Listening with Ornette Coleman

[7/4]

September 22, 2006

Listening With Ornette Coleman

Seeking the Mystical Inside the Music

By BEN RATLIFF, NY Times

THE alto saxophonist and composer Ornette Coleman, one of the last of the truly imposing figures from a generation of jazz players that was full of them, seldom talks about other people’s music. People generally want to ask him about his own, and that becomes the subject he addresses. Or half-addresses: what he’s really focused on is a set of interrelated questions about music, religion and the nature of being. Sometimes he can seem indirect, or sentimental, or thoroughly confusing. Other times he sounds like one of the world’s killer aphorists.

In any case, other people’s music was what I wanted to talk to him about. I asked what he would like to listen to. “Anything you want,” he said in his fluty Southern voice. “There is no bad music, only bad performances.” He finally offered a few suggestions. The music he likes is simply defined: anything that can’t be summed up in a common term. Any music that is not created as part of a style. “The state of surviving in music is more like ‘what music are you playing,’ ” he said. “But music isn’t a style, it’s an idea. The idea of music, without it being a style — I don’t hear that much anymore.”

Then he went up a level. “I would like to have the same concept of ideas as how people believe in God,” he said. “To me, an idea doesn’t have any master.”

Mr. Coleman was born, in 1930, and raised in Fort Worth, where he attained some skill at playing rhythm and blues in bars, like any decent saxophonist, and some more skill at playing bebop, which was rarer. He arrived in New York in 1959, via Los Angeles, with an original, logical sense of melody and an idea of playing with no preconceived chord changes. Yet his music bore a tight sense of knowing itself, of natural form, and the records he made for Atlantic with his various quartets, from 1959 to 1961, are almost unreasonably beautiful.

Following that initial shock of the new came a short period with a trio, then a two-year hiatus from recording in 1963 and 1964, then the trio again, then a fantastic quartet from 1968 to 1972 with the tenor saxophonist Dewey Redman (who died three weeks ago), then a period of funk-through-the-looking-glass with his electric band, Prime Time. Mr. Coleman is still moving, now with a band including two bassists, Greg Cohen and Tony Falanga, and his son, Denardo Coleman, on drums.

He has a kind of high-end generosity; he said that he wouldn’t think twice about letting me go home with a piece of music he had just written, because he would be interested in what I might make of it. But there is a great pessimism in his talk, too. He said he believes that most of human history has been wasted on building increasingly complicated class structures. “Life is already complete,” he said. “You can’t learn what life is. And the only way you die is if something kills you. So if life and death are already understood, what are we doing?”

A week later we met for several hours at his large, minimal-modernist loft in Manhattan’s garment district. Mr. Coleman is 76 and working often: he is making music with his new quartet that, at heart, is similar to what he made when he was 30. On “Sound Grammar,” his new live album (on his new record label, of the same name), it is a matter of lines traveling together and pulling apart, following the curve of his melodies, tangling and playing in a unison that allows for discrepancies between individual sound and intonation and, sometimes, key.

Unison is one of his key words: he puts an almost mystical significance in it, and he uses it in many ways. “Being a human, you’re required to be in unison: upright,” he said.

Mr. Coleman draws you into the chicken-and-egg questions that he’s asking himself. These questions can become sort of the dark side of Bible class. Many of them are about what happens when you put a name on something, or when you learn some codified knowledge.

Though he is fascinated by music theory, he is suspicious of any construct of thought. Standard Western notation and harmony is a big problem for him, particularly for the fact that the notation for many instruments (including his three instruments — alto saxophone, trumpet and violin) must be transposed to fit the “concert key” of C in Western music.

Mr. Coleman talks about “music” with care and accuracy, but about “sound” with love. He doesn’t understand, he says, how listeners will ever properly understand the power of notes when they are bossed around by the common Western system of harmony and tuning.

He’s not endorsing cacophony: he says making music is a matter of finding euphonious resolutions between different players. (And much of his music keeps referring to, if not actually staying in, a major key.) But the reason he appreciates Louis Armstrong, for example, is that he sees Armstrong as someone who improvised in a realm beyond his own knowledge. “I never heard him play a straight chord in root position for his idea,” he said. “And when he played a high note, it was the finale. It wasn’t just because it was high. In some way, he was telling stories more than improvising.”

MR. COLEMAN’S first request was something by Josef Rosenblatt, the Ukrainian-born cantor who moved to New York in 1911 and became one of the city’s most popular entertainers — as well as a symbol for not selling out your convictions. (He turned down a position with a Chicago opera company, but was persuaded to take a small role in Al Jolson’s film “The Jazz Singer.”) I brought some recordings from 1916 and we listened to “Tikanto Shabbos,” a song from Sabbath services. Rosenblatt’s voice came booming out, strong and clear at the bottom, with miraculous coloratura runs at the top.

