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.
“[...]
Being connected with children as I have in my life, I feel that it’s important
to keep this alive, this fantasy. [...]What is reality? What is fantasy?” Don Cherry, March 12, 1970
Born in Oklahoma City (Oklahoma) in 1936,
Don Cherry is well known as the trumpet player of Ornette Coleman during his
successful attempts to revolutionize jazz music. Mind, my readers: we won’t
discuss here the principles of harmolodics, thing we hope we’ll face in the
future, even if we’ll talk diffusely about the records our two heroes gave life
together. For the moment it is important to stress that, if Coleman played a
plastic saxophone in order to utilize the microtones – do you remember what we
were discussing some
months ago when talking about soprano saxophones and straight horns? – to
create a freer music in comparison to bebop and the previous jazz music, Cherry
used a pocket trumpet, an instrument with a nasal and a less chrystalline sound
than an usual trumpet.
One thing that always hit me when I think about
Coleman and Cherry’s instrumental choices, and an example I want to use to
explain myself better, is that of those photographers who, in the digital i.e.
in an extremely precise era, go back to Polaroids and toy cameras. Leaving some
processes to the accident, to a form of creative chaos – as the saturation of
colors, the impossibility to control contrast through different films and papers
or, in the case of music, the difficulty in controlling instruments that are
not thought to be heavily precise – is a good way to play a music in which
there is no wrong note in a given process since it depends from what will
follow.
So, what Coleman and Cherry were trying to
obtain was an extreme freedom starting from extreme constrictions. If Something
Else!!!, the first album by Ornette Coleman (Contemporary, 1958) shocked the
audience of that time for its extreme freedom, it is true that it is an album
full of beautiful, recognizable and memorable melodies. Mind about Jayne, third
track of the album: trumpet and alto go at a nice unison before soloing, with
Coleman producing himself in his typical ‘laughters’ before playing a melody
with an undefined and mocking tonal center.
Things change a little with the following album
Tomorrow is The Question! (Contemporary, 1959) where piano is excluded from the
palette, which increases in tonal and harmonic freedom. Coleman is taking bebop
revolution to its extreme. If Charlie Parker and his peers were playing with
dissonances resolution trying to give life to a more and more complex game,
defying the listener and the other musicians involved, the music of Ornette
Coleman instead is prone to give into new directions.
Once John Coltrane, a Parker’s enthousiast
during his younger age and a contemporary of Coleman,told an interviewer that he was, during his ‘sheets of sound
period’, trying to express one sentence going in two different directions at
once; Coleman himself wanted to reach with his music every possible direction.
What we have here is a conscious attempt to go beyond the limits of an
intellectual experience as bebop became in the end, trying to open new paths to
the musicians who wanted to follow this new road even if at risk of not being
understood.
There’s in fact a huge tradition of musicians
who not only did not dig Ornette Coleman’s idea and practice of music, but also
a great quantity of musicians who imagined the jazz Coleman and Cherry were
creating was only a sum of incoherent, unrepeteable melodic lines in which
dissonance had the effect of destroying the musicians ability to change chords
and play with different intonations. Coleman music was taken by many – by
Charles Mingus as an example: take for instance his interviews contained into
the book Mingus Speaks by John F. Goodman where the bassist and composer talks
diffusely about the music of Albert Ayler and others – as an attack to the
seriousness and complexity of music itself.
If we try to observe better how things
happened, we will notice, instead, that a huge amount of musicians from the end
of the 1950s until the end of the following decade dedicated their energies to
sort out of the shallows of a more and more intellectual drift in order to
obtain always more freedom of expression. Albery Ayler with his ‘speaking in
tongues’ melodies, Coltrane with his ‘sheets of sound’ and then with his
collaboration with Pharoah Sanders in order to obtain the unpredictability of a
music driven by two different musicians instead of one, Archie Shepp with his
rawness and fierceness, and so on.
Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry gave life to a
music that conveyed different emotions, as one can feel listening to his most
known composition, Lonely Woman, that opens his third album The Shape of Jazz
To Come (Atlantic, 1959) where a simple and again memorable melody is played
through a rough and raucous style in order to create some anguish, as in the
famous picture The Scream by Edvard Munch. A nightmarish urban solitude is what
we can approach through Coleman way of playing. Don Cherry, on the other hand,
with his graspy and anti-crystalline sound is the perfect, crackling partner
for the altoist and composer.
And even if tracks like Peace and Focus on
Sanity are less anguishing, the unpredictability of where the horns will go was
leaving the linstener of that time with a potent sense of disorientation.
Things are going even worse – but we prefer to say: even deeper – with Free
Jazz (Atlantic, 1961), an album where two quartets, one led by Coleman and the
other led by his friend and pivotal figure of that time Eric
Dolphy, are intersecting each other in a disorientating stream of
consciousness of about 37 minutes.
