Ornette Coleman: Classic Or Dud?

"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.

hahahaha

JAZZ DOUCHEBAG THROWDOWN

the incomprehensible Kool-aid

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I would like a musicologically-bent few reasons as to why you call bullshit.

OUT OF CURIOSITY

not out of fuck-you-ness

and I'd like an intelligent definition of harmolodics, but we can't always get what we want.

Really? I'm sure this could be arranged, dude.

we can't always get what we want
we can't always get what we want
we can't always get what we want

Pilin' up the platitudes.

I basically don't think he's had anything new to say since very early on (which is a big reason why he records so rarely), but people seem to be so in love with him that they don't care or seem to notice.

of course, I also think Bob Dylan's output of the last 25 years is worthless and embarrassing, so I'm not really in the majority on much around here (which is why I almost never post).

anyway, my first comment was two years ago, and was a simple answer to "Classic or Dud?". I'll stick by that and let whoever wants to think that I'm a brainless fool for said position.

Well, Jon, I respect this opinion (not that you care for my respect).

Although some people don't mind if someone sticks with a thing and doesn't say anything new.

"Although some people don't mind if someone sticks with a thing and doesn't say anything new."

sure, this is a position I see expressed more and more by jazz fans/critics/musicians these days, innovation isn't important. it has a lot to do with why I'm no longer a jazz fan, as innovation in music generally is pretty important to me (not that it's always possible, but at least try).

innovation in music generally is pretty important to me (not that it's always possible, but at least try)

How do you define innovation in 2009? Who is innovating, and what are they doing that is innovative? Are there new chords being discovered/invented? New scales? New meters? New instruments? Or are we just talking about advances in recording technology and/or incremental adjustments in technique applied to existing instruments?

Phil, that would be a pretty long and involved discussion, but you basically know my answer anyway and I'm pretty sure you don't agree.

I'd actually be interested in hearing the answer though.

(And you don't see any innovation in 70s Ornette?)

i was tempted to ask that

i don't know; at the RFH there was a sense of "look! i can ornette over any kind of music i want!"

"And you don't see any innovation in 70s Ornette?"

no, he just added electricity to the same ideas.

"I'd actually be interested in hearing the answer though."

OK, I'll take a shot, although it's stretching the original topic at best. for anyone who doesn't know, I run Erstwhile Records, and have for the last ten years specialized in electroacoustic improvisation. so while obviously that's my bias, previously to that I was just a fan (of many different areas of music), and the only reason I work with the musicians that I do is that I believe in their music, not because they were friends of mine or they live in my city. so with that in mind, Phil's questions:

"How do you define innovation in 2009? Who is innovating, and what are they doing that is innovative?"

actions speak louder than words, so I'll enter into evidence the 60 or so CDs I've released in the last decade, the best 30-40 of which I think qualify as genuinely new music. if you need a few specific names, Keith Rowe, Toshimaru Nakamura, Sachiko M, Burkhard Stangl, Ami Yoshida, Jason Lescalleet and a slew of others to various extents.

"Are there new chords being discovered/invented? New scales? New meters? New instruments?"

chords, scales and meters are all meaningless in this music (at least to the limited extent of my understanding of those terms). new instruments in some cases, yeah.

"Or are we just talking about advances in recording technology and/or incremental adjustments in technique applied to existing instruments?"

no, I'm (pretty much solely) talking about the end result, which at its best combines the energy of free improv with an extremely wide palette of sounds, whether they be electronics, extended techniques on conventional instruments, or whatever mixture.

it's really hard to talk in generalities like this for me, but there's a brief shot since Sundar asked.

Cool, thanks. I enjoy many of your releases and agree that these artists are innovative.

I guess 70s Ornette isn't innovative in quite the same way but "adding electricity" and applying free jazz ideas to funk grooves do seem like creative syntheses to me.

thinking about it a little more and trying to connect it a little more to this thread, the Giuffre/Bley/Swallow material from the earlier sixties (particularly Thesis and Fusion) and Bill Dixon's two Vade Mecum records were I believe pretty influential on the European wing of EAI, as well as trying to bring the ideas of Cage/Stockhausen/Xenakis/Feldman/Cardew/Lachenmann (and probably a few others) into a free improv context.

the overarching general genre history of EAI is that when the Tokyo 'onkyo' crew emerged in the late nineties (specifically when Hat Art released Taku Sugimoto-Opposite, a record every improv fan of any kind should hear), the European free improv scene at the time basically splintered into two general areas:

