Show #117: Ornette Coleman

I got a request a couple weeks or so ago for more free jazz and so today I deliver.


(Photo found here.)

While I know that Ornette Coleman plays sax and was one of the pioneers of free jazz, I really know very little about the genre as a whole and even less about the man. Ergo I've had to seek out information about the man and his music. The PBS site provides a bio of him courtesy of The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz. This is their summary of Coleman's life prior to becoming a professional musician:

Ornette Coleman began playing alto saxophone at the age of 14, and developed a style predominantly influenced by Charlie Parker. His early professional work with a variety of southwestern rhythm-and-blues and carnival bands, however, seems to have been in a more traditional idiom. In 1948 he moved to New Orleans and worked mostly at nonmusical jobs. By 1950 he had returned to Fort Worth, after which he went to Los Angeles with Pee Wee Crayton's rhythm-and-blues band. Wherever he tried to introduce some of his more personal and innovative ideas he was met with hostility, both from audiences and musicians. While working as an elevator operator in Los Angeles he studied (on his own) harmony and theory textbooks, and gradually evolved a radically new concept and style, seemingly from a combination of musical intuition born of southwestern country blues and folk forms, and his misreadings — or highly personal interpretations — of the theoretical texts.

In May of 1959 Coleman recorded The Shape of Jazz to Come which saw him leave traditional jazz chord structure behind. This was followed up by Change of the Century later that same year. People who know a helluva lot more about jazz than me consider these two albums to be prefaces to his next effort, Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation. It consisted of a single 37-minute track and saw Coleman moving farther away from traditional jazz and into the avant garde. It also gave birth to the name of the genre.


(Photo from All About Jazz.)

The photos here are all from 1971 and this week's recording is from 28-30 October of that same year at the Jazz Jamboree in Warsaw, Poland. I believe that this festival took place just after Coleman recorded Science Fiction the previous month but don't quote me on that.

Setlist:

Written Word
Broken Shadows
Street Woman
Song For Che
Rock The Clock

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Ornette Coleman

From trusty YouTube, here is Coleman performing in Rome in 1974.