Notably, the previous album This is Our Music
(Atlantic, 1960) features a Coleman composition titled Beauty is a Rare Thing
that in a way anticipates the trumpeter’s future enterprises as you can hear
through Mu, a collection of two LPs issued by Actuel in 1969. But let’s keep on
following the tracks in the right order. Obviously Ornette Coleman’s music not
only encountered solid oppositions, but also arose curiosity at a point in which
another contrasted innovator, the above nominated John Coltrane, in 1961 wanted
to record an entire album of Coleman compositions alongside with his partners
Don Cherry on pocket trumpet, Percy Heath and Charlie Haden on bass, and Ed
Blackwell on drums.
Listening to the album The Avant Garde released
by Atlantic is a strange experience. One can hear Coltrane trying to fit
Coleman melodies with his peculiar style, not following harmolodic rules –
harmolodics is the name of the music theory Coleman gave shape through his
playing and thinking – but his own path. In a way this is comprehensible since
no jazz musician can play as someone else and everybody has to stay as close as
possible to his or her world of reference, but in another way this album seem to
me as a wasted opportunity since there is not a real encounter between Coleman
and Coltrane worlds, only a juxtaposition of compositions and styles into one
album.
Anyway, soon Don Cherry started figuring out
how his own music would sound, and soon he signed a contract with Blue Note
producing his own trilogy in which one can hear how playing with two giants
saxophonists helped him developing his own conception of art. Cherry’s trilogy
embodying Complete Communion (Blue Note, 1965), Symphony for Improvisers (1966)
and Where is Brooklyn? (1967) is one of the most accomplished statements in the
realm of improvised music.
The concept is similar for each of the three
records: there is a theme introducing a ‘tutti’, a unison, and then there is
place for every soloist in order to express himself. If Complete Communion,
featuring Gato Barbieri on tenor, Henry Grimes (from Albert Ayler combos) on
bass and Ed Blackwell on drums, divided into two different parts, one for each
LP side, it’s the most airy and catchy, relatively speaking, while the ending
of the trilogy is left to the most newyorican, groovy and nervous Where is
Brooklin?, where Cherry is supported by Pharoah Sanders, increasing his debt
with Trane idea of sound and music.
Symphony for Improvisers, the album that stays
in the middle of the trilogy, is possibly the most complex. The line up is
comprised of Cherry on pocket trumpet, Pharoah Sanders and Gato Barbieri, Henry
Grimes, Karl Berger on piano and vibraphone – possibly after the removal of
these melodic instruments from the Coleman groups Cherry would love to know how
they could be reintegrated into the music without loosing that peculiar stream
of consciousness his pal gave life to – and the resulting music is aggressive,
intimate and fluent at the same time.
Another couple of collaborations we have to
mention are Charlie Haden project of the Liberation Music Orchestra (Impulse!,
1969), where Cherry is present with both his pocket trumpet and a flute, giving
life to a melange between the songs the Hispanic anarchists were singing
between their courageous battles against the army of Francisco Franco and more
free jazz oriented parts, and the previous album recorded by the New York
Contemporary Five with Archie Shepp (Sonet, 1964), where Cherry, Shepp on
tenor, altoist John Tchicai, bassist Don Moore and drummer J.C. Moses give life
to a music devoted to Coleman’s and Monk’s heritage.
But Cherry is the kind of person who don’t
sleep on other people’s music theories, and by 1968-69 he starts exploring new
territories in music, thanks also to a fruitful collaboration with Terry
Riley, giving life to a previously unheard mix of improvised, ethnic music,
art rock and psychedelia (not all the subgenres are always present together in
the same project, but they convey into Cherry’s music as far as their essence,
leaving every album and every project free to develop where the particular
moment and musicians involved can make the sound fluorish).
More theatrical than his previous music, as one
can see through different live performances recorded live and reproducible
online, Don Cherry’s new path will be harshly absorbed by jazz intellighentzja,
but important tracks will be visible in artists like Sergeij
Kuryiokhin, a musician we talked diffusely last year. Mu – First Part and
Mu – Second Part (BYG, 1969 and 1970) are possibly Cherry masterpieces,
together with Symphony for Improvisers. Featuring the trumpeter accompanied
only by Ed Blackwell on drums in a series of beautiful duets where Don Cherry
plays time after time his pocket trumpet, a bamboo flute, piano, his own voice
and a series of small percussions, this couple of records helped the musician
in finding his own most personal voice.
Not ascribable exclusively to the realm of
improvised music nor to that of exotic or world music but living a life of its
own somewhere in the middle, this music is the higher point in Cherry’s career,
not easily replicable as the less accomplished El Corazon (ECM, 1982) will show
and an inspirational source for musicians to come, as the double CD Piercing
The Veil (AUM Fidelity, 2007) by Cherry’s enthousiasts bassist William Parker
and drummer Hamid Drake will show you.
