Ornette Coleman: Classic Or Dud?

'ornette at 12' is one of my faves. also 'at the golden circle' and the 'naked lunch' soundtrack

that rhythm section on at the golden circle is so great, one of best jazz trios ever imo.

cosign

i agree w/mself of 19 years ago lol

'free jazz' is actually one of my favorites too tbh

I recently came across 'Opening the Caravan of Dreams', a 1985 live album from Prime Time that I don't see much talk about. Really, really funky and cool. Almost no-wavey in parts. Fans of 'Dancing in Your Head' would dig, I reckon.

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