John Tynan

[ghost of miles]

I've never been all that familiar with John Tynan, the Downbeat associate editor who infamously labeled the Coltrane-Dolphy group "anti-jazz" back in 1961, leading to the "Coltrane and Dolphy Answer the Critics" article. In doing some research for an upcoming Night Lights show, though, I've learned that Tynan was actually an early advocate for Ornette Coleman! (His piece "Ornette: the First Beginning" is reprinted in DOWNBEAT: 60 YEARS OF JAZZ.) While Tynan's writing is not anywhere near the level of, say, Larry Kart, he still comes across in the Ornette piece as an open-minded, sympathetic listener excited by what he's hearing (the early Ornette tunes and recordings). So why did he round on Coltrane and Dolphy so furiously? Granted, perhaps Coltrane was pursuing a more sonically aggressive path...and perhaps early Ornette was more accessible even in its own time than we've been led to think. (Though I think that's probably quite a stretch on my part, given the numerous articles I keep coming across...) Still struck me as a bit odd, though, and I'd love to hear from any who were around when said history was happening.

[AllenLowe]

well, I was reading Downbeat, but I cannot call myself a real witness - however, there was a big change from Ornette's Contemporary records to the album Free Jazz - and some of the Coltrane/Dolphy stuff, when they were working together, was fast and furious and very rough (listen to some of the bootleged broadcasts). Whereas early Ornette was quite melodic and bluesy and had that frame of reference. Starting in the late 1960s, that particular orientation was rapidly changing - and I should add that Dolphy had already, for some time, abandoned standard chord changes, which made some of his earlier work a bit easier to grasp -

Edited March 24, 2009 by AllenLowe

[JSngry]

If I remember Tynan'a "anti-jazz" article correctly, he was put off by the length of the solos relative to the (what he heard as) lack of harmonic variety, as well as the mechanical tonal manipulations used by Dolphy and Coltrane (false fingerings, overtones, mutliphonics) etc.

Mingus observed at the time, and not exactly as a compliment, that Ornette was really an "old-fashioned" player. That's been borne out over time. Nothing "old-fashioned" at all about Coltrane & Dolphy other than their pursuit of transcendence through focused intensity, and that was a concept hardly familiar to most white Americans in 1961-60.

The funny thing about the charges of monotony relative to harmony that were levelled against both Coltrane & Dolphy at this time is that although the underpinning was fairly "static" (and not even there, really b/c McCoy would follow/compliment Trane's digressions pretty regularly in his accompaniments), what they played on top of it was anything but. Both Trane and Dolphy would superimpose different chords on top of the underlying ones seemingly at will, but they always brought it back home (To me, Trane's digressions seemed more derived from scalar extrapolations, Dolphy's from alternate/superimposed progressions, but that's not something I'd wish to be quoted on...). But if you didn't have the ear to hear when it left, where it went, and when it came back, it would probably tend to sound either all the same, or else like total gobbledygook.

Of course, Ornette's music challenged the people in somewhat the same way, but Ornette was always so damned focused on melody, both compositionally and soloistically. And although I wasn't there when it first hit, I do know that my first reaction to Ornette, in 1970, at age 15, was that it wasn't at all "strange". Now, sure, I had already gotten hit by Hendrix, Zappa, Beefheart, and various other "weirdness", but I do think that unless you know why it should sound so different, there's a good chance that Ornette's early music won't sound all that unusual to you, simply becuase there is so much melody to it. I think that most people respond more to melody than to harmony anyway, so Ornette's got a leg up there. Not that Trane & Dolphy weren't "melodic", hell damn near everything is "melodic" in its own way, if you can let it be, but you know what I mean. It's easy to notice the ongoing melodiousness long before you notice the lack of a recurrent chord progression, if you ever even do notice that.