Don Cherry’s releases at this point in his
career become discontinuous and sometimes repetitive even if in a way
fascinating. Orient and Blue Lake (both BYG, 1971) are attempts to broaden the
landscape adding tampoura – played by his wife Moqi Cherry – and other
instruments to the palette of the two Mu, but partly for the repetition of some
formulas partly because of a lesser compelling inspiration the result is
discontinuous.
A fascinating result is, instead, Brown Rice
(Horizon, 1975) where Cherry, at his own pocket trumpet and also at Yamaha
keyboards is accompanied by Frank Lowe on tenor saxophone, Charlie Haden on
bass, Billy Higgins on drums and Ricky Cherry at acoustic and electric piano,
giving live to a music similar to the so called krautrock explored in the same
years by Can – raised by Irmin Schmidt, a student of Karlheinz Stockhausen,
where psychedelia and trance are scratched by Lowe’s statements and sweetened
by Don’s caressing but at the same time determined voice.
During his last years, Cherry’s music was
issued by Manfred Eicher’s ECM, a label famous for his peculiar sound design:
Cherry encountered old friends like Charlie Haden and new accolites like
percussionist Nana Vasconcelos, producing a less adventuros but better recorded
music coherently in line with his Theatre of Eternal Music idea. Passed away on
October 19, 1995, Cherry’s music is one of the most intriguing and personal statements
of one of the most creative of XX Century.
Another gorgeous Free Factory re-issue, from last years' ending. Five tracks, three from a 1963 Copenhagen concert, just few days after the quintet recorded Niel Holt's Future One soundtrack. Consequences was taken from that lp, and along with the opening Coleman's Emotions, sounds like Archie Shepp's Fire Music: hot rhythms, breathtaking horn blows, confrontational attitude: October Revolution in music. Time's up also for a pianoless, but touching, Monk's Mood. This show was broadcasted by Danish Radiohusets, and it seems that those three tracks would be all that remains.
Last couple of titles comes before Cherry recorded his Symphony for Improvisers and after trumpeter, with saxophonist Gato Barbieri, released Togetherness. Long Suite presents material from Complete Communion (recorded five months before), as long as a nervous rendition ofAfro-Blue, which is very far from Coltrane's majesty, and Golson's I remember Clifford. Five players involved in this Hilversum sessions never recorded together again: Don will meet 'Leandro' on Le Depart (soundtrack for beautiful Jerzy Skolimowski movie), Haden's Liberation Music Orchestra and Gaslini's Nuovi Sentimenti; pianist/vibist Carl Berger and drummer Aldo Romano would be present on Togheterness sessions, but these 30 minutes of music are the only bassist Bo Stief took part in trumpeter discography. Sound quality's quite good, not excellent, but a couple of few seconds noise intrusions wouldn't spoil listener's enjoyment.
Tracklist: 01. Emotions; 02. Monk's Mood; 03. Consequences; 04. Exodus; 05. Suite (For the Children / Afro Blue / I Remember Clifford).
Personnel: Don Cherry (trumpet) with: John Tchicai (alto), Archie Shepp (tenor), Don Moore (bass), J. C. Moses (drums) - 01/03; Gato Barbieri (tenor), Karl Berger (vibes, piano), Bo Stief (bass), Aldo Romano (drums) - 05/06.
“I never even thought about whether or not they understand what I'm doing . . . the emotional reaction is all that matters as long as there's some feeling of communication, it isn't necessary that it be understood.” (John Coltrane)
Esiste un punto di contatto tra la perdita e la consapevolezza? Esiste una qualche forma artistica che abbia mostrato una specie di presentificazione del dolore nel momento stesso in cui tende verso l'esplorazione di nuove forme?
Ascolti India, ad esempio, e ti domandi cosa mai avrà pensato Ravi Shankar (di cui il sassofonista di Seattle era un fervente ammiratore). Sicuramente sarà rimasto turbato.
Ascolti Meditations, e senti che nessun altro musicista ha incarnato quella pienezza dello spirito che non è mai appartenuta alle religioni occidentali.
Ascolti un brano come Dearly Beloved e improvvisamente capisci.
Ascolti i dischi realizzati con Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, Don Cherry, Cecil Taylor, e pensi che in fondo solo quella vecchia volpe di Miles ha saputo sfruttare il suo stato nascente, indirizzarlo, mischiarcisi.
Mai capace di essere altro da se stesso, Trane, nel bene e nel male. Icona già in vita, si è trovato al crocevia di tutta una serie di discorsi musicali e culturali: l'avanguardia, la fede, i cambiamenti. Li ha attraversati tutti senza lasciarsi, in fondo, determinare da nessuno di essi. Eccedendoli, in senso antropologico.
Perché non esiste la banalità del bene: non solo per raggiungerlo, ma anche solo per desiderarlo, occorrono almeno tre movimenti, quelli che dànno il titolo al suo disco più famoso.
