Coleman/Cherry live at Hillcrest club lp

[Guest ariceffron]

last nite at 330 am i bough this lp from a weirdo kid at a party. i was looking through his rap records and then i was whoa. he had schizszeoprhina, and then he had an lp ive NEVER seen and didnt know existed: its that early early coleman and cherry stuff. you know it really isnt as crappy as the critics made it out to be. i guess i can see what they were saying about his tone, but as far as what hes playing. i guess i can see how it couold be critiziced, but it really isnt as bad as they made it out to be.

[jazzbo]

yes, it really isn't! in fact . . . it's good!

[jlhoots]

Thanks Lon for translating.

[John L]

What do I think? I think that Coleman and Bley at the Hillcrest is the shit. I wish that Paul Bley could somehow make available the rest of the tapes.

[Pete C]

Thanks Lon for translating.

Get with it, man, that free jazz typing is the wildest.

But can the kid do standards?

[JSngry]

Hey Aric - which LP was it? The one on Inner City or the one on IAI? Different stuff on each.

[paul secor]

Hey Aric - which LP was it? The one on Inner City or the one on IAI? Different stuff on each.

Whichever it was - they're both good!

[mailman]

I've had the Inner City LP for years but I didn't know about another one on IAI. Was it recorded during the same engagement. I've always considered the Inner City release a treasure and I'd sure like to hear more. Is IAI material available anywhere?

[Chuck Nessa]

I've had the Inner City LP for years but I didn't know about another one on IAI. Was it recorded during the same engagement. I've always considered the Inner City release a treasure and I'd sure like to hear more. Is IAI material available anywhere?

The Inner City was licensed from Musidisc. The original lp was on the America label. Musidisc issued a cd in 1993.

The IAI lp was withdrawn shortly after release in 1977. Ornette got it blocked.

[Guest ariceffron]

its the inner city

[mikeweil]

The IAI lp was withdrawn shortly after release in 1977. Ornette got it blocked.

Chuck, you happen to know the reason?

[Chuck Nessa]

Yes. They failed to get a publishing license from Contemporary. Ornette was looking for an "out" and this was "it". Contemporary filed (or said they'd file) court papers.

[JohnS]

What do I think?  I think that Coleman and Bley at the Hillcrest is the shit.  I wish that Paul Bley could somehow make available the rest of the tapes.

In his book "Stopping Time" Bley says that he sold all the tapes from the Hillcrest club for re-use. If I remember correctly he wanted to finance his trip east.

[Larry Kart]

Here's a review I wrote of the IAI Hillcrest LP for Jazz magazine in 1974. Not sure I still believe everything that I wrote in it, esp. about Ornette's lack of influence, but what the hell -- that's the way it seemed at the time (at least to me):

Ornette Coleman worked with this group (cornetist Don Cherry, drummer Billy Higgins, bassist Charlie Haden, and pianist Paul Bley --the nominal leader, who recorded the group in live performance) for six weeks between his first and second studio recording sessions, sometime between March 1958 and January 1959. The logical question is, how does Coleman sound at this early date, freed from studio pressures and united for the first time with Haden? Well, he sounds great, much more at ease than on his first album, Something Else. And even though, compared to what was to come, there is something of the gawky adolescent to the Coleman we hear on Live at the Hillcrest Club, no other recording of his has a comparable feeling of looseness and spontaneity until the Town Hall Concert album of 1962.

And do these tracks tell us something about Coleman that we didn’t know before? I suppose not, but merely because they’re beautiful in themselves and unexpected messages from the past, they do help to explain why the most successful innovator of the sixties (successful in the sense of producing performance after performance that really worked) should in the long run have had such a negligible effect on his contemporaries and successors, compared to the impact of men like John Coltrane and Eric Dolphy. (Very few players showed Coleman’s literal imprint, and if there were others who grasped the principles of his music without wishing to sound like him, they must have decided that these principles coudn’t be applied by them.)

It comes down to this--Cole-man is both a pre-tonal and a post-tonal player, and, in a sense (a very fruitful one for him), he reads the history of tonality backwards to its pre-tonal state. What enabled him to do so, in addition to innate genius, was the accident of birth that placed him in a provincial center (Fort Worth, Texas) where Charlie Parker’s latest stretchings of triadic harmony could be heard alongside musics--blues, rhythm and blues, cowboy ballads, and what have you--that were either pre-tonal or so crude in their tonal functions as to be pre-tonal by implication. You can call it naïve or the ultimate sophistication, but sensing the relation between a music in which tonality was on the brink of ceasing to function and musics in which it functioned quite simply or hardly at all, Coleman was able to preserve what for him were the plums of tonality --the emotional colors of triadic harmony, especially the most basic ones (who aside from Monk has made so much of the octave jump?)--without adopting tonic-dominant cadential pat-terns and phrase structures.

This explains why the internal rhythm of Coleman’s solos often has a bouncy, downhome lope to it, a la Swing Era alto saxophonists like Pete Brown and Tab Smith or proto-r&b figure Louis Jordan (even though Coleman will interject phrases of startling asymmetry, and even though that internal rhythm has a floating, precisely controlled relation to the stated beat of the bass and drums). Conversely, the men who were most involved in stretching triadic harmony to its furthest limits to date in jazz, Charlie Parker and Art Tatum, also were the men who carried the subdivision of the beat to its furthest point to date--because such subtleties of accentuation were necessary to throw into relief, and so make articulate, melodic lines whose harmonic implications otherwise might have been inchoate.

On "Klactoveedsedstene," Coleman and Cherry play Parker’s spikey theme with tremendous élan, which should settle any lingering doubts about Coleman’s rhythmic control and confirm that his sometimes radically simple rhythmic choices were real choices and not the results of any instrumental in-capacity. The analogous simplifications of his melodic-harmonic universe can be heard best here on "The Blessing," where he takes a mellow, strongly organized solo highlighted by a subtle sotto voce passage of implied doubletime. Improvisations like this--"Peace" on The Shape of Jazz to Come is another--reveal that however free Coleman is of tonic-dominant functions (in the sense of not needing to touch home base at specific intervals), his music has plenty of cadential possibilities that he can find as emotion dictates. And it is these moments of resolution, which give back to us the most primary pleasures of triadic harmony cleaned of the grime of long use, that ultimately divided Coleman from his contemporaries. However much they might respect a pre-tonal universe and make gestures toward it, they lived in a post-tonal world and could not read the history of tonality as Coleman did. But if his route has turned out not to be one that others could take, perhaps that makes the beauty he has given us all the more treasurable.

[clifford_thornton]

Hmm. I've got the America record but didn't realize the IAI had different music. Will have to hunt that one down. Thanks for the review -- not that I wouldn't already be checking it out, but still, nice to read.

[brownie]

There was an earlier discussion of this music:

http://www.organissimo.org/forum/index.php...59&hl=hillcrest