 illustration by Nathan Jensen |
of unrecognized genius, and hindsight’s contribution to the reputations of
people no longer on this earth cannot be underestimated. Jazz aficionados,
listening in horror as the audience talks loudly over one of their favorite
vintage club recordings of Jelly Roll Morton, know that if only they could have
been there, they would have paid attention. We would all be humbled to
find ourselves positioned in the same time and place as one of the genre’s true
musical giants, right? Well, good news… we’re right where we need to be.
Ornette Coleman, whose work has influenced music as profoundly as anything by
Beethoven, Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker, or Chuck Berry, was born into a
shotgun house in a poor neighborhood of Fort Worth, Texas in 1930, and found
his initial position less than ideal. Poverty, racism, and segregation were
rampant, and not only was music his calling, it was also his ticket out of
town. Yet Coleman found himself an outsider from the start. Initially
self-taught, he took voraciously to the saxophone, yearning to play bebop when
Texas roadhouse R&B was the only real option. Years later, when he hit
California, there had already been many run-ins with close-minded musicians.
All the while, he was composing, studying music, and incubating the origins of
his theories, which would come to be known as “Harmolodics,” the catch-all,
difficult-to-define label for all things Coleman.
Likened to a family all talking at the same time, the “Harmolodic” concept
broke all the rules, abandoning chord-based structure for tonal and rhythmic
expression, all players operating democratically, independent of the melody,
yet empathic of each other. Empathy was not, however, something the music
community at large had for Coleman’s theories or practices, and many of the
first bebop musicians the sax player encountered walked out on his performances
in disbelief. Undaunted, all this isolation and rejection made its way into
Coleman’s music, whose democratic spirit and ideas of global unity served as a
perfect counterpoint to the obstacles he encountered.
And soon, Coleman discovered he was not alone. Legendary drummer Ed Blackwell
was the first of many soulmates the saxophonist would encounter — like two,
young, self-taught prodigies named Don Cherry and Charlie Haden. Though Coleman
had already released two recordings with studio musicians for Contemporary
Records, the quartet, trumpet player Cherry, bassist Haden, and drummer Billy
Higgins, would prove to be the group that first captured Coleman’s true vision.
Pianist, educator, and leader of the Modern Jazz Quartet, John Lewis, heard the
quartet and got them signed to Atlantic Records, and when their debut —
prophetically titled The Shape of Jazz to Come — hit the streets in
1959, it set the world of music on its ear.
And it was only the beginning. The quartet, with various personnel changes,
would record nine remarkable records in three years for Atlantic (compiled on
Rhino’s 6-CD box set, Beauty Is a Rare Thing), including the landmark,
utterly improvised Free Jazz. Like any radical change, the music was met
with acclaim, and for a time, much controversy and derision. “Are you cats
serious?” an incredulous Dizzy Gillespie, the arbiter of cool, asked at one the
quartet’s early Five Spot shows. They were. Very serious.
In the decades that have followed the quartet’s demise, Coleman has brought
many fine musicians through his ranks (Charles Moffat, Dewey Redman, James
Blood Ulmer, Ronald Shannon Jackson, son Denardo), and continued to push the
envelope, delving into harder backbeats and electricity, collaborating with
unlikely partners, and uncompromisingly pursuing his own muse. Many benchmarks
have occurred along the way: the orchestral Skies of America (’72),
Harmolodic hoe-down, Dancing in Your Head (’75), Of Human
Feelings (’82), and the original quartet’s reunion, In All Languages
(’87), to name only a few.
After a seven-year layoff, the launch of Coleman’s Harmolodic label (a Verve
imprint) has reactivated his career, first with the release of last year’s
Tone Dialing, with his band Prime Time, and more recently with the
scaled-down, riveting Sound Museum recordings, featuring Geri
Allen, Charnett Moffat, and Dernado (see review). In addition, the label has
rescued two important Coleman releases from obscurity: Body Meta,
recorded during the same session that yielded Dancing in Your Head,
features some furious Harmolodic funk stew, driven hard by drummer Ronald
Shannon Jackson, while Soapsuds, Soapsuds is a beauty — a quiet and
intense duet session with bassist Charlie Haden. Both are on CD for the first
time.
