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

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.