“I was once in Chicago, about 20-some years ago,” Mr. Coleman said. “A young man said, ‘I’d like you to come by so I can play something for you.’ I went down to his basement and he put on Josef Rosenblatt, and I started crying like a baby. The record he had was crying, singing and praying, all in the same breath. I said, wait a minute. You can’t find those notes. Those are not ‘notes.’ They don’t exist.”

He listened some more. Rosenblatt was working with text, singing brilliant figures with it, then coming down on a resolving note, which was confirmed and stabilized by a pianist’s chord. “I want to ask something,” he said. “Is the language he’s singing making the resolution? Not the melody. I mean, he’s resolving. He’s not singing a ‘melody.’ ”

It could be that he’s at least singing each little section in relation to a mode, I said.

“I think he’s singing pure spiritual,” he said. “He’s making the sound of what he’s experiencing as a human being, turning it into the quality of his voice, and what he’s singing to is what he’s singing about. We hear it as ‘how he’s singing.’ But he’s singing about something. I don’t know what it is, but it’s bad.”

I wonder how much of it is really improvised, I said. Which up-and-down melodic shapes, and in which orders, were well practiced, and which weren’t.

“Mm-hmm,” he said. “I understand what you’re saying. But it doesn’t sound like it’s going up and down; it sounds like it’s going out. Which means it’s coming from his soul.”

MR. COLEMAN grew up loving Charlie Parker and bebop in general. “It was the most advanced collective way of playing a melody and at the same time improvising on it,” he said. Certainly, he was highly influenced by Parker’s phrasing.

He saw Parker play in Los Angeles in the early 1950’s. “Basically, he had picked up a local rhythm section, and he was playing mostly standards. He didn’t play any of the music that I liked that I’d heard on a record. He looked at his watch and stopped in the middle of what he was playing, put his horn in his case and walked out the door. I said, ohh. I mean, I was trying to figure out what that had to do with music, you know? It taught me something.”

What did it teach him? “He knew the quality of what he could play, and he knew the audience, and he wasn’t impressed enough by the audience to do something that they didn’t know. He wasn’t going to spend any more time trying to prove that.”

We listened to “Cheryl,” a Parker quintet track from 1947. “I was drawn to the way Charlie Parker phrased his ideas,” he said. “It sounded more like he was composing, and I really loved that. Then, when I found out that the minor seventh and the major seventh was the structure of bebop music — well, it’s a sequence. It’s the art of sequences. I kind of felt, like, I got to get out of this.”

He talks a lot about sequences. (John Coltrane, he said, was a good saxophone player who was lost to them.) With regard to his Parker worship, he kept the phrasing but got rid of the sequences. “I first tried to ban all chords,” he said, “and just make music an idea, instead of a set pattern to know where you are.”

I SUGGESTED gospel music, and he was enthusiastic. I brought something I felt he might like: sacred harp music — white, rural, choral music, about 100 voices in loose unison. We listened to “The Last Words of Copernicus,” written in 1869 and recorded by Alan Lomax in Fyffe, Ala., in 1959.

“That’s breath music,” he said, as big groups of singers harmonized in straight eighth-note patterns, singing plainly but with character. “They’re changing the sound with their emotions. Not because they’re hearing something.” But then we were off on another topic — whether a singer should seek a voicelike sound for his voice. “Isn’t it amazing that sound causes the idea to sound the way it is, more than the idea?” he asked.

Finally the listening experiment broke down. It’s hard to keep Mr. Coleman talking about anyone else’s music. His mystical-logical puzzles are too interesting to him.

He is writing new pieces for each concert, and was leaving for European shows. “Right now, I’m trying to play the instrument,” he said, “and I’m trying to write, without any restrictions of chord, keys, time, melody and harmony, but to resolve the idea eternally, where every person receives the same quality from it, without relating it to some person.”

He told a childhood story about his mother, who, he kept reminding me, was born on Christmas Day. After he received his first saxophone, he would go to her when he learned to play something by ear. “I’d be saying: ‘Listen to this! Listen to this!’ ” he remembered. “You know what she’d tell me? ‘Junior, I know who you are. You don’t have to tell me.’ ”

[Guest youmustbe]

The European 'tour' is one concert, Skopje, Macedonia. 7 other were cancelled because of poor or no ticket sales.

[7/4]

He talks a lot about sequences. (John Coltrane, he said, was a good saxophone player who was lost to them.)

