Ornette Coleman Birthday Broadcast on WKCR

On March 9, 2024, the date of birth of Ornette Coleman, WKCR will broadcast all day for 24 hours (12.00 A.M. – 11.59 P.M.) the incredible music of the alto saxophonist, violinist, trumpeter, composer and music theorist. Born in Forth Worth, Texas, in 1930, Ornette Coleman revolutionized jazz starting from a cubist vision of bebop up to harmolodics, his innovative music theory in which sounds are no more linked to a tonal centre but free to develop themselves and progress according to the taste, culture and sensitivity of the musicians.

Since the very beginning of his career, despite the singability of the compositions included into his first album Something Else!!!! (Contemporary, 1958), Coleman performances were perceived as shocking by the jazz community, provoking event violent reactions of rejection in other musicians. Drummer Max Roach as an example stated that Ornette Coleman was ruining jazz, even if he played, later on, with musicians associated with the free jazz revolution such as Cecil Taylor.  

But Coleman, who played for his entire career a plastic alto saxophone because of its microtones even if it was more difficult to play than one made of brass, and his collaborators Don Cherry, Scott La Faro, Charlie Haden, Ed Blackwell and Billy Higgins, were convinced about the righteousness of their music vision, and decided to go on. It was with Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation (Atlantic, 1961) that the shock widened thanks to the use of a double quartet, one led by Coleman and the other by Eric Dolphy.

Coleman career and discography are full of such moments of redefinition of a musical genre such as jazz. From the percussions of the Master Musicians of Jajouka in Dancing in Your Head (Horizon, 1977), to the orchestrations of Skies of America (Columbia, 1972) featuring a long composition played by the London Symphony Orchestra, from Song X (Geffen, 1096) realized with the help of Pat Metheny to the experimentations on behalf of Yoko Ono, Lou Reed and The Grateful Dead, the music of Ornette Coleman is under the sign of experimentation and adventure.

Those willing to celebrate, next Saturday, the anniversary of Coleman birthday, would certainly connect to WKCR in order to enjoy a full day of incredible music. 

 

Carla Bley has died yesterday, Oct. 17, 2023

Born Lovella May Borg in Oakland, California, on May 11, 1936, pianist and composer Carla Bley has sadly passed away yesterday due to a brain cancer, as told by her husband, bassist Steve Swallow. For a long time associated with free jazz, Bley during her career spanned through a vide variety of registries, including solos, duos – the longtime collaboration with Swallow – up to exploring all the potentials of big bands.

The most famous projects she collaborated with are obviously Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra, a line up that changed during the decades producing at least one masterpiece – their firsts album for Impulse! released in 1970 – and the project under her name Escalator over the Hill (JCOA, 1971), a triple album for a big band including Jeanne Lee, Gato Barbieri, Karl Berger, Don Cherry, Charlie Haden, Leroy Jenkins, Enrico Rava, Roswell Rudd and many others.

The work was inspired by poems of Paul Haines and it was depicted as a “masterpiece” and by some as “the most important record of all times”. Far from sensationalism, EOTH is simply one of the most successful attempts to mix free jazz, rock, indian music – ragas in particular – and the cabaret music of Kurt Weill. Intense, physical and intellectual at the same time, the album is an unicum in a career that quite often explored delicate and meaningful places such as in the case of pieces like End of Vienna from the album Fancy Chamber Music (ECM, 1998) with its violin, viola, cello and flute delicate and intense dialogues.

In fact, Bley’s music was not only and not always dense and thick, since many times it was lyrical and meditative as in Fleur Carnivore, full of references to classical compostions, even if reworked through a jazz sensitivity, as in More Brahms from Sextet (ECM, 1987) or again adventurous and evocative as in the compositions selected by the Jimmy Giuffre Trio for the alum Jimmy Giuffre 3 (ECM, 1961).

As it happened earlier this year with the losses of Peter Brotzmann and Tristan Honsinger, the death of Carla Bley deprives us not only of a magnificent musician/composer, but also of a refined human sensitivity so useful in these days of conservatorship and cultural, but not only cultural, homologation. Even because these musicians will not be replaced by new or younger ones, more influenced by the days they’re living in than the older ones, freer and less inclined to compromise first and foremost in their minds.