Edited March 24, 2009 by JSngry

[ghost of miles]

Of course, Ornette's music challenged the people in somewhat the same way, but Ornette was always so damned focused on melody, both compositionally and soloistically. And although I wasn't there when it first hit, I do know that my first reaction to Ornette, in 1970, at age 15, was that it wasn't at all "strange". Now, sure, I had already gotten hit by Hendrix, Zappa, Beefheart, and various other "weirdness", but I do think that unless you know why it should sound so different, there's a good chance that Ornette's early music won't sound all that unusual to you, simply becuase there is so much melody to it. I think that most people respond more to melody than to harmony anyway, so Ornette's got a leg up there.

So maybe my "perhaps early Ornette was more accessible even in its own time than we've been led to think" supposition isn't quite as farfetched as I thought it might be? For a long time now people have been commenting on how "accessible" Ornette's early music now seems (from the vantage point of 2009, 1999, 1989, what have you)--but was it readily accepted in more quarters circa 1959 than history might lead us to believe? (I know that some did--John Lewis for one, along with folks I'd tend to put more in the category of "train-jumpers" like Leonard Bernstein.) Was OC's early music more of a critical controversy than a fan controversy? Or at least even more likely to provoke artists and critics than musically-untrained or lesser-trained listeners? (Granted, there were plenty of musically-untrained critics as well...) Because you're absolutely right about OC's melody, and how it hooks nearly anybody who's got half an ear and mind open to it. (And who also, perhaps, doesn't have professional or artistic/journalistic consequences riding on the outcome.)

I'm just throwing these out as questions/speculations--not having had the privilege of being alive in the year of 1959. Thanks for the very illuminating response, Jim. (And for articulating things that I can only clumsily intuit in a limited way.)

Edited March 25, 2009 by ghost of miles

[JSngry]

I honestly don't know how it was heard in 1959, obviously. But Ornette did get a fair amount of "hype" (Lewis, Schuller, Jazz Review, the titling of his albums, etc.) that stressed the "differentness" of his music in such a way that maybe a lot of people felt...compelled to have an "opinion" rather than just a spontaneous response, if you know what I mean.

Recommended reading on the matter - Joe Goldberg's chapter on Ornette in Jazz Masters Of The 50's.

[ghost of miles]

Here are some excerpts from an early review of SOMETHING ELSE by Art Farmer--from the July 1959 Jazz Review (not up yet at Jazz Studies Online, but it soon should be...I copied this out of a bound volume at the IU School of Music library):

Ornette Coleman writes some very nice tunes, but after he plays the tune, I can't find too much of a link between his solo and the tune itself. From what I've heard though that's the way he looks at it. He apparently feels there shouldn't be too much concern about the tune and chord structures--they're prisons to him. He just goes on and plays what he feels from the tune...It doesn't seem valid to me somehow for a man to disregard his own tunes... It's a lack of respect. Maybe he'll eventually get to have more respect for his tunes.

His whole atittude is different from what I'm used to. It's going to take time for me to evaluate him. He does have an immense amount of feeling in his playing. The tunes are very nice ones. They have quality. In some I felt Monk and George Russell.

He's different from the others on the scene, and when people come along like that, you have to be able to evaluate them as being different. If you can't, it's hard to say whether they're good or bad. Like when I first started to listen to Monk, I couldn't appreciate him until I could separate him from someone like Powell or Tatum. Maybe that's what we have to do with Coleman.

I wish I had the whole article (much of it a critique of OC's playing), but I was out of coins for copying and had to just jot down several passages. Farmer makes a somewhat similar comment in a blindfold test response to OC's "Endless," reprinted in Leonard Feather's 1960 Encyclopedia of Jazz:

...this style of playing is very extreme, but it does show that there is more freedom to be taken advantage of than is, as a rule... I like Ornette's approach to writing. I wish I could see more of a link between the writing and the solos. It's like a building without any foundation and something's got to keep it up in the air. Even an atom-powered submarine has to go back to home base sometimes... You've got to know where home is. You've got to acknowledge that somewhere. Three stars.

I'm not quoting these with approval--just interested in how a hardbop player like Farmer was reacting to OC in 1959.

