| Ornette Coleman |
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Information AboutOrnette Coleman |
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Coleman was born and raised in . Part of the uniqueness of his sound came from his use of a plastic saxophone on his classic early recordings (Coleman claimed that it sounded drier, without the pinging sound of metal), though in more recent years he has played a metal saxophone. EARLY CAREER Coleman moved to Los Angeles in the early 1950s . He worked at various jobs, including as an Elevator operator, while pursuing his musical career. Even from the beginning of Coleman's career, his music and playing were, in many ways rather unorthodox: Coleman was more concerned with Relative Pitch than with "proper" Equal Temperament ; his sense of Harmony and Chord Progression are not as rigid as most Swing Music or Bebop performers', and were easily changed and often implied. Many Los Angeles jazz musicians regarded Coleman's playing as out-of-tune, and he sometimes had difficulty finding like-minded musicians with whom to perform. Pianist Paul Bley was an early supporter. In 1958 Coleman led his first recording session for ''Something Else! The Music of Ornette Coleman''. The session also featured Trumpet er Don Cherry , Drummer Billy Higgins , bassist Don Payne and Walter Norris on Piano . Norris was sympathetic to Coleman's ideas, but has been criticised for not quite grasping them (though, in fairness, it must be noted that few grasped Coleman's ideas this early on), and further, a piano tied Coleman to Equal Temperament . THE SHAPE OF JAZZ TO COME on drums. Coleman encountered Double Bass ist Charlie Haden – perhaps his most important collaborator – and formed a regular group with him, Cherry, and Higgins. They were an unlikely-looking fellowship – Coleman with his plastic alto saxophone, Cherry playing the pint-sized pocket trumpet, Haden honing his technique via his Missouri family's hillbilly band. This quartet recorded '' The Shape Of Jazz To Come '' in 1959 , with Atlantic Records , who had signed Coleman to a multi-album contract. ''The Shape of Jazz to Come'' was, according to critic Steve Huey, "a watershed event in the genesis of avant-garde jazz, profoundly steering its future course and throwing down a gauntlet that some still haven't come to grips with." {Link without Title} While definitely – if somewhat loosely – Blues -based and often quite melodic, the Album 's songs were harmonically unusual and unpredictable. Some musicians and critics saw Coleman as talentless hack; others regarded him as a genius. Coleman's quartet received a lengthy – and sometimes controversial – engagement at famously declared Coleman was "all screwed up inside," and Roy Eldridge stated he'd listened to Coleman Drunk and sober, but couldn't understand or enjoy his music either way. On his best-known early recordings for the Atlantic Records , Coleman led a Piano -less quartet with Cherry on Trumpet , usually Charlie Haden , but sometimes Scott LaFaro on Double Bass and either Billy Higgins or Ed Blackwell on Drums . These recordings are collected in a Box Set , ''Beauty is a Rare Thing''. FREE JAZZ In on Trumpet , Eric Dolphy on Bass Clarinet , Haden and LaFaro on bass, and both Higgins and Blackwell on drums. The record was recorded in Stereo , with a Reed / Brass / Bass / Drums quartet isolated in each stereo channel. ''Free Jazz'' was, at nearly 40 minutes, the lengthiest jazz recording to date, and was instantly one of Coleman's most controversial albums. The music features a regular but complex pulse, one drummer playing "straight" while the other played double-time; the thematic material is a series of brief, dissonant fanfares; as is conventional in jazz, there are a series of solos features for each member of the band, but the other soloists are free to chime in as they wish, producing some extraordinary passages of collective improvisation by the full octet. Coleman intended ''Free Jazz'' simply to be the album title, but his growing reputation placed him at the forefront of jazz innovation, and Free Jazz was soon considered a new genre, though Coleman has expressed discomfort with the term. Among the reasons Coleman may not have entirely approved of the term '' Free Jazz '' is that his music contains a considerable amount of Composition . His Melodic material, although skeletal, strongly recalls the melodies that Charlie Parker wrote over " Standard " harmonies, and in general the music is closer to the Bebop which came before it than is sometimes popularly imagined. (Several early tunes of his, for instance, are clearly based on favorite bop chord-changes like "Out of Nowhere" and "I Got Rhythm".) Coleman very rarely played standards, concentrating on his own compositions, of which there seems to be an endless flow. There are exceptions, though, including a classic reading (virtually a recomposition) of "Embraceable You" for Atlantic, and an improvisation on Thelonious Monk 's "Criss-Cross" recorded with Gunther Schuller. 