Early Ornette Coleman
I am less expert in Ornette’s early music than I am in his music of ’69-‘72. (See the post Ornette Coleman and The Bad Plus.) Recently I decided to go through his pre-Atlantic recordings again with fresh ears.
This past January I spent a couple of afternoons with Ornette, and have included things he said to me in this post. He and I are not close. Ornette’s door has always been open to other musicians, and anyone with enough gumption and a dose of good luck could spend the same amount of time with him that I did. I sensed I was starting to be intrusive (“You sure ask a lot of questions, Ethan!”) and have not pursued a relationship with him since then. He did enjoy the fact that I knew his records so well, and when I played him “Street Woman” off of Give he gave it his blessing.
One thing he told me was that the first time he picked up the saxophone, he played pretty much the way he does today. I can believe it. I’ve heard almost every recording he has ever made, and on all of them he plays in the same way, in the same style. This style is based on melody of the purest beauty. (Lately I have been saying in interviews, “Ornette Coleman is one of the two greatest composers of melody in Western music. The other is Franz Schubert.” This is of course absurd—there are an infinite number of great melodies written by others—but it sure looks nice on the page!)
Until at least 1973, the music of Ornette Coleman was structured from the top down, melody first and foremost. His bands huddled around the blast furnace of his melodic genius and got inspired to create the rest. Each member of the group was required to take a lot of initiative. Therefore, trying to talk about Ornette Coleman's music without considering the musicians playing with him is folly. We would not have Ornette without Don Cherry, Charlie Haden, and Billy Higgins. Ed Blackwell and Dewey Redman are the two other most significant collaborators, but David Izenzon, Charles Moffett, Bobby Bradford, Jimmy Garrison, Scott LaFaro and Denardo Coleman also played with Ornette in a sympathetic way. In Ornette's music since ’73 I am less certain of the process but do know that the members of Prime Time mostly made up their own parts.
The basic problem I have with most critical discussion of Ornette is how little consideration is given to the ensemble. (In Darius Brubeck’s recent article, Charlie Haden’s name does not appear.) I’m not saying that Ornette isn’t a powerful leader, which he obviously is: many of Ornette’s musicians have never played better than with him. He also does some shaping of his performances, which I experienced first hand when he taught me his ballad, “Once Only.” I learned the melody, wrote it down, and then began harmonizing as he played it. After the first phrase, he stopped. “Ethan, what are you playing in that first bar? Ab dominant?” It was Ab dominant. “Try E major instead.” Ah—that was better. But then we played it for quite a while, and he had no further comment on the changes I played except that he liked it. The lovely harmony played by Greg Cohen on “Once Only” off of Sound Grammar is not like what I played, although Cohen does begin in E major/B Major.
It’s a shame that interviewers seldom ask Ornette about his musicians, since he is not secretive about the collaboration process. One of the earliest longer pieces about Ornette is in A. B. Spellman’s book, Four Lives in the Bebop Business, and one gets the sense that Ornette was really trying to communicate to Spellman how important his sidemen were to him. There is far more about the band in the Ornette chapter than in the Herbie Nichols, Jackie McLean, or Cecil Taylor chapters. Four Lives has a surprising amount about Ornette’s bassists, although the slant is more sociological than musical. (Ornette: “David Izenzon has a lot of background. I mean, he knows that he’s Jewish…”)
I asked Ornette about Haden, and he said that Charlie had the biggest ears. When we talked about Don Cherry, Ornette began nearly weeping, saying that Don understood him better than anybody, and how he missed him. Ed Blackwell? “He played the most perfect phrases. No one else could phrase the melodies that correctly, except now Denardo can too.” Dewey Redman? “Dewey could play the keys of the saxophone.” Ornette is also quoted in the recent Redman obituary published in DownBeat: “Dewey’s creativity was one of the highest forms of spirituality I ever experienced.”
Haden, Blackwell, Dewey, Cherry: These are Ornette’s people. The first two records on Contemporary, Something Else and Tomorrow is the Question, feature musicians who are not Ornette’s people. Unfortunately, this doesn't prevent them from being a full part of the collaboration process, since Walter Norris, Don Payne, Percy Heath, Red Mitchell, and Shelly Manne all got to make up their own parts and play what they wanted when they played with Ornette. As a result, those Contemporary records are more successful at establishing that Ornette needs his people more than at anything else. Perhaps part of problem with Ornette’s early career is that those LPs were the ones in stores when Ornette was changing the century at the Five Spot. If the first Ornette record on the shelves had been the masterpiece The Shape of Jazz to Come (with Cherry, Haden, Higgins and the transcendent opening track “Lonely Woman”) he would have had a much better chance of being understood by the jazz community at large. The Shape of Jazz to Come ensemble was the band that blew the mind of every serious New York musician. If Ornette had been at the Five Spot with Walter Norris and Don Payne, do you think we would be talking about him now?
