1950s: Tears Inside, from Tomorrow is the Question
As the jazz world absorbs the death of Ornette Coleman, the accolades to an extraordinary musical pioneer naturally concentrate on his unorthodoxies – his weird wardrobe, his white, plastic alto sax, his often impenetrable explanations of his work, and primarily his radical impulse to break jazz free of the structures of pop songs and allow improvisers to evolve their own shared narratives in the passing moment.
But for all his once controversial nonconformism, Coleman wasn’t taking the artform back to year zero, and his music was deeply rooted in the traditions of American jazz and the blues. The British writer Victor Schonfield, a champion of Coleman’s work back in the day when many ran a mile from it, wrote in the sleevenotes to the 1966 album Ornette Coleman in Europe: “His lovely tone is essentially the sound of jazz.”
As with all those pioneer horn-players, Coleman’s sax evoked the sound of the human voice. Coleman first recorded in 1958, but it was the aptly-named 1959 album Tomorrow is the Question that brought the Texan’s sound to wider notice, and unveiled his originality as a composer – still with the earlier jazz style of bebop clearly audible in the melodies and in the rhythm section, but beginning to be twisted into new shapes.
Trumpeter Don Cherry, a long-time Coleman sidekick (and subsequently father of singers Neneh and Eagle-Eye Cherry) shares the soloing with the empathy the two were to pursue for years. If anything demonstrates Ornette Coleman’s blues-soul, it’s Tears Inside.
1960s: Faces and Places, from Live at the Golden Circle
By the mid-60s, Coleman had become a famously divisive figure in American music, with high-profile admirers such as musicologist Gunther Schuller and the Modern Jazz Quartet’s John Lewis rooting for him, but many others proclaiming the death of jazz if Coleman’s ripping up of the rulebook prevailed.
In 1965, the German critic and promoter Joachim Berendt encouraged him to try his luck in Europe. Coleman toured for a year with a trio including bassist (and psychotherapist) David Izenzon and drummer Charles Moffett. The tour included mixed receptions for a stint at Ronnie Scott’s, with the British writer and Coleman-sceptic Benny Green penning his famous lines: “By mastering the useful trick of playing the entire chromatic scale at any given moment, he had absolved himself from the charge of continuously playing wrong notes. Like a stopped clock, Coleman is right at least twice a day.” But this Coleman trio was in reality a fascinating blend of freewheeling improv and Moffett’s surprisingly traditional swing.
1970s: Dancing in Your Head
In the 1970s, the restless contrarian decided to unleash a whole new jangle of startling sounds – electric ones this time. African-American soul and R&B groups such as Sly and the Family Stone, or improv-oriented rock bands such as the Mothers of Invention, Grateful Dead and Cream were appropriating the former jazz audience, and Miles Davis was already one of the best-known jazz musicians to be adapting to these changes.
Typically, Coleman travelled there by his own route. He still allowed his players to juggle the music collectively and spontaneously, borrowing rock’s electric guitars and heavy percussion, but swapped an elemental rumble for an explicit rock backbeat, and hijacked the methods of minimalism for the melodies. Coleman’s alto, wailing through the melee, is as impassioned as ever.
1980s: Endangered Species, from Song X
The guitarist Pat Metheny, a melodious crossover star with a big worldwide audience by the mid-1980s, was taking a risk by recording with one of jazz’s most anti-commercial figures when he collaborated with Ornette Coleman on the album Song X. But the gifted and dedicated improviser in Metheny drove this decision, and he was also a long-time admirer of the saxophonist’s compositions.
The rhythm section comprised Charlie Haden, Coleman’s drummer son, Denardo, and brilliant jazz percussionist Jack DeJohnette. Out of the seabird whoops and thrashing drumming of the intro to Endangered Species come guitar-sax exchanges that sound like Prime Time’s seething fusion soundscapes made illuminatingly clearer.
1990s: Colors, with Joachim Kuhn
From 1958 – when Coleman briefly played on the West Coast in Paul Bley’s Hillcrest Club band – to the mid-90s, the saxophonist steered clear of pianists. The instrument’s fixed pitch and urge to lock down harmonies didn’t fit with the plasticity of his musical ideas. But in 1996, Coleman performed at the Leipzig Opera with German pianist Joachim Kuhn, and on the Sound Museum recordings with former M-Base piano virtuoso Geri Allen. The intimate duet with Kuhn, a pianist of sensitivity and almost psychic responsiveness to a very unpredictable partner, produced some of the most poetic Coleman performances of his later years.
2000s: Turnaround, from Sound Grammar
In 2005, when he was 75, Ornette Coleman released his first album of new work in a decade. Sound Grammar was a live quartet set with two double bassists and Denardo Coleman on drums, recorded in Germany, and, in 2007 it won a Pulitzer prize. The accolade was as much for Coleman’s remarkable career as for the repertoire and method, which was generally quite typical of the venerable saxophonist’s touring work in his later years on the road with this characteristically conversational lineup.
But the leader was in eloquent form (on trumpet and violin as well as saxophone), the bassists compatible yet contrasting, and the repertoire a mix of new material and bold reworkings of old classics – such as Turnaround, a quirky blues number that had first appeared on Tomorrow Is the Question, back when Coleman let the free-jazz genie out of the bottle in 1959.