1960S After the Atlantic period and into the early part of the 1970s , Coleman's music became more angular and engaged fully with the jazz Avant-garde which had developed in part around Coleman's innovations. His quartet dissolved, and Coleman formed a new trio with David Izenzon on bass, and Charles Moffett on drums. Coleman began to extend the sound-range of his music, introducing accompanying string players (though far from the territory of "Parker With Strings") and playing Trumpet and Violin himself; he initially had little conventional Technique , and used the instruments to make large, unrestrained gestures. His friendship with Albert Ayler influenced Coleman's development on trumpet and violin. (Haden would later sometimes join this trio to form a two-bass quartet.) Between 1965 and 1967 Coleman signed with legendary jazz record label Blue Note Records and released a number of recordings starting with the influential recordings of the trio ''At The Golden Circle'' in Stockholm. In 1966 , Coleman was criticised for recording ''The Empty Foxhole,'' a trio with Haden, and Coleman's son Denardo Coleman – who was ten years old. Some regarded this as perhaps an ill-advised publicity ploy on Coleman's part, and judged the move as a misstep. Others, however, noted that despite his youth, Denardo had studied drumming for several years, his technique – which, though unrefined, was respectable and enthusiastic – owed more to "pulse" oriented Free Jazz drummers like Sunny Murray than to Bebop drumming. Denardo has matured into a respected musician, and has been his father's primary drummer since the late 1970s. Coleman formed another quartet. A number of bassists and drummers (including Haden, Jimmy Garrison and Elvin Jones ) appeared, and Dewey Redman joined the group, usually on tenor Saxophone . He also continued to explore his interest in string textures – from the Town Hall concert in 1962 , culminating in ''Skies of America'' in 1972 . (Sometimes this had a practical value, as it facilitated his group's appearance in England in 1965 , where jazz musicians were under a quota arrangement but "classical" performers were exempt.) FUSION OUTLOOK ON JAZZ Later, however, Coleman, like Miles Davis before him, took to playing with Electrified Instruments . Albums like ''Virgin Beauty'' and ''Of Human Feelings'' used Rock and Funk Rhythm s, sometimes called Free Funk . On the face of it, this could seem to be an adoption of the Jazz Fusion mode fashionable at the time, but Ornette's first record with the group which later became known as Prime Time (the 1976 ''Dancing in Your Head'') was sufficiently different to have considerable shock value. Electric Guitar s were prominent, but the music was, at heart, rather similar to his earlier work. These performances have the same angular melodies and simultaneous group Improvisation s – what Joe Zawinul referred to as "nobody solos, everybody solos" and what Coleman calls " Harmolodics " – and although the nature of the pulse has altered, Coleman's own rhythmic approach has not. Some critics have suggested Coleman's frequent use of the vaguely-defined term "harmolodics" is a musical of sorts designed to occupy critics over-focused on Coleman's sometimes unorthodox compositional style. Jerry Garcia played guitar on three tracks from Coleman's ''Virgin Beauty'' (1988) - "Three Wishes", "Singing In The Shower", and "Desert Players". Twice in 1993, Coleman joined the Grateful Dead on stage playing the band's "The Other One", "Wharf Rat", "Stella Blue", and covering Bobby Bland 's "Turn On Your Lovelight" among others. Another unexpected association was with guitarist Pat Metheny , with whom Coleman recorded ''Song X'' (1985); though released under Metheny's name Coleman was essentially co-leader (contributing all the compositions). In 1991, Coleman played on the soundtrack for David Cronenberg 's '' Naked Lunch ''; the orchestra was conducted by Howard Shore . It is notable among other things for including a rare sighting of Coleman playing a jazz standard: Monk's blues line "Misterioso". The mid-1990s saw a flurry of activity from Coleman: He released four records between 1995 and 1996, and for the first time in nearly forty years, Coleman worked regularly with Piano players (either Geri Allen or Joachim Kühn ). Many critics noted that it took jazz piano nearly that long to catch up with Coleman's innovations. Coleman has rarely performed on other musicians' records: albums with Jackie McLean in 1967 (on which Coleman played trumpet), James Blood Ulmer in 1978 , Joe Henry 's ''Scar'' in 2001 and Lou Reed in 2003 are among the few exceptions. LEGACY Although now an elder statesman of jazz, Coleman continues to push himself into unusual playing situations, often with much younger musicians or musicians from radically different musical cultures, and continues to perform regularly. An increasing number of his compositions, while not ubiquitous, have become minor have managed to turn them to their purposes; John Zorn has recorded ''Spy Vs Spy'' (1989), an album of radical thrash-metal versions of Coleman songs; there have even been country-music versions of Coleman tunes (by Richard Greene ). Recently, he has performed live with the popular trio The Bad Plus , a group similarly committed to challenging jazz orthodoxy. EXTERNAL LINKS |
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