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Posted

Ornette Coleman and friends

Royal Festival Hall, London

* • John Fordham*

• The Guardian, Tuesday 23 June 2009

Long after the last note, the crowd was still in the hall. Ornette Coleman's

final gig, at the Meltdown festival he curated and played at, was carried

off with typically wayward flair. His 50-year career has been stuffed with

controversies, breakthroughs and accolades, but the 79-year-old sax

improviser and composer seemed to sense something special was happening as

he moved gingerly along the front of the stage, shaking the outstretched

hands of people surging toward him.

But then the music Coleman and his guests have been playing at Meltdown has

been a revelation: vivid, witty, open and passionate. Coleman and his core

band (his son Denardo on drums, Al MacDowell and Tony Falanga on electric

and acoustic basses respectively) played Friday and Sunday, after ecstatic

opening sets by the polyrhythmic dances of Morocco's Master Musicians of

Jajouka. Guitarist Bill Frisell joined Friday's show not as a soloist but as

a Coleman collaborator, and quickly became enmeshed in the churning rhythms.

Sometimes the sound harmonised, sometimes it veered apart as Coleman blew

that great particle collider he calls a saxophone. Patti Smith arrived to

fire some edgy spontaneous poetry over Denardo's tramping, elemental

drumming and his father's wailing instrument.

On both nights, Falanga elegantly unfurled Bach's Cello Suite No 1 as

Coleman, playing viola, brought to it a clamour of dissonant improv. The

Rite of Spring opening, meanwhile, respectfully mirrored by Coleman's

haunting sax line (and by Baaba Maal's soaring voice on Sunday), swelled

into the band's own personal rite as a funk pulse grew.

Coleman's classic Turnaround, a mix of mournful blues figures and

spine-tingling long-note cries, preceded Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist Flea,

who guested to make the group even more thunderously funky, particularly on

the leader's trance-melody classic, Dancing in Your Head. But the encore

trumped even that. Bassist Charlie Haden joined Coleman and Denardo's hushed

cymbal pulse to play the saxophonist's yearning Lonely Woman, one of the

most beautiful of all jazz ballads, first as a lament, then as a piece of

absorbingly graceful, though sometimes tentative, swing. The ensuing crowd

eruption wasn't just for an extraordinary show - it was for 50 years of

Coleman as well.

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