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less it impresses you. Certainly this is true with music, where so much is
borrowed and co-opted from what came before. James Brown’s great legacy loses
some of its luster when you hear the Five Royales vastly similar precedents, to
name but one example. Ornette Coleman, though, belongs to a select group of
composers whose music seems to have come from nowhere, to have sprung forth
wholly from his creative mind. He’s the rare intellectual that makes music not
for the head, but for the heart.
Obtaining an audience with Coleman took a sustained effort over a long period
of time, yet even over the phone, you realize his unique language is not just
confined to musical parameters. He plays with time, careening off course, often
taking circuitous routes to make a point, but always making one. Trying to
cover his amazing life and career in 40 minutes is like running through the
Uffizi; the best you can hope for is a glimpse of what lies within.
Austin Chronicle: Describe your early days as an R&B musician around the
juke joints of Texas.
Ornette Coleman: When I first got my saxophone, I went to different jam
sessions, and finally put a band together. This was in the late Forties or
early Fifties. Segregation was very strong then, so I would play for Mexicans,
and whites and blacks… different jobs on different days. I was in the house
band for a place where they had gambling, and whenever the Texas Rangers would
come in, everyone would begin dancing so they wouldn’t be taken to jail. For
me, as a young man, it was just a form of surviving. Because where I grew up in
Fort Worth, it was kinda… rugged. There weren’t many jobs available for black
people. I did get a chance to hear a lot of different musicians that came
through the area. I remember Stan Kenton came through once and I played with
his big band. Dizzy Gillespie, I idolized him, Lester Young, and man, T-Bone
Walker. One of the first persons I backed up was Joe Turner. So It was a
growing experience and also a survival experience.
AC: And occasionally some good music, it sounds like.
OC: Yeah, it was really good music. Since I was playing in different
locations, I had to learn lots of different things. I would be playing “La
Paloma” one night, “Stardust” the next and “Night Train” after that. So I got
to understand how music works in different relationships.
But what happened was, I outgrew it very fast when I heard bebop music. I
first got inspired to play when a band came to my elementary school. One of the
guys stood up with his saxophone and played, and it was like magic to me. I was
just bewildered by what it was. I asked my mother, could I have a saxophone,
and she told me if I went out and worked and made some money, I could buy one.
So I made a shinebox and got my first horn like that after about two and a half
years. I soon learned that most of the music people were playing was written,
and I was always thinking that they were just playing from the fact that the
horn was like a toy — it just seemed very easy to me to do.
In fact, when I picked up my horn for the first time, I played it as good as
I’m playing now, [though] I didn’t know as much about music as I do now. I
decided there was more to music than just playing the saxophone. I learned how
to read and write the things that I was playing myself. And from that, I
started getting into what people call composition. When I was about 17, I
discovered that most music was being dictated from the piano. I mean, everyone
uses the piano to note the key, the chord. Yet, I found that instrumental music
had other sounds besides the piano for their tonics. Such as string quartets,
on the viola, C natural appears where the B natural is on the treble clef.
These kind of things made me go deeper into understanding what written music —
compositional music — takes. Then I discovered bebop.
Bebop music was the only music that I had really heard that had complicated
lines, and I wanted to play that music. So I decided to leave Fort Worth. I
told my mother I was going to Dallas, and I got on the bus with a minstrel band
and went to Natchez, Mississippi. Then the guy fired me because he thought I
was trying to modernize the band. I met this person called Clarence Samuels and
he had a session set up. But after the session, the cops came in and told me to
get out of town. I ended up going to New Orleans without ever knowing what
happened to that recording. That was my first experience with taped music.
I stayed in New Orleans for about two and a half years, then I went back to
Fort Worth. I met Peewee Crayton, who needed a saxophone player and asked me to
join. I remember having a jam session with Crayton, and Bob Wills & the
Texas Playboys were there. We were all playing bebop. They were playing country
blues, Western music on their job, and bebop at night. It was a good, healthy
environment. I was learning a lot about music, so I decided to go to California
with them, and I ended up staying about 10 years and making my first records
there.