[ghost of miles]

I honestly don't know how it was heard in 1959, obviously. But Ornette did get a fair amount of "hype" (Lewis, Schuller, Jazz Review, the titling of his albums, etc.) that stressed the "differentness" of his music in such a way that maybe a lot of people felt...compelled to have an "opinion" rather than just a spontaneous response, if you know what I mean.

Recommended reading on the matter - Joe Goldberg's chapter on Ornette in Jazz Masters Of The 50's.

Thanks, I'll seek it out. Ridiculous that I don't have that book anyway. Been meaning to get it for years, but somehow it's eluded me.

[AllenLowe]

an interesting sideline - John Lewis, who early on was touting Ornette as the first thing new since Bird, was saying in his last years that Ornette, in the years since, had lost it and was faking it, basically - disappointing in someone who is held out as Ornette's early supporter. But than, I think Lewis was very pretentious and artificial in his approach to the blues. Apparently, once he sensed that Ornette was no longer "in the tradition" he felt artistically betrayed.

"Anti jazz" would indicate that the new music was counter to whatever the critic felt was essential to jazz - and that would be recognizeable melody (and Ornette played, at least in those early days, with an implied sense of harmonic development as well as melodic) and the whole idea of getting from A to B to C in an "organized" fashion. And those DOlphy/Trane things are frighteningly intense, not for the faint of heart. And certainly Tynan wasn't the only one. Ira Gitler is still railing about the sound of the first generation avant garde, and as I recall Leonard Feather was quite nasty as well. And I am certain there were more than a few other critics who agreed silently, but were too diplomatic (and too sympathetic to the problems of the jazz musician) to take a public stand that would have put these guys, whom they knew were great musicians, down. People like Gitler took it personally, interestingly enough.

Ornette's bands in the 60's, also, were well organized in a relatively conventional jazz way, the elements clearly delineated, less chaotically tied together than in Trane's band. I heard Ornette with Haden and Dewey Redman (and I think Billy Higgins) at Slugs in 1969 and it was an overwhelming experience. I didn't really understand it but I knew it was ingenious and I felt something very deep stirring in me afterwards (and thankfully Haden came over between sets to talk to me and my friends and try to explain what was going on. )

Edited March 25, 2009 by AllenLowe

[ghost of miles]

Just came across this--Ornette's BFT response to George Russell's "Livingston, I Presume" with Art Farmer on trumpet (this also comes from Feather's 1960 Encyclopedia of Jazz):

When I hear a tune played I like to hear a difference between the tune and the improvising...like I believe that the execution of improvising should blend with the emotion...but in certain cases where the technical part of a tune hinders a musician from free improvising, it seems I don't get the message that they actually hear something to play in that style of tune... Art Farmer seems more experienced in playing, free-improvising, with that sort of writing, where the thing they're playing, the way they're playing it doesn't sound like it's notated that way, and Arthur's the only one I now who seems to be able to improvise in the form of playing. Four stars.

[ghost of miles]

From an early-1990s (I think) Reflex interview--Coleman quoted in the booklet to the BEAUTY IS A RARE THING box:

I used to try to improvise, to play exactly what I thought improvising meant--not what somebody else thought it was. I would find myself getting fired, being put down--but it was always the musicians, not the audience, putting me down. Emotionally, they knew what I was doing.

[fasstrack]

But than, I think Lewis was very pretentious and artificial in his approach to the blues. Apparently, once he sensed that

That's a strange statement. On what do you base it, and can you support it? I think his blues were very sparse and wise. Also, "Django", his beautifully conceived piece has a great little blues sequence toward the end, which ties the whole thing together and provides contrast with the other sections. Also, wasn't that John Lewis playing the intro to "Parker's Mood"? I heard several takes and they all were great, and very different from each other.

[Kalo]

OK. I've been neglecting to check in on the Organissimo forums for quite a while. But this thread reminds me of what's so special about this place.

Lots of food for thought here!

[JSngry]

One more thought for consideration - in 1961, if somebody's soloing was disrupting you and makes you nervous, as both Ornette's & Trane/Dolphy's did, who would have been more likely to push that disruption up a notch, Billy Higgins or Elvin?

