I didn’t see Ornette Coleman until 1971 when he played the Saturday afternoon program of the Newport Jazz Festival with his old comrades Dewey Redman, Charlie Haden, and Ed Blackwell. It was fortuitous that he shared the afternoon bill with Eubie Blake, Willie “The Lion” Smith, Freddie Hubbard, Charles Mingus, and the New York Bass Violin Choir, for that evening a riot interrupted Dionne Warwick’s performance of “What the World Needs Now” and the festival came to a crashing halt. (I’d felt the rumblings of disorder and made a hasty exit from the grounds during the preceding set by Dave Brubeck with Gerry Mulligan.) It would be ten years before jazz was welcomed back to Newport.
I saw Ornette several times thereafter, always curious to hear what he was playing, who was in the band, and what he was wearing. Like Miles Davis, Roy Haynes, and Duke Ellington, he was a paragon of sartorial splendor. While his latest music (the symphonic Skies of America in 1972; the multi-layered harmolodic ’70s/’80s funk of Prime Time; his 21st Century quartet with his son and longtime drummer Denardo Coleman and bassists Greg Cohen and Tony Falanga) always intrigued me, and his 2003 appearance at Carnegie Hall floored me, it was the first bursts of his music on record, the 1958-1961 period, that remains the most compelling. Coleman’s themes, often played in unison with trumpeter Don Cherry, could be brusque, discordant, and intense, but they invariably opened up to solos lively with melodic invention and poignant lyricism. And while his rhythm section of Charlie Haden on bass, and Billy Higgins or Ed Blackwell on drums, swung magnificently, they were also deeply sensitive to the mood and nuance of the music and the twists and turns of Coleman’s and Cherry’s improvisations.
Like Muddy Waters and other bluesmen whose music fell into the cracks or microtones between pitches, Coleman said that one of his most important self-discoveries came “when I realized that you could play sharp or flat in tune.” Listening intently to Ornette all over again this week reminds me that few saxophonists have achieved such a keening, plaintive, human sound. And fewer still are the composers who’ve written such memorable pieces as “The Blessing,” “When Will the Blues Leave,” “Turnaround,” “Lorraine,” “Tears Inside,” “Ramblin’,” “Lonely Woman,” “Peace,” “Humpty Dumpty,” “Una Muy Bonita,” “Blues Connotation,” “The Legend of Bebop,” and “Congeniality.” (The latter is a classic example of how deep he was in the vernacular; “Congeniality” interpolates the classic blues melody that came to be known as “Red Hot.” Bob Dylan extolled the rockabilly version of “Red Hot” by Billy Lee Riley in his MusiCares address at the Grammy’s this year.)
Ornette’s innovations in pitch, harmony, and structure instigated the biggest controversy in jazz history. When he arrived in New York in 1959, it was already apparent that jazz would never be the same, and both admirers and detractors were vociferous with acclaim and denunciation. Gil Evans said, “He swings, and he’s got a good feeling for melody.” John Lewis, who brought him to the attention of Atlantic Records and saw to Ornette and Don Cherry receiving scholarships to the School of Jazz in Lenox, Mass in the summer of 1959, said he was “an extension of Bird.” But Bird’s former colleagues were less impressed. Miles Davis said his playing and tunes suggested that “psychologically, the man is all screwed up inside.” Max Roach was put off when Ornette asked if he could sit in with the drummer’s quintet in California in the mid-fifties. Sometime after his opening at the Five Spot on November 17, 1959, Ornette claimed that Max punched him in the mouth. Charles Mingus seemed more puzzled than perturbed in saying the music was “like organized disorganization, or playing wrong right. And it gets to you emotionally.” The great bebop drummer Shelly Manne, who played on Tomorrow Is the Question with Coleman in 1959, hinted at the appeal Ornette has had for subsequent generations of musicians more in tune with Ornette’s dictum to respect one’s feelings in the music: “When I worked with Ornette, somehow I became more of a person in my own playing.”
“Lonely Woman,” the haunting, dirge-like ballad introduced on Coleman’s Atlantic debut, The Shape of Jazz to Come, came to mind the moment I heard he’d died last week. I was on vacation at the time and reading Philip Glass’s new memoir, Words Without Music. Ornette is referred to several times in its pages, and is among the jazz players whom Glass likens to himself as alchemists, “taking the energy of New York and transforming it into music.” Ornette’s first harmolodic alchemy involved country blues and bebop, but he told Glass there was one pairing that resisted admixture. “Don’t forget, Philip, the music world and the music business are not the same.” For a coterie of musicians and fans, however, it’ll remain Ornette’s world for years to come.
Here’s Ornette playing “Lonely Woman” in 2008 in Vienna.