1) musicians who felt compelled to rethink at least to some extent what they were doing in light of the Tokyo crew (Sugimoto primarily, but also Otomo Yoshihide, Sachiko M, Toshimaru Nakamura). Otomo's 'Mottomo Otomo' festival in Wels, Austria, was a major galvanizing event colliding Europe and Tokyo in a live situation. (EAI)

2) musicians who either didn't notice or decided to keep on going as they had been. (EFI)

Keith Rowe and Radu Malfatti both fell into the former group, and both currently count Tokyo-based musicians as most of their primary collaborators (Rowe: Toshi Nakamura and Sachiko M, Radu: the two Takus, Sugimoto and Unami). Derek Bailey and Peter Brotzmann would be examples of the latter, plenty of others, label examples would be Emanem, FMP, Incus, Maya.

it also should be noted that some of these ideas were already percolating in Europe (Polwechsel, For 4 Ears, some of the early Random Acoustics releases), and that's why the Tokyo crew's approach connected so well. and of course it should also be noted that there were grey areas in between (Another Timbre have specialized in documenting this area in the last few years) and musicians like Cor Fuhler and Axel Dorner who would play in both styles in different projects (both are also jazz musicians, they play in Otomo's jazz projects among other things).

anyway, all that is leading to a more specific answer to Phil's question: "Who is innovating, and what are they doing that is innovative?". London saxophonist Seymour Wright (a Prevost/Rowe disciple who's been doing some great work of his own recently, specifically his given away for free solo disc 'Seymour Wright of Derby' and his duo with Sebastien Lexer on Another Timbre) asked me not that long ago what I thought the most radical releases in my catalog were, and I told him the four all-Tokyo musician projects I've done. as music historians, we all know that one sign of the 'new' is often extreme, angry pans, here's one for the Ami Yoshida/Toshimaru Nakamura record I put out a few months ago that I just saw today:

http://www.squidsear.com/cgi-bin/news/newsView.cgi?newsID=974

the flip side: http://dustedmagazine.com/reviews/4974

anyway, those are a series of four records that I'd describe as genuinely 'new' (013/024/042/056 in the Erst catalog) and the main reasons I would say would be the timing and the instrumentation (thus the palette). I also work with a lot of combos who are playing together for the first time, and in the case of Soba to Bara, it's actually before the first time they played, overdubbed solos recorded separately and layered on top of each other with no editing. I think you might even like this one, Phil, the Wire review (Bill Meyer) just compared them to Billie Holiday/Lester Young and Steve Lacy/Irene Aebi (eek), which is kind of amazing for a duo that not only wasn't actually playing together, but never had before.

"applying free jazz ideas to funk grooves "

to my ears, Fela and the best electric Miles dwarf Ornette's efforts in this area, he's never struck me as especially funky (more towards gospel), which is a problem when you're trying to make free funk.

along these lines, have people heard the Vernard Johnson record I'm Alive? DL immediately if you haven't, free sax on gospel songs, dude blows his ass off in service of the Lord and will make even the biggest haters believers sometimes, right up until the song ends. I'd love to hear more of him sometime, my friend is supposed to copy some cassettes for me if he ever finds them, but he didn't release much.

Peter Brotzmann's pretty awesome, too. I think jon and I have different aesthetics, because I'd rather hear Ornette or Brotzmann doing what they've been doing for decades than the innovative ashtray rattling with intermittent blips and bloops and the "oh-so-poignant" silences of EAI.

oh no, how wrong can you be. A jazzman like ornette really has to abandon his idiom and start making free improv electro acoustic bullshit if he wants to kick it in the 00s.

I wonder if jon abbey likes crabcore.

You should be more polite.

I'm actually really curious what jon abbey's reaction is to crabcore.

I've never heard of crabcore, sorry.

Then this is the thread for you!

someone can love seeing the Preservation Hall Jazz Band now (presumably they're still playing?), and they can indeed be pretty awesome.

but no one thinks they're playing the music of now, that's all that I'm saying, and I attempted to do it with minimal value judgments, just trying to explain my perspective.

one sign of the 'new' is often extreme, angry pans

I didn't find that review all that angry or extreme. I did think his questions ("What exactly does "music" like this accomplish? What is its innate purpose/function/meaning?") were kinda dumb, in that the majority of music has long been meaningless and purposeless (liturgical music played in actual churches/temples/synagogues/mosques during actual services, and military marching music, are the big examples of music with an actual purpose) and its only function is aesthetic. I also believe context is almost always moot anyway; each piece of music is a set of sounds, organized (to a greater or lesser degree), and should be taken on its own merits rather than placed into any larger context. This is one of the cornerstones of my approach to music criticism, as jon knows. One of the big disputes we've had in the past revolves around my refusal to accept the necessity of studying up on a genre before opining on a particular piece of music. If it works for me, it works for me, and deep reading of the composer's theories isn't gonna change the sonic product one way or the other. A listener who allows himself to be swayed by an artist's rhetoric is either gullible or insecure.