No Elvin, no Trane as we know him now. This I do believe. Roy Haynes came close, but would that have worked out over time like Elvin did? I tend to think not.

[AllenLowe]

fasstrack - don't want to divert from the main topic, but, honestly, I can't stand John Lewis's playing (though I agree Django is a beautiful piece). To me, Lewis's playing wreaks of "I am a sophisticated musician but I can still play the blues." I would have preferred Duke Jordan on Parker's Mood. The MJQ, for this very reason, puts me to sleep. False erudition, which I believe is a common problem in certain jazz approaches from the 50's and 60's.

[fasstrack]

fasstrack - don't want to divert from the main topic, but, honestly, I can't stand John Lewis's playing (though I agree Django is a beautiful piece). To me, Lewis's playing wreaks of "I am a sophisticated musician but I can still play the blues." I would have preferred Duke Jordan on Parker's Mood. The MJQ, for this very reason, puts me to sleep. False erudition, which I believe is a common problem in certain jazz approaches from the 50's and 60's.

Well, you have strong opinions, and I guess you are entitled. You don't have to be a musician to have preferences, just know what you're talking about. I will take it on faith that you do and speak out of passion for this art form, since I have read you before here.

But you never justified your claim with chapter and verse and, frankly, musical insights/examples, only gave more opinion. Please do so. (Also, small point: you meant 'reeks' of...., didn't you? I know, I hate when that happens ).

[AllenLowe]

you're right, I should be more specific. But basically I would cite any blues I have ever heard Lewis play. It always sounds like he is working too hard to make it "bluesy" but "modern," but I will let it rest at that, as we can certainly disagree. I will recount, as I did once before - I met Lennie Tristano years ago and happened to have mentioned that I had seen a duo of Hank Jones and John Lewis (this was probably the middle 1970s). Tristano said: "John Lewis? blehh...now Hank Jones, there's a piano player."

[fasstrack]

you're right, I should be more specific. But basically I would cite any blues I have ever heard Lewis play. It always sounds like he is working too hard to make it "bluesy" but "modern," but I will let it rest at that, as we can certainly disagree. I will recount, as I did once before - I met Lennie Tristano years ago and happened to have mentioned that I had seen a duo of Hank Jones and John Lewis (this was probably the middle 1970s). Tristano said: "John Lewis? blehh...now Hank Jones, there's a piano player."

Yeah. Lennie Tristano. There's a guy who could play the blues......(Sorry, couldn't resist).

Yeah, let's agree to disagree and leave this alone. I accept your opinion and I guess you accept mine.

[Larry Kart]

Another big factor, I believe, in the backlash (or front-lash) against the avant garde way back when, from many musicians especially, is what I once called "the norms of craft professionalism." There's a whiff of that in Art Farmer's "You've got to know where 'home' is" remark (or words to that effect) about Ornette's playing on his own pieces. If one is talking about having a sense of "home" as the difference between knowing where you really are musically, knowing chaos from coherence, sure -- provided you've got big ears and an open mind and are willing to recognize that there may be senses of "home" that at first may be new to you. But to the degree that jazz is or can be a competitive clubhouse or locker room, craft knowledge (i.e craft knowledge that we the insiders already are aware of and agree upon) can also serve as a semi-social, semi-musical screening process and/or a form of one-upsmanship, a way of separating the "hip" pros from the unqualified amateurs. On that front, what Ornette was doing was seen in some quarters as a dire threat to the professionalism that, to some pros, is what makes a pro a pro -- a chucking aside of all codes and standards and thus of one of the professional jazz community's key modes of self-validation/belonging/sense of specialness. I recall a Phil Woods interview where he said that if you don't know ... I think it was something like the correct first change on the bridge of "Sophisticated Lady," you had no right to call yourself a jazz musician. (I should add that for many professional musicians of that time, a sense of validated insider specialness was among their key social/emotional rewards for living lives that could be damn difficult. You know -- "At least I'm hip, I'm not playing like Tex Beneke."