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Ornette Coleman was born a jazz musician who came of age around the time Charlie Parker was at his peak. That meant the material this mystic of melody had to use was very circumscribed: 1950’s jazz was swinging bop-type heads with a standard rhythm section featuring discursive solos on semi-complex chord changes. If he was born today he would have a lot more options, but that’s what he had to use back then. Ornette Coleman’s first recording is from early 1958. It has swinging bop-type heads with a standard rhythm section featuring discursive solos on semi-complex chord changes.
Norris and Payne are the pianist and bassist on Something Else. As he treated all his musicians, Ornette let them play how they wanted to play. They are certainly good enough jazz players. (Norris’ up-tempo solo on “Chippie” is fierce and impressive.) The majority of the songs on Something Else are either the blues (“The Disguise,” “Alpha,” “When Will the Blues Leave”) or rhythm changes (“Chippie,” “Angel Voice,” “The Sphinx”), with only three songs that aren't either: “The Blessing,” “Invisible,” and “Jayne.” Ornette is quoted in the liner notes:
“I always write the melody line first because several different chords can fit the same melody line. In fact, I would prefer it if musicians would play my tunes with different changes as they take a new chorus so that there’d be all the more variety in the performance. On this recording, the changes finally decided on for the tunes are a combination of some I suggested and some the musicians suggested.”
I suspect that Norris came up with most of the chord changes on the three non-blues or rhythm tunes, changes that more or less fit the brilliant, instantly memorable and idiosyncratic Coleman lines. (Perhaps, according to Rifftides, Johnny Mandel came up with one sequence for “The Blessing” too.) Does Ornette improvise on those Norris chords on Something Else? To my ears, he is just floating over the conservative Norris harmony without accepting those changes as true. Exhibit A is the song “Jayne.” “Jayne” has gone down in history as the tune Ornette wrote on “Out of Nowhere,” but it’s a simple fact that the melody of “Jayne” is not on the changes of “Nowhere.” (The first 8 bars of “Jayne” never leave G major, and “Nowhere” is distinguished by a big out-of-key II/V in bar 3.) However, Norris and Payne do use the changes of “Nowhere” for solos, which is an aesthetic error. If I were a working jazz musician when this record came out and heard Ornette’s solo on those famous changes, I would say, “This guy cannot find his ass using both hands even if there was a hot brick in his back pocket.” Since I am a modern-day Ornette Coleman fanatic, I listen to his solo on “Jayne” and say, “Wow! Listen to him propose those notes as acceptable on these changes…it doesn’t work, though, he needs his cats backing him up.”
On two of the three rhythm changes tunes (“Chippie” and “Alpha”) the bridge is improvised, without a written melody. (Of course, this was pretty common already; among the more famous examples are Sonny Rollins' “Oleo” and Dizzy Gillespie's “Wee.”) I asked him about this, and he said that the bridge of rhythm changes was how he first knew how to leave the home key. A light bulb went on my head, and I thought, “Bridge of rhythm changes = start of free jazz.” This makes a lot of sense, and explains why there are so many improvised bridges in his early music. Perhaps we can hear this embryonic free jazz in the most successful moment on Something Else, which is Ornette's first solo on “Angel Voice.” Norris and Payne treat it as a straight rhythm changes in A. Ornette plays in the home key on the beginning and ending “A” sections and leaves that key (and normal bridge changes) behind for the whole bridge. It’s a great moment; you can hear the language of jazz react in shock and bewilderment at how well it works: “What was THAT? That felt pretty good!”
As stated before, many of Ornette's early bridges were improvised. There is only one rhythm changes tune with a composed bridge on Something Else, and that is “The Sphinx,” whose bridge is also the only rubato music on the album. In my opinion, the unique A and B sections of “The Sphinx” do not imply rhythm changes at all, and the Norris-Payne decision to play it as such is an even graver error than playing “Out of Nowhere” on “Jayne.”
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Much better than Something Else are 65 minutes of Paul Bley, Ornette, Cherry, Haden, and Higgins recorded live at the Hillcrest club in October/November 1958. Instead of the conservative piano comping of Norris, Bley either plays interactively behind Ornette or lays out. The other musicians are the first great Ornette quartet. These too-little known recordings are the most informative source about early Ornette.