Interesting concept today of all days.

[Guest youmustbe]

It's a concept if you don't know how to play changes, like Ornette doesn't...if you do, like Bird, or Trane, it doesn't seem that you get 'lost' very much musically. Bird and Trane seemed to have done allright as far as Jazz history goes!

It's like playing in tune. if you can't , like Ornette can't, you develop a system called harmolodics. If you can, you record Ko Ko or Love Supreme.

[Larry Kart]

I think that when Ornette said that Trane "lost to sequences," he meant that Trane was too absorbed in them, or too enamored of them, for his own musical good -- not at all that he was "lost" to them as in not knowing where he was in the form. To say that would be absurd.

[ghost of miles]

The European 'tour' is one concert, Skopje, Macedonia. 7 other were cancelled because of poor or no ticket sales.

Wow--really? Ticket prices too high, poor choice of venues, declining interest in Ornette, or some other factor? (I wouldn't think that it would be declining interest.)

[Larry Kart]

I think that when Ornette said that Trane "lost to sequences," he meant that Trane was too absorbed in them, or too enamored of them, for his own musical good -- not at all that he was "lost" to them as in not knowing where he was in the form. To say that would be absurd.

Sorry -- I meant "... when Ornette said that Trane was 'lost to sequences''... etc.

[7/4]

I think that when Ornette said that Trane "lost to sequences," he meant that Trane was too absorbed in them, or too enamored of them, for his own musical good -- not at all that he was "lost" to them as in not knowing where he was in the form. To say that would be absurd.

Sorry -- I meant "... when Ornette said that Trane was 'lost to sequences''... etc.

well yeah.

[AllenLowe]

"It's like playing in tune. if you can't , like Ornette can't, you develop a system called harmolodics. If you can, you record Ko Ko or Love Supreme."

uh, is there someone out there who still thinks Ornette can't play? Even Stanley Crouch has come around.

This was quite a fascinating article - Ornette always has great insights, and really, to my way of thinking, nails the important things - like "Isn’t it amazing that sound causes the idea to sound the way it is, more than the idea?”

the kind of thinking that Wynton (and quite a few others) will never really understand -

Edited September 25, 2006 by AllenLowe

[Quasimado]

"Isn’t it amazing that sound causes the idea to sound the way it is, more than the idea?”

For great improvisors like Parker or Marsh, I would imagine that the sound is the idea. There is no separation ... So I'm not sure what Ornette's amazing distinction is. .. but then, I guess I just can't understand whatever it is I'm supposed to about Ornette in general ...

[md655321]

It's a concept if you don't know how to play changes, like Ornette doesn't...if you do, like Bird, or Trane, it doesn't seem that you get 'lost' very much musically. Bird and Trane seemed to have done allright as far as Jazz history goes!

It's like playing in tune. if you can't , like Ornette can't, you develop a system called harmolodics. If you can, you record Ko Ko or Love Supreme.

Wow. What an embarrasing and unfortunate post. Is it 1958 and no one told me?

While I may understand not 'getting' it, I certainly don't understand mocking it.

Ornette is completely right about sound and sequences. While bebop may have been about sound for Bird and Diz, it has been process for everyone else. What Ornette says about the major and minor 7th is also correct. The bebop scale is based on that chromaticism, and learning to play bebop involves learning that scale. Ornette wanted to get away from systems of improvising and from theory to just sound. Music theory should be a response to what we hear, it shouldnt come first. Quite often for imrovising musicians, theory came first. And it happened to Trane up until Giant Steps. He then realized that advanced harmony was not music, SOUND was music.

Edited September 25, 2006 by md655321

[paul secor]

It's a concept if you don't know how to play changes, like Ornette doesn't...if you do, like Bird, or Trane, it doesn't seem that you get 'lost' very much musically. Bird and Trane seemed to have done allright as far as Jazz history goes!

It's like playing in tune. if you can't , like Ornette can't, you develop a system called harmolodics. If you can, you record Ko Ko or Love Supreme.

Seems like you have something against Ornette or his music. That's your right, but the two sentences that you're concerned with in the article:

He talks a lot about sequences. (John Coltrane, he said, was a good saxophone player who was lost to them.)

are not quotes. They are evidently a summarization by Ben Ratliff. Who knows what Ornette actually said? I've had limited experiences with newspapers (outside of reading them), but I've had enough to know that what you say or even what you write - my experience with the NY Times - is not necessarily what gets printed.

[paul secor]

Very interesting article. I was happily surprised that Ben Ratliff played the sacred harp music for Ornette to listen to and comment on.