I think an additional, semi-separate objection from some musicians and writers to the Coltrane of "Chasin' the Trane" and beyond (because one couldn't object to Trane, at least not rationally, in quite the same terms one could to Ornette) was that the the nature of Trane's performances -- their length and expressionistic fervor and, in the minds of some, their implicit aura of Afro-American anger -- was going to destroy the notion of jazz as entertainment, break the bond between the music and its longtime predominant audience (white and black) and thus threaten the livelihoods of almost everyone on the scene.

[ghost of miles]

Another big factor, I believe, in the backlash (or front-lash) against the avant garde way back when, from many musicians especially, is what I once called "the norms of craft professionalism." There's a whiff of that in Art Farmer's "You've got to know where 'home' is" remark (or words to that effect) about Ornette's playing on his own pieces. If one is talking about having a sense of "home" as the difference between knowing where you really are musically, knowing chaos from coherence, sure -- provided you've got big ears and an open mind and are willing to recognize that there may be senses of "home" that at first may be new to you. But to the degree that jazz is or can be a competitive clubhouse or locker room, craft knowledge (i.e craft knowledge that we the insiders already are aware of and agree upon) can also serve as a semi-social, semi-musical screening process and/or a form of one-upsmanship, a way of separating the "hip" pros from the unqualified amateurs. On that front, what Ornette was doing was seen in some quarters as a dire threat to the professionalism that, to some pros, is what makes a pro a pro -- a chucking aside of all codes and standards and thus of one of the professional jazz community's key modes of self-validation/belonging/sense of specialness. I recall a Phil Woods interview where he said that if you don't know ... I think it was something like the correct first change on the bridge of "Sophisticated Lady," you had no right to call yourself a jazz musician. (I should add that for many professional musicians of that time, a sense of validated insider specialness was among their key social/emotional rewards for living lives that could be damn difficult. You know -- "At least I'm hip, I'm not playing like Tex Beneke."

The book's at the office, but I think Ekkehard Jost says something roughly similar in FREE JAZZ, Larry--that the NYC musicians were offended by Ornette for some of the same reasons that you state above...something to the effect of "who does this yokel think he is, coming in and 'playing' like that?"

[AllenLowe]

Larry is absolutely right - it was always interesting to me that Johnny Carisi, whom I considered a very advanced musical thinker, hated the whole avant garde from Ornette on; for all Carisi's adventurousness he was a very schooled composer and he felt anyone who was not was faking it. But the whole "gotta know the tradition" thing is frought with problems and difficult implications, and I say this as a musician who went from Barry Harris disciple to friend-of-Julius- Hemphill player and composer - as I told someone once, when I started to get away from chord changes I felt I was being disloyal to Barry, whom I had gotten very close to; every time I played in any kind of open form, I felt like, musically speaking, I was cheating on my wife, if you know what I mean. But I took heart from guys like Bob Neloms, who was deeply schooled but not afraid to go off in any creative direction. And Dave Schildkraut (yeah the guy I keep talking about) said something that amazed me once. He said that Joe Henderson had told him he never felt like a true jazz musician as long as bebop was the standard, as he never felt adequate to the style - but that Trane freed him up and showed him he could be a jazz musician on other terms.

So there's always a different way of doing things. I hate to say this but Hemphill, one of the most amazing musicians I ever played with, who could drive a band with his sound and time, who was a composer of the stature of Duke Ellington, and who was 10 times the saxophonist I was, was not particularly good at chord changes (to my surprise I handled them better than he, and I don't mean that as a boast. He just did not think in those terms, though he could write harmonically complex pieces).

But look - Duke Jordan couldn't play stride (and neither can Barry Harris). Cripple Clarence Lofton was a better blues player than a gaggle of jazz pianists. I don't remember the first chord to the bridge of Sophisticated Lady, but I've worked with some heavy hitters. I can barely read music but Randy Sandke, one of the most sophisticated musicians I know, asked me at a recording session who had harmonized a particular tune (it was my tune and my changes and he was very complimentary, to my great delight). I know a popular "free" drummer who cannot keep straight time. And I once played with one of the greatest pianists in jazz who sounded, on the blues, like a bad lounge player.

