A brief squall of horns opens “Focus on Sanity,” the song that kicked off Ornette Coleman’s seminal Atlantic Records phase. Part fanfare, part detonation, that sound made it plenty clear that the Texas saxophonist was plunging into almost entirely uncharted territory. Twenty-nine years old when he recorded the song in a Hollywood studio in May of 1959, Coleman was something of a late starter as jazz musicians go. Like so many others of his generation, he had cut his teeth in rhythm and blues bands, before recording two relatively conventional-sounding records for the California label that defined the sound of West Coast jazz, Lester Koenig’s Contemporary Records. That cool West Coast sound—exemplified by the work of Chet Baker and Stan Getz, among others—wasn’t exactly Coleman’s niche, as he demonstrated when he showed up to record his debut for Atlantic. That session featured the first version of Coleman’s classic quartet (Coleman on alto sax, Don Cherry on cornet, Charlie Haden on bass, and Billy Higgins on drums) and was to result in the then-shattering album, The Shape of Jazz to Come.
Such seemingly hubristic titles were a hallmark of Coleman’s Atlantic stint—others would include Change of the Century and This is Our Music—but the music more than lived up to the hyperbole, even if it was greeted with considerable skepticism and even outright derision at the time. Made up as it was of equal parts disruption and eruption, and presided over by a quiet, self-assured oddball given to often inscrutable utterances, it was perhaps unsurprising that Coleman’s revolution met with resistance from the various branches of jazz’s old guard—modern giants and revolutionaries in their own right. “I don’t know what he’s playing,” Dizzy Gillespie famously observed, “but it’s not jazz.” Miles Davis seemed, if anything, even more perplexed. “Just listen to what he writes and how he plays,” he told writer Joe Goldberg at the time. “If you’re talking psychologically, the man is all screwed up inside.”
Coleman’s adventurous discography now spans forty-seven years, and he has become a stellar example of that wondrous American phenomenon: the heretic transformed by time into an icon. He is also one of the last survivors from what was arguably jazz’s most revolutionary and fecund period.
It seems somehow fitting that the newly expanded Walker Art Center will kick off its reopening this month with a three-day celebration of Coleman’s life and music, a tribute that will include a performance from the seemingly ageless and increasingly reclusive titan, accompanied by his latest quartet (April 21–23, Walker Art Center and Ted Mann Concert Hall; 612-375-7600). The oddly named “The Festival Dancing in Your Head”—what was wrong, I wonder, with “The Dancing in Your Head Festival”?—is pegged to Coleman’s seventy-fifth birthday, and in that sense the institutions are contemporaries (the Walker was originally launched in 1927, at the tail end of the great modernist revolutions in art and literature, and in the midst of jazz’s first flourish), and also comrades in arms.
The evolution of most art forms from the end of the nineteenth century through much of the twentieth was remarkably accelerated and punctuated by revolutions both major and minor; the period between Monet’s Rouen Cathedral series and Picasso’s Guernica, for instance, was barely forty years, and a mere thirty-seven years elapsed between Huckleberry Finn and Ulysses. Yet even by that standard it seems remarkable today to consider that only thirty years separate Louis Armstrong and His Hot Five’s West End Blues and Coleman’s 1958 debut Something Else! Perhaps even more remarkable is the fact that it took Coleman just two years to make the leap from that now almost accessible-sounding debut to the barbarians-at-the-gates assault of Free Jazz, the album that provided the basic template for a whole new generation of outsiders who would, in short order, completely transform the modern jazz landscape.
Given the intervening decades and the truly forbidding torrent that would later be produced by various outsiders plunging much further down the trail blazed by Coleman, it’s sort of hard now to hear what all the fuss was about. Listening to Coleman’s earliest records today, what stands out is his gift for writing memorable, even lovely melodies, and the extraordinary communication between the members of his original quartet. Coleman is first and foremost an emotional player, and his alto has a keening pitch, alternating between expressive blasts and clusters and impressionistic lines, often in almost telepathic lockstep with Don Cherry’s cornet or pocket trumpet. The rhythm section of Charlie Haden and Billy Higgins (Ed Blackwell would later replace Higgins behind the drum kit for a number of the Atlantic sessions) always seems to be both driving and navigating, exploring every cranny of each tune’s structure and simultaneously goading and responding in conversation with the horns.
Coleman’s compositions can veer from the placid to the frantic, but there’s generally a solid framework in place, a method to what his detractors hear as madness. Although Coleman famously coined the word “harmolodics” to describe that method, it’s a word—and, even more broadly, a general philosophy—that may never be satisfactorily defined by anyone, including the man himself.
Loosely (and, perhaps, wholly inaccurately), harmolodics represents Coleman’s attempt to free jazz from the yoke of conventional chord changes and concepts of harmony. In braiding the harmony and melody of a particular tune, Coleman allows for an intricately patterned approach to improvisational interplay, or, as his longtime collaborator Cherry once noted, an entirely new improvisational vocabulary. The result is music that is continually coiling and unfurling like strands of DNA, with Coleman and Cherry circling the same melody in different keys.
Coleman has applied that same approach to his diverse catalog of work, from those early forays into free jazz to his shambling and shamanic (call it shambolic) electric excursions with his Prime Time band. Like Sonny Rollins, John Coltrane, and a number of other icons of the period, Coleman took a self-imposed hiatus in the early sixties, only to reemerge with a new, even broader commitment to his fiercely individual vision. He took up trumpet and violin, recorded with his ten-year-old son Denardo on drums, wrote and recorded a symphony (“Skies of America”), and traveled to Morocco to jam and record with the Master Musicians of Jajouka, truly kindred spirits. They pushed Coleman in an entirely new direction and exerted an obvious influence on Prime Time’s herky-jerky funk workouts and distinct brand of jangling trance ragas.
He has also collaborated and performed with Pat Metheny, Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead, received a MacArthur “genius grant,” contributed to the score for David Cronenberg’s adaptation of Naked Lunch, and, in recent years, appeared on recordings with such disparate characters as Joe Henry, Lou Reed, and even Eddy Grant.
Yet no matter what sort of configuration he’s playing with or what he’s up to, Coleman always sounds like nobody else in jazz. His various bands have never been anything short of first-rate chemistry labs, churning out synthetic and organic variants of his own complex and still highly original formulas.
Coleman’s discography includes very few collaborations outside his own circle of acolytes and protégées, and he has seldom been as thunderous or caterwauling as some of those who came after him: Albert Ayler’s simple and indelible folk melodies owe an obvious debt to Coleman, and John Coltrane took Coleman’s Free Jazz to the very edge of the abyss with 1965’s Ascension, in his volcanic late period. Nevertheless, Coleman’s influence is as vast as it is singular. Though he has inspired countless others, he’s spawned no
real imitators and contributed few tunes to the jazz canon—1959’s “Lonely Woman,” certainly, but nothing else comes immediately to mind. Yet you could, I think, make a solid case that Coleman’s main contributions effectively represented the end of the line in terms of jazz’s evolution. Certainly plenty of others would take his basic ideas further into dissonance and deconstruction, and still others would reject them altogether, but no one, really, has managed to do anything much (or anything much good) that is not recognizably a strain of his revolution, or a reaction to it.
I fully realize that that perhaps ridiculous assertion is likely to lead to exactly the sorts of arguments that Ornette Coleman has been starting for almost fifty years—which is all, of course, just as it should be.