AC: Around this time you met Ed Blackwell, who greatly influenced your
thinking.
OC: I was actually writing and playing the music that I now call Harmolodics
before I left Texas, but when I got to California, I tried to play with some
very professional bebop musicians. I thought because I knew their repertoire, I
would be able to play it. But when I got up on the bandstand and started
playing, all of these professional guys put their instruments down and left me
there. I was so devastated and disappointed, and from then on I decided not to
integrate in that style of music anymore. I had already found something that I
wanted to share with them, but the bebop music had a strict form — it’s like
pop music.
AC: It must have been a relief to find people like Ed Blackwell, and
later Charlie Haden and Don Cherry in California.
OC: Blackwell was the first person I met that was actually very open to
playing. One of the things that was amazing is that he never worried about
time, he only worried about content. From that, I met Billy [Higgins] and
Charlie [Haden] and [Don] Cherry. The music I had made for Contemporary
Records, I had written in Texas, but I didn’t get my first recording contract
from playing the saxophone; I got it from writing music. Les Koenig called and
said, “No one knows what to do with the songs I bought from you. They can read
them, but they don’t know what to do with them. Do you know?” And I said,
“Sure, let’s put a band together.” I used Walter Norris and Don Payne, it was
sort of like studio musicians. But I really wanted to play the music that I was
playing with Don [Cherry] and the rest. Although I had made two popular records
in California, I was still working in Bullock’s as an elevator driver. The
record business was very strange, with instrumental music. I still find it very
strange in some ways.
AC: Much has been made of the telepathy of the musicians you played
with in this early quartet. It always reminded me of a trapeze act without a
net. How do you rehearse something like that, how do you prepare to play
Harmolodically?
OC: I’ve only had two real good Harmolodic bands… one was in ’75, the other
in ’95. The one in ’75 was teenagers and they had just really started on the
instruments, so I had a first opportunity to assure Harmolodics with them, and
the second Harmolodic band was made up of people who had been playing classical
music. To answer your question, one of the things I do when I hire someone into
my band is to hold classes about Harmolodics. I write out a lesson and teach it
to them, then show them how it works and see if they can apply that to
improvising. That’s how I’ve always assured knowledge about Harmolodics, not
only with people in my band but people who have studied with me.
AC: Back in the early Sixties, when you were releasing these
groundbreaking records on Atlantic, it must have bothered you that you were
receiving such harsh criticism, even from peers like Miles Davis and Dizzy
Gillespie.
OC: Well… Miles, Diz, Coltrane… Coltrane studied with me for a while, Miles
sat in with me, I played with Diz. You know, I really realized what exists when
your survival is at stake, off of whatever it is, whether you are president of
the United States or an executive or whatever… I never thought about the
musicians being angry because of what I was playing. I thought it more about
their survival in relationship to the value of what they were doing. To this
very day, I don’t find any difference between any music as far as that’s
concerned. I really believe that rock, jazz, classical, and the rest, are
ethnic titles to keep people divided in relationship to their true art as a
pure human expression. The human nervous system has no race, no color, no
agenda.
If someone today was playing like a Dizzy Gillespie or Miles Davis, he
wouldn’t have the problem that Diz and Miles had. He might not play any better
or worse, but he would receive more universal acceptance. In fact, I’ve found
if you make something where you don’t depend upon the love of an audience in
order to know how valuable it is, you can probably become very successful in
business. Business people seem to support each other, but artists are divided
because of the business.
AC: There’s a strong thread of democracy in your work, no extended
solos, equal say from all your players.
OC: Yeah, I really believe in Harmolodics that the melody is not the lead —
it’s the person that is performing the music that’s the lead.
AC: Your goal seems to be a universal music that transcends language and
perspective.
OC: You know, in America, there are endless forms of ethnical people. For
instance, I heard a lady from the Cape Verde islands in New York who didn’t
perform one word of English, and the place was packed. They loved her. She sat
down and started smoking. I mean, she was like, at home. She was the first
person I’ve seen in America that, like say if you had brought an African person
singing in all African, maybe the audience would have only been black. Or if
you had brought an Irishman, maybe the only people there would have been Irish.
