Search - Ornette Coleman :: Free Jazz

Looking for the Magic City

Matthew Watters | Vietnam | 01/20/2010

(2 out of 5 stars)

"An album of undeniable historical importance, Free Jazz is also not likely to be one you'll listen to often. It inspired, and continues to inspire, countless great recordings of collective improvisations, including a number of far greater albums that followed immediately in its wake in the 1960s. Sun Ra's Magic City (and his other experiments in conduction), John Coltrane's Ascension (and Live in Seattle), Albert Ayler's New York Eye and Ear Control, and Peter Brotzmann's Machine Gun are all more spiritually searching, musically soaring and just plain searing experiences, and, while Ornette deserves all the props for doing it first, you can hear all the musicians on Free Jazz concentrating too hard as they try to make their solo statements or comment on what the other players are doing. It's all a bit tentative compared to what would come later, and, as a maelstrom, it's all rather polite. Interestingly, Eric Dolphy's bass clarinet comes off as the dominant and most confident voice. He's seems to have been born to channel some sort of ineffable cry from the soul, and it's no wonder that Coltrane wanted to be near him."