There are eight tunes from the Hillcrest Club:
Klactoveesedstene (Charlie Parker) Ornette and Don play the same intro, head, and tempo that Bird played. Ornette solos first, on the form, with Bley laying out. Unfortunately—or perhaps fortunately? --Bley comes in on the third bridge in the wrong place, and the form is kind of a free-for-all afterwards, although they don’t leave Bb much, and there seems to be at least one more clear bridge. Cherry’s brief comments behind Ornette’s solo include the melody of “Congeniality.” The most astonishing moment is the rubato unison line that Ornette and Don play to conclude the solo. It is significant that on his versions of other people’s music, Ornette always includes some original written material.
The Blessing (Ornette Coleman) This has a great laid-back alto solo, full of the main key of the song (G) and casual implications of strange tangents to weird II-V’s. At 3:30, we look into the abyss. The master then wraps it up with a blues cry. Throughout, Bley and Haden play the obvious harmonization of the melody, but without the horrible boxiness of the version on Something Else. There’s no way not to hear the opening phrase of the tune as F# minor to B7, but after that it could go different ways to get to G. That’s just how Bley and Haden play it: open, with options.
(Important digression: Charlie Haden’s marvelous walking lines distinguish the Cherry/Coltrane version of “The Blessing”: they are above, below, and just alongside the changes. It's from the album The Avant-Garde. An early bonding moment between Reid Anderson and myself was our enthusiasm for Charlie on this version of "The Blessing." On the same record, there is a rather unbelievable discordance between Coltrane and Percy Heath on “Invisible.” Heath plays the last two bars of every “A” section as C major, like how Norris and Payne play it on Something Else. Coltrane plays it as Db. Every time! I don’t know why Coltrane thought it was Db, but the fact that he does says something about the fluidity of Ornette’s early “music with changes”—again, changes that Ornette probably had little to do with. If Charlie Haden been on “Invisible,” he would have heard Coltrane and the final two bars would have been Db.)
I Remember Harlem (Roy Eldridge) A piano feature with written lines for the horns.
Free (Ornette Coleman) This is the first proper recording of an “up-tempo no changes” Coleman piece, the style featured during his Atlantic years. The head is a horn-only call. Interesting to compare this conservative bridge to the wild one on Change of the Century.
When Will the Blues Leave? (Ornette Coleman) In his autobiography, Paul Bley says that when Billy Higgins and Charlie first met, they were playing so well together that they played a whole set a jam session duo-- just the two of them, swinging. Haden and Higgins get to show off that deep groove on “When Will the Blues Leave,” which relaxes Ornette enough so that he delivers his most conservative, form-filled jazz performance. Check out the Horace-Silver-on-acid horn interludes after the first head and before the last head! (Those aren’t on the version on Something Else.) Ornette plays his most accurate 12-bar blues on record. Bley’s comping is right with Ornette, hooking him up. If Bill McHenry and I played together like this now, we would consider it a little obvious, but for 1958 it is pretty amazing. Around 3:30 the mystic has had enough jazz, and turns the dial on his time machine.
Ramblin’ (Ornette Coleman) The recording of this song on Change of the Century is canonical. It’s instructive to compare it with the live one made a year earlier. The arrangement is almost the same, but on the Hillcrest version Billy Higgins plays much more aggressively on the head and Haden plays the 12-bar blues throughout the horn solos. A year later on Change of the Century, Haden wouldn’t be following the form as exactly. In both his solo here and in the studio, Ornette barely departs from the home key.
Crossroads (Ornette Coleman) This is the most avant-garde piece from the Hillcrest material. There is no rhythm section when the horns and piano improvise. The band’s excitement at such transgression is palpable, and at the end they are rewarded with the most enthusiastic applause of any of the eight songs. A second theme was added to “Crossroads” and became “The Circle with the Hole in the Middle” on The Art of The Improvisers.
How Deep Is the Ocean (Irving Berlin) A beautiful long Coleman line for just the horns introduces trumpet and piano solos. Coleman doesn’t solo, but he does some in-key background noodling for a few bars before the long written line takes it out. It is suddenly clear that the line is derived from the last eight bars of the tune, and Ornette gets a brief cadenza.
