you but I know the saxophone so well and I can hear I’m still playing the saxophone, and if it is OK with you, I need to keep going until I’m just playing music. I thought that was the most generous thing to offer, both for his time because I was already happy, but also a life lesson that even he, the master that he was at that moment, needed to transcend the delivery system, the articulation machine that the saxophone was and just get to the point where there was nothing standing between his heart and the beating heart of the song. It was really wonderful to be in his company.

MJ: Finally, do you want to say anything to our UK and European readers?

JH: Yes, as an American I’m sorry, haha. We are doing the best we can, some of us. I will leave you with one last Ornette story, a couple of months after we recorded together I turned 40, and my wife and children brought me coffee to bed very early on that Saturday morning and the phone rang. I wouldn’t have answered it, but my wife said she was sure it would be my mom and dad and I should answer it. I picked the phone up, and nobody said anything but I heard the phone set down, and then Ornette plays me ‘Happy Birthday’ for two and a half minutes, and it was tremendous and I just had tears pouring down my face. I had so many friends when they heard about it later say to me it was too bad I wasn’t home because I could have recorded it on my answer machine, and I’m thinking how in the world could that be better than me hearing him in real-time.

He also recorded with Don Cherry early on. I joked with him years ago that he should seek out Billy Higgins and Charlie Haden (who were alive at the time) so that he could say he brag he played with the classic Ornette quartet.

Great stories, will have to check that Joe Henry album, thanks!

from Lou Reed's site:

THIS IS ONE OF MY GREATEST MOMENTS.
I had Ornette Coleman play on my song Guilty. He did seven versions- all different and all amazing and wondrous. I put up these different takes so you could share. Each take is Ornette playing against a different instrument- ie drum, guitar 1 guitar 2 etc. Listen to this!!!
LOU REED///////ORNETTE COLEMAN

i signed in, guilty as charged, and it's still the three. but thx a bunch these are terrific!

I remember this feature on Lou's website years ago, there were definitely more than 3 takes you could switch between at that point.

Yeah---now I'm finding quite a few informative posts by self on here, starting to feel like the dude with reminder tattoos in Memento:

This is fun: Ornette w Lou Reed and combo, on takes of Lou's "Guilty," with the words changing a little each time, along with the sax and one of the guitars, bass a bit less so. For total effect, my faves are the first and last versions---listen on headphones if you got 'em, but voice, sax and drums, or drum, come through even on tiny laptop speakers.
http://www.loureed.com/guilty/

― dow, Thursday, June 11, 2015

Listening to Virgin Beauty for the first time right now. I'm sure I'd have gotten to it sooner or later, but the Jerry Garcia connection did bump it up on my list. Ornette sounds fantastic and on those three tracks Garcia fits in nicely, I just can't help but imagine a less "of its time" rhythm section.

i've a Japanese release of that that's remastered and the music breathes so much compared to the extremely 2D sounding original issue.

https://store.acousticsounds.com/d/166996/Ornette_Coleman-Round_Trip_The_Complete_Ornette_Coleman-Vinyl_Box_Sets

incredible deal, not supposed to be buying records but couldn't resist