"They're changing the sound with their emotions. Not because they're hearing something."

That's something I'll be thinking about for a while.

[AllenLowe]

"For great improvisors like Parker or Marsh, I would imagine that the sound is the idea. There is no separation ... So I'm not sure what Ornette's amazing distinction is. .. but then, I guess I just can't understand whatever it is I'm supposed to about Ornette in general ..."

well, yes and no, re Parker and Marsh - never in the radical way that Ornette is presenting the idea, in my opinion - what Ornette is really suggesting is a unity of voice/expression/sound which is truly as old as the hills, and yet which gets lost in modern musical techniques. It is the integration of the voice with the notes/sounds that the voice is making in a way which goes the way of its own logic as opposed to being superimposed on a pre-ordained "sequence," as Ornette is saying, and is unfettered by things like required chord changes or rigid song form- I'll quote Harry Partch (a composer) here as well, because he is talking about the same thing, I think:

“The ancient Greek and Chinese conception – as old as history - that music is poetry, has deteriorated…even when words are used they are merely a vehicle for tones. The voice is just another violin or another cello… with this metamorphosis…the ancient conception…was obscured, left to folk peoples – sailors, soldiers, gypsies…troubadours, Meistersingers, the Japanese Noh and kabuki, the folk music of England and our own southern mountains, the pure Negro spiritual (not ‘symphonized’) - hearers are transported not by mass but subtlety…the true music of the individual.”

Partch is reacting to Western harmony as codified by Bach, and proposing a different kind of approach, as is Ornette - it's so old that it's new, as they say - for another approach to Ornette that I thing gets to some of the same points, read Larry Kart's essay on Ornette and "pre-tonal" music, collected in his book (and soon to be a major motion picture) -

This is not saying that Bird's sound is irrelevant to his ideas- it's not, and neither is Armstrong's or Morton's, etc etc. Their sounds just have a somewhat different relationship to what they are playing than with the neo-folk technique Ornette is advocating.

Edited September 25, 2006 by AllenLowe

[7/4]

[Joe G]

It's all good.

[Guest youmustbe]

Ornette truly revolutionized Jazz...added a whole new language still in use today, and maybe as well in Rock, just as Bird did to Pop music of his day, and Armstrong to the popular music of his day....

But, Ornette was able to do that precisely because he 'couldn't 'play like Bird or Sonny et al. If he could have he would not have come up with his own 'sound' and 'ideas'.

I dare say, contrary to most of you on this board, I've heard Ornette about 100 times live, still occasionally run accross him on the street and so on.

My admiration knows no bounds for what he has accomplished, but not everything he says is 'New Or Old Gospel!

[md655321]

Ornette truly revolutionized Jazz...added a whole new language still in use today, and maybe as well in Rock, just as Bird did to Pop music of his day, and Armstrong to the popular music of his day....

But, Ornette was able to do that precisely because he 'couldn't 'play like Bird or Sonny et al. If he could have he would not have come up with his own 'sound' and 'ideas'.

Why is that not the case for Bird, or Trane, or Duke? If Ornette could play EXACTLY like Bird, there is no way he could have been original? Why does it have to be exclusive? Could Sonny play exactly like Hawk? Is he better than Ornette just because he could?

Edited September 25, 2006 by md655321

[7/4]

It's all good.

That's pretty much how I feel, I just thought the Common Practice graphic was funny.

[Joe G]

And so it is. And not a bad thing to stash in one of my books, only to have it pop out at me on some future date. :rsmile:

[Larry Kart]

You Must Be's point, I believe, is that Ornette simply (or perhaps not so simply, given what he could do) "couldn't play like Bird, Sonny, et al." in the specific sense that he couldn't play on/within the harmonic framework/chorus structure of standard sequences. Of course, that's not all that people like Bird, Sonny, et al. did, but they did have that option, and You Must Be thinks that Ornette didn't and doesn't. Martin Williams, for one, said otherwise -- or at least that's one logical way to take Martin's account of having heard Ornette play just like Bird one night, in a response to challenge of some sort, as I recall. But I'd say that I'd agree with You Must Be here, adding that this came about not because Ornette lacked the capacity in any sense to do this but because of a combo of (a) his eccentric initial misunderstandings of certain music basics -- see Litweiler's bio for details on this (b) what and how he began to hear when he began to put what probably now should be called those "musunderstandings" to use and © the fact that Ornette seems by temperament to be at once an innate systematizer and a "lone cat."