That’s not the case today. You don’t have to change your language or change
your style in order for someone to appreciate what you are doing artistically.
The kids are going to be born — and there are those that are as old as myself
— who will be able to enjoy the true human expression without any ethnical
discrimination.
AC: You have two reissues out on your Harmolodic label, Body Meta and
Soapsuds, Soapsuds. …Meta is a propelled funk record,
while Soapsuds… is just the opposite. It has an
after-hours feel to it, like a jam session in a empty club. The playing from
both you and Haden seems so remarkably matched. How did this session come
about?
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I was supposed to play, it was a political job I didn’t want to get involved
in. So, I got stranded in Europe, since I had spent all my money getting there.
Finally, I got a call from a manager in France who asked me to play on this
record. From that I got enough money to make Dancing in Your Head. The
Body Meta songs came from that same session. During that time, I
got a call from John Synder who was making records for A&M, and Charlie
[Haden] was making records for them, too. By the time I returned to the U.S.,
Synder had started Artists House records, and that’s when we made that
session.
AC: It’s a beautiful recording. There’s a fairly exhaustive
discography that came in the original vinyl issue of Soapsuds…
mentioning many unreleased recordings from throughout your career. Now that
you’re running your own label, are there plans to release any of this
material?
OC: We have a bit of material. Basically, since we started Harmolodic with
Polygram, we decided on a concept and that started out with Tone
Dialing and the two Sound Museums. Now, we have a record
coming out with musicians from India and a Japanese singer with a beautiful
voice, a rapper and two musicians from Bombay, and it’s really very enjoyable.
You know, for me, music is really true emotional medicine. It makes people feel
better, it makes people happy, it makes people think. It just brings lots of
joy and love to people. The thing that I realize more and more is there isn’t
any particular style or caste of music that really can do that better than any
other music.
AC: I once read a story about you and your band sitting around
listening to a Robert Johnson tune and wishing you could play like that as a
full band, meaning the expressiveness and the freedom and….
OC: Did someone tell you that?
AC:I read it. It’s not true?
OC: I don’t remember saying that, but tell me, what was the punchline?
AC: None, really, the idea being that an individual can play with
free meter, off-key guitar, flatted notes, getting away from the fixed 12-tone
piano setting. I was pleasantly surprised to see a piano player, Geri Allen, on
your new Sound Museum recordings. This is the first time in quite a
while that you have worked with a pianist. Does this pose a problem for
you?
OC: Not at all. To me, the piano is just an added sound. It’s a basic
instrument that had been invented for people to know how to play tempered music
in unison. But in this form of playing non-tempered music…. for instance, did
you ever hear the musicians from Jajouka?
AC: I’ve heard your work with them, yes.
OC: You know, they play unison, and they all play their own notes. That’s a
very advanced form of unison. The synthesizer has the same property concept.
You can take the synthesizer and change the frequency of any sound. So,
basically flat and sharp and natural are just time signatures — they’re not
profound ways of getting to a musical idea. I mean, two saxophone players are
playing the same note, you have to agree on the same frequency for the sound to
be in tune. But if you’re playing by yourself, if an emotion that comes to you
or through you reminds you of some sound that you heard, then you can use that
sound in an expression. You’re not gonna be put in jail if you try it. When I
hear Eastern music, any music, that doesn’t have to conform to any given temper
or unison, it usually sounds very ancient, and also very new. I think that’s
why when you hear the young kids that are playing bebop these days, it doesn’t
sound as pure and as interesting, because all they’re doing is repeating the
melody and trying to play solos based on the changes. The people who wrote the
music of those days, they didn’t have to think that way, it was all one.
AC: In a few decades, you’ve gone from being an outcast to a living
legend. How do you view your place in musical history?
OC: Well, I don’t think it’s any different than anyone who’s done anything for
humanity. Imagine if everybody was lazy, nothing would ever get done.
[This interview will air in the near future one of Jeff McCord’s
“Overnight” shifts on KUT-FM.]
This article appears in November 22 • 1996 and November 22 • 1996 (Cover).