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The next record Ornette made in the studio was Tomorrow is the Question, recorded in the first three months of 1959 with no piano. Ornette was pleased with this absence and there are no more significant Coleman performances with piano until much later. However, Tomorrow doesn’t have the star of Something Else, Billy Higgins. In his place was Shelly Manne, a fine player who is not an Ornette Coleman musician. Neither are Red Mitchell and Percy Heath, who are two great bass players, but bass players that do not know how to improvise without changes. Like Norris and Payne before them, Mitchell and Heath grimly create forms to play on that the soloists don’t relate to very well. There are two twelve-bar blues on the album (“Tears Inside,” “Turnaround”), three rhythm changes ("Tomorrow is the Question,” “Rejoicing,” “Endless”) and four in the category of “other” (“Mind and Time,” “Compassion,” Giggin’,” “Lorraine”). On both “Mind and Time” and “Giggin’,” Heath creates twelve bar forms to walk on but neither is a blues (“Mind and Time” has a really weird 7 + 5 form). “Lorraine” is interesting: Mitchell and Manne play the unusual form (rubato melodies and changes of tempo) not just on the head but also behind both soloists.
Tomorrow is a better record than Something Else by far, since without a piano, Ornette’s concept immediately sounds less wrong. However, this rhythm section cannot follow Ornette either, and keeping the form behind Ornette doesn’t really work. (It is just too symbolic when Manne and Mitchell get a bar off of each other on “Rejoicing”! I doubt if these professionals ever got lost playing “C” rhythm changes before or since.) Both blues are good examples of the Ornette/band conflict, especially since Don Cherry plays them so beautifully, hurrying back to hold our hand if we think he is lost. Unlike Cherry, Ornette is done with handholding. Ornette's solos have wonderful blues phrases and those magical leaps away into new keys, but the rigorous bassists don’t support his digressions. The feeling gets very diffuse, resulting in an awkward ending of Ornette’s solo on “Tears Inside.” On “Turnaround” it’s even worse, with a terrible edit as the head comes back in. (Manne’s drumming is particularly wrong on “Turnaround.”)
If Charlie Haden had been on this date, he would have solved this issue. There is no studio recording of "Turnaround" with Ornette and Charlie together, but it was part of the repertoire on the Song X tour (Pat Metheny, Ornette, Haden, Jack DeJohnette, Denardo Coleman). Bootlegs are revealing: Metheny plays the 12-bar form on “Turnaround” accurately, just like with Haden and Jack on 80-81. When Ornette solos, Haden hooks up Ornette and they leave the form, soaring in great whoops of blues. The brand-new version of “Turnaround” on Sound Grammar also ignores the “correct” blues form after the melody. I am certain that this is way Ornette wanted to play with Red Mitchell, too.
There are those that swear by Tomorrow Is the Question, and it has some great Don Cherry (stronger than on Something Else or even at the Hillcrest), but for me it is a just a fun curiosity except for the brilliant melodies. Even though Percy Heath has a fat beat, I need Charlie Haden back for the language to completely make sense.
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After the two Contemporary discs, Ornette made The Shape of Jazz to Come, Change of the Century, This is Our Music, Ornette!, and Ornette on Tenor for Atlantic. They are all jazz classics. (Free Jazz has some great moments but is too monochromatic. As I speculated before about the two Contemporary albums, I wonder if Free Jazz has harmed Ornette’s reputation, especially at the time it was released.) There is no common-practice blowing over changes on any of the Atlantic records by anybody, even on “Embraceable You” (see the previous Ornette post.). There some pieces with structure, like “Lonely Woman,” “Una Muy Bonita,” “Ramblin’,” “T. & T.,” “Beauty Is A Rare Thing” and so forth, but those structures were almost certainly created democratically and none of them cycle consistently.
After the run of Atlantic records, Ornette formed a trio to assimilate European modernist classical music. His new bassist, David Izenzon, played a great deal with the bow, and not long after that, Ornette starting playing noise violin. (“The Ark,” from Town Hall 1962, is an extraordinary performance from this band.) Then he wanted rhythm without experience and hired his young son. (“Come Il Faut,” off of Crisis, shows 12 year-old Denardo Coleman at his best.)
The classic Ornette Coleman music of 1969—1972 was based around a core quartet of Dewey Redman, Charlie Haden, and Ed Blackwell. It was a great ensemble able to include elements from all the previous Ornette bands. Ornette’s song “Broken Shadows” was performed frequently during this era (there are at least four recordings of it), and it is a rare post-1959 example of Ornette using a repeating AABA cycle during the whole song. The AABA of “Broken Shadows” is marked by one or two horns continually playing the tune. Since there aren’t chord changes (Haden's low counterpoint suggests but does not confirm harmony) or tempo (Blackwell shifts from time to rubato), Ornette can play whatever he hears and not be in conflict with the ensemble. Even though it is AABA, "Broken Shadows" uses a kind of "flexible platform for the free-form soloist" that the groups on the Contemporary albums were unable to deliver.