[AllenLowe]

just to add to what Larry said, I don't think it really matters if Ornette can play "inside" - it's like arguments over whether an abstract expressionist painter can draw "realistically" - what matters is the work, though I used to be a little more conservative on this subject (spent too much time at too many sessions with players who could not play, including a lot of pseudo free-jazzers) - Dave Schildkraut once told me something very interesting that Joe Henderson said to him - that Henderson never felt he could be a participant when bebop was the prevailing style, as he did not think he could really play it in that style; but that he was completely liberated by Coltrane, et al, who showed that there was another way to go. Let's use another comparison - Duke Jordan could not play anything like James P Johnson; doesn't mean his own playing wasn't real jazz. Any musician who so totally creates his own frame of refernce, as Ornette does, has nothing to prove -

[JSngry]

I've talked to a few old-timers around here who heard Ornette in FW, and they say that he was playing "just like Bird". Even allowing for generalities, I think it's safe to say that if he couldn't play bebop at all, they'd have said something. These were not the type people to sugarcoat, if you get my drift...

I think it's probably like me eating liver - I can eat it, but it's not natural to me, and there's any number of things that come naturally to me before that does. And ever since I made it clear to my mom that I was not going to eat it (musta been about 10 at the time), I've never even tried to, except once or twice to be polite. But you can best believe that every bite pained me to no end.

I might even go out on a speculative limb and say taht when Ornette was playing inside, he did it by playing by ear. The guy's notions of theory (from what I've read/heard him him say) are certainly homemade to one degree or another (which is not to imply that they don't "work. Hell yeah they work). So he wasn't playing bebop "theoretically", he was playing the licks that he heard, and playing them well, apparently. But w/o that "traditional" theoretical understanding, he might not have been able to apply those licks to anything too much other than situational replication.

Which might mean that when he started to do his thing, the was playing by "heart" rather than by "ear". Because although he could apparently hear the bebop language well enough to play it, it seems that he didin't feel it enough to grow all the way into it. Some guys w/o all the theoretical background can do that, just because they feel it. But Ornette was feeling something else, and something else was what he ended up playing.

As for the intonation issue, it's so totally a non-issue. I'll go so far as to say that he has better control of his pitch than do most people who play "in-tune".

[Larry Kart]

I've talked to a few old-timers around here who heard Ornette in FW, and they say that he was playing "just like Bird". Even allowing for generalities, I think it's safe to say that if he couldn't play bebop at all, they'd have said something. These were not the type people to sugarcoat, if you get my drift...

I think it's probably like me eating liver - I can eat it, but it's not natural to me, and there's any number of things that come naturally to me before that does. And ever since I made it clear to my mom that I was not going to eat it (musta been about 10 at the time), I've never even tried to, except once or twice to be polite. But you can best believe that every bite pained me to no end.

I might even go out on a speculative limb and say taht when Ornette was playing inside, he did it by playing by ear. The guy's notions of theory (from what I've read/heard him him say) are certainly homemade to one degree or another (which is not to imply that they don't "work. Hell yeah they work). So he wasn't playing bebop "theoretically", he was playing the licks that he heard, and playing them well, apparently. But w/o that "traditional" theoretical understanding, he might not have been able to apply those licks to anything too much other than situational replication.

Which might mean that when he started to do his thing, the was playing by "heart" rather than by "ear". Because although he could apparently hear the bebop language well enough to play it, it seems that he didin't feel it enough to grow all the way into it. Some guys w/o all the theoretical background can do that, just because they feel it. But Ornette was feeling something else, and something else was what he ended up playing.

As for the intonation issue, it's so totally a non-issue. I'll go so far as to say that he has better control of his pitch than do most people who play "in-tune".

Jim -- I think your paragraphs three and four above nail it exactly.

[Guest youmustbe]

Ornettte Was/Is an 'Original'...that's why he had the impact he did! And why he changed so much in music(s) and influenced Trane, Sonny in turn.

Like Wayne, or Keith, he says some very Hip things, but like Wayne, Keith, like all of us, like me, sometimes he's full of shit. Coltrane Was/Is my idol, but Ornette Was/Is my Hero...For what he did against all odds, all the abuse, and perservered and was proven 'right'.

I heard a story that when Dave Schildekraut used to play in this little club in the Village in the early '50's, his wife used to come and inbetweeen sets would you yell at him...'When are you going to get a real job..you have children to support!" He went on the road and his replacement was Lee Konitz.

BTW The way they play the head on Embraceable You on This Is Our Music has stuck in my head these past 44 or so years so it pops up regularly at all hours...one of the 'playlists' in my brain along with the opening bars of Beethoven's Hammerklavier, a tenor aria form Verdi's Ballo In Maschera, as well as that Mister Softee Ice Cream truck fucking jingle!