So not everybody can do everything. A lot of the old blues guys, who to me are god-like in their expressive powers, play 13 and 17 and 19 bar blues - the point, as Neloms used to say to me, is "it's not what you play it's what you say."

Edited March 26, 2009 by AllenLowe

[Larry Kart]

If anyone has access to such journals (some people here probably will in this digital age) track down this article by sociologist Howard S. Becker, "The Professional Dance Musician and His Audience,” American Journal of Sociology, LVII (September, 1951) pp. 136–44.

By "dance musician" Becker means jazz musician. Becker himself was a professional jazz pianist in Chicago in the 1940s (he studied with Tristano and still plays), and this is the shrewdest account of jazz's still relevant "insider versus outsider" issues (which we've touched upon above) that I've ever seen, by many miles. (Becker is one of the world's great sociologists and a very down-to-earth, drily humorous writer; no academic jargon for him.) The material in this article was compressed and reworked as Chapter Five in Becker's celebrated book "Outsiders," but I prefer it in its original longer, shaggier form. Some will find a visit to Becker's website worthwhile:

http://home.earthlink.net/~hsbecker/

There are several articles about jazz posted there (though not the one I mentioned), and a lot of other interesting stuff. Becker also wrote the only book about how to write something that was ever of practical use to me (and this at a time when I was really blocked and had an important piece to deliver by a rapidly approaching deadline). The title is "Writing for Social Scientists: How To Start and Finish Your Thesis, Book, Or Article," but it's not just for social scientists. If what you're trying to write is non-fiction of any sort (or maybe even fiction or poetry), then Becker will help.

The title of Chapter Three of this book is one of the keys, "One Right Way." To quote: "[Writers] make [their] job much harder than it need be when they think there is Only One Right Way to do it, that each paper they write has a preordained structure they must find. They simplify their work ... when they recognize that there are many effective ways to say something and their job is only to choose one and execute so that readers will know what they are doing." There's a whole bunch of stuff wrapped up there, and Becker neatly unpacks all that needs to be unpacked so that you yourself can get on with what you need to do. He's a practical Zen master.

[AllenLowe]

I like him already - I haven't listened to it but he's got a version on his site of him playing Little Tin Box; strangely, I was just thinking about that song the other day -

(the title, of the song from the old B'Way show Fiorello, btw, refers to the corruption trials of the pre-Laguardia administration in NYC of Gentleman Jim, and the testimony, as I recall, about how some corrupt official kept his money in a little tin box - "that a little tin key unlocks - there is nothing unorothodox about a little tin box")

Edited March 26, 2009 by AllenLowe

[JSngry]

Then again, w/o a piano, some people who weren't really pitch-astute but who instead followed melody more as a succession of intervals and contours instead of specific pitches relative to an underlying harmony might not have found Ornette particularly daunting.

[Larry Kart]

I like him already - I haven't listened to it but he's got a version on his site of him playing Little Tin Box; strangely, I was just thinking about that song the other day -

(the title, of the song from the old B'Way show Fiorello, btw, refers to the corruption trials of the pre-Laguardia administration in NYC of Gentleman Jim, and the testimony, as I recall, about how some corrupt official kept his money in a little tin box - "that a little tin key unlocks - there is nothing unorothodox about a little tin box")

I listened. A bit thick-fingered at times, as one might except from a man approaching 80 who plays in his spare time, but there are some nice touches -- reminds me a bit of Hod O'Brien.

[Chuck Nessa]

The problem of Ornette for some writers/fans/etc was "changes" but Coltrane messed with the regular 4/4 and that bothered more folks. I'm sure some of the writers didn't know changes but they could tap their feet. After all, Coltrane had demonstrated his facility with accepted western harmony. Ornette was more revolutionary but Trane's lack of accepted swing brought down the house.