Jazz
music grew and developed in a process of gradual change with many twists
and
turns, and it will be impossible to comprehend the emergence of the Free Jazz
Movement without understanding how it fed on a powerful cultural shift in
American society during that period.
During
the late 50’s and early 60’s, the word “Freedom” stood out as a politically
charged word in American public discourse and it would be difficult to find a
term that was more explosive and laden with varieties of meaning being
proclaimed with more emotion during those tumultuous years. “Freedom” was very
much something to live for, or, for a few, even to die for. There were the
“Freedom Riders”, the “Freedom Singers”, and there was the “Freedom Vote”. The
word was imprinted on the public’s consciousness and dramatized in speeches by
Dr. Martin Luther King. It was sang in hymns and brandished at all
battlegrounds of the civil rights movement.
The influence of this Freedom Movement on Free
Jazz was therefore very visible and expressive. However, the sociopolitical
ramifications of this music are in many ways decisive in distinguishing the new
free jazz players from the older generation of experimental jazz performers.
From a purely musical point, freedom i. e. atonality in jazz music had appeared
many years before Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor raised it into a decisive
issue. But all of these precursors of free jazz were white musicians and
representatives of the status quo.
In contrast, the proponents of free jazz who
came into prominence at the close of the 50’s were almost all outsiders: as African
Americans they were outsiders from mainstream society and as musical renegades
they were outsiders from mainstream jazz. Many of them lacked access to concert
halls, grants, commissions and other symbolic measures of artistic achievement.
During
his formative years in Los Angeles, free jazz pioneer Ornette Coleman worked as
an elevator operator in a department store and pianist Cecil Taylor labored as
a dishwasher in a restaurant. In his early teens, Coleman acquired an alto
saxophone, but struggled to learn the rudiments of the horn.
He however, persevered and continued to
develop and grow as a musician defying all the odds while sticking to his style
of improvisation. In addition to being known as a saxophone player, Coleman was
also an accomplished violinist, trumpeter and composer. He is one of the major
innovators of the free jazz movement of the 1960’s and is closely associated to
avant-garde jazz and jazz rock.
His
birth name is Randolph Denard Ornette Coleman. He was born in Fort Worth, Texas,
USA on March 9th 1930. He attended I.M.Terrell High School in Fort Worth and
was a member of the school band until he was dismissed from the band for too
much improvisation. While in school, he began performing R&B and bebop
initially playing the tenor saxophone and started his own band called Jam
Jivers with fellow students. He later switched to alto sax which has remained
his primary instrument to date.
Coleman’s
approach to harmony and chord progression was much less rigid than that of the
bebop performers, and he was very much interested in playing what he heard
rather than fitting into predetermined chorus structures and harmonies. He was
known for playing “in the cracks” of a scale which led many musicians in Los
Angeles to regard his playing as being out-of-tune. Nonetheless, pianist Paul
Bley was an early supporter and musical collaborator.
In
1958, Coleman led his first recording session for Contemporary Records with the
release of “Something Else”… the music of Ornette Coleman- featuring Don Cherry
on trumpet, Billy Higgins on drums, Don Payne on bass and Walter Norris on
piano. In 1959, he made his last release on Contemporary entitled- “Tomorrow is
the Question! - A quartet album which featured Shelly Manne on drums and
excluded the use of piano which he would not use in his music until the 90’s.
Later in 1959, he brought a group of musicians
together including Charlie Haden on bass with Cherry and Higgins playing their
usual roles and signed a multi-album contract with Atlantic Records. The album
“The Shape of Jazz to come” was released the same year and was referred to as
a”watershed event in the genesis of avant-garde Jazz”. Some musicians saw Coleman as an iconoclast,
but others including conductor Leonard Bernstein and composer Virgil Thomson
regarded him as a genius and an innovator. His quartet received a lengthy
engagement at New York’s famous Five Spot club and support came from other
quarters such as the Modern Jazz Quartet and Lionel Hampton.
In
1960, Coleman recorded the album “Free Jazz”-A Collective Improvisation, which
featured a double quartet including Don Cherry and Freddie Hubbard on trumpet,
Eric Dolphy on bass clarinet, Haden and Scott LaFaro on bass, and both Higgins
and Ed Blackwell on drums. Although Coleman is notably one of the pioneers of
free jazz, he did not entirely approve of the term and in-fact later explained
that the term “Free Jazz” was used by him only as the title to an album and not
meant to declare a new form of jazz. It should be noted here that Coleman’s music
contains a considerable amount of composition and his melodic material strongly
recalls the melodies that Charlie Parker wrote over standard harmonies. He very
rarely played standards, concentrating on his own composition of which there
seemed to be an endless flow.
Between
1965 and 1967, Coleman signed with Blue Note Records and released a number of
recordings starting with the recording of “At the Golden Circle Stockholm”. In
1966, he recorded “The Empty Foxhole”, a trio with Haden, and Coleman’s son Denardo
Coleman- who was only ten at the time. Coleman was criticized for this
initiative and some thought that he did it as a publicity stunt. Others
however, noted that the young Coleman, despite his youth, had studied drumming
for several years and needed the experience for his development.
Denardo
has since matured into a respectable musician and has been his father’s primary
drummer since the late 1970’s. Ornette was also interested in string textures
and in 1962 he released the album “Town Hall”, and in 1972 he came out with
“Skies of America”, each of these releases being string arrangements.
In
later years, Coleman like Miles Davis before him took to playing with
electrified instruments. Albums like “Virgin Beauty” and “Of Human Feelings”
used rock and funk rhythms, sometimes referred to as free funk. These
performances have the same angular melodies and simultaneous group
improvisations, something Joe Zawinul referred to as “nobody solos, everybody
solos”. In 1988, Coleman released the album “Virgin Beauty” with Jerry Garcia
playing guitar on three tracks. In 1993, he joined the rock band “Grateful
Dead” on stage playing the band’s songs, and earlier in 1985, he joined Pat
Metheny and recorded “Song X”. This album was released under Metheny’s name but
Coleman was essentially the leader of this project, contributing all the
compositions in the album.
Coleman’s
notoriety was also felt beyond the borders of the U.S. In 1990, the city of
Reggio Emilia in Italy held a three-day “Portrait of the Artist” featuring a
Coleman quartet with Cherry, Haden and Higgins. The festival also presented
performances of Coleman’s chamber music and the symphonic “Skies of America”.
The 1990’s saw a lot of work from Coleman, and in 1996, he again started
working with piano players on his recordings.
The
period of 2000s, witnessed Coleman receiving numerous awards and honors. In
2004, he was awarded The Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize, one of the richest
prizes in the arts. In 2006, he released a live album titled “Sound Grammar”
with his newest quartet, his son Denardo playing drums and two bassists,
Gregory Cohen and Tony Falanga. This album won a Pulitzer Prize for music in
2007.In that same year; he was honored with a Grammy award for lifetime
achievement in recognition of his legacy. In 2009, he received the Miles Davis
Award and in 2010, he was awarded an honorary degree in music from the
University of Michigan.
Coleman
continues to play music that pushes him into unusual situations, often with
younger musicians or musicians from radically different musical cultures and
still performs regularly.
“There
is nothing more sacred than Freedom and Independence” Ho Chi Ming (Vietnam)