someone can love seeing the Preservation Hall Jazz Band now (presumably they're still playing?), and they can indeed be pretty awesome. but no one thinks they're playing the music of now

There's no such thing as "the music of now," though. Music doesn't move on a horizontal line. It's a string of moments, some of which are in reaction to others and some of which aren't. This is particularly true in the CD/internet era, when a huge amount of music exists in digital simultaneity.

There's no such thing as "the music of now," though.

Well, there is music that is more novel than other music, which is why I suggested jon familiarize himself with crabcore. It definitely has a "now-ness."

"There's no such thing as "the music of now," though."

amusingly, Radu Malfatti and Klaus Filip have titled their upcoming duo CD for my label 'imaoto' or 'now sound' in Japanese.

"Music doesn't move on a horizontal line. It's a string of moments, some of which are in reaction to others and some of which aren't. This is particularly true in the CD/internet era, when a huge amount of music exists in digital simultaneity."

I'd say yes and no. within areas, especially ones that are in their prime period of creativity, you have albums that vault everything that's come before and force people to deal with them or become yesterday's news. this was true for hip-hop and Public Enemy, for instance (I'd say with It Takes a Million... but maybe others here would say their first record), or when Charlie Parker showed up, or Albert Ayler.

and horizontal is too simplistic, but I do think there's an overall general lineage from jazz to EFI to EAI, just as there's one from big band to bebop to free jazz. this isn't saying free jazz is the best of those, but it was the music of the mid-sixties, not bebop.

within areas, especially ones that are in their prime period of creativity, you have albums that vault everything that's come before and force people to deal with them or become yesterday's news. this was true for hip-hop and Public Enemy, for instance (I'd say with It Takes a Million... but maybe others here would say their first record), or when Charlie Parker showed up, or Albert Ayler.

I think this is only true for listeners who were alive when these records were new. Both Charlie Parker and Albert Ayler stopped making records before I was born (1971). So to me, they exist simultaneously. As far as PE are concerned, much as I love them, they were more aberrant than pathbreaking. Nobody else could pick up where they left off - legal restrictions on sampling made it prohibitively expensive.

the majority of music has long been meaningless and purposeless (liturgical music played in actual churches/temples/synagogues/mosques during actual services, and military marching music, are the big examples of music with an actual purpose) and its only function is aesthetic.

The two examples you give are musics with a stated purpose; the lack of obvious statements-of-purpose with regards to other areas of music doesn't negate the face that they may have very specific purposes/functions (to paraphrase Little Richard, it's more fun to figure those purposes out than to have them spelled out for you).

I also believe context is almost always moot anyway; each piece of music is a set of sounds, organized (to a greater or lesser degree), and should be taken on its own merits rather than placed into any larger context.

Those merits are largely, if not entirely, defined and determined by larger (social, political, economic, what have you) contexts.

This is one of the cornerstones of my approach to music criticism, as jon knows. One of the big disputes we've had in the past revolves around my refusal to accept the necessity of studying up on a genre before opining on a particular piece of music. If it works for me, it works for me, and deep reading of the composer's theories isn't gonna change the sonic product one way or the other. A listener who allows himself to be swayed by an artist's rhetoric is either gullible or insecure.

Reading up on a composer's intentions isn't the same thing as, say, investigating what other artists in that particular area of activity (or, sometimes more revealingly, other areas of musical activity) were doing around that time. If "context" is strictly defined as background/theoretical study of a composer, that's only an extremely tiny part of the story. And reducing the potential results of such study to "Now I like it!" or "Now I hate it!" strikes me as limited/limiting. My own readings on, say, Anthony Braxton or Elvis Presley -- whether I've found them insightful or thought they were utter bullshit -- have given me different perspectives, new ways of approaching their work, new ways to listen; it's never resulted in a simple "Oh, I used to love this, but now I realize that it sucks," and I've never encountered anyone, in person or in print, for whom that's been the case, with any artist.

"I think this is only true for listeners who were alive when these records were new."

I'm giving you historical examples to explain to you what I mean. presumably you're alive now, right? :)

Right, but those albums were only leaps forward for the time; now, they're just drops in the ocean of sound. Are there records being released now that vault music forward in the way you're describing? Even if I accepted your framework, I'd say no.