Search - Ornette Coleman :: Ken Burns JAZZ Collection: Ornette Coleman

A handy introduction to a great original

N. Dorward | Toronto, ON Canada | 01/09/2001

(4 out of 5 stars)

"Ornette Coleman's music remains one of the most challenging oeuvres in modern music; it has been profoundly influential in jazz, among both "mainstream" & "avantgarde" musicians, but also outside it (Zappa, Captain Beefheart, punk, funk, &c, all took something from his example; Jerry Garcia even joined forces with Coleman for one album). His music still sounds stunningly fresh. Coleman's most famous innovation was to drop the "changes" of jazz tunes--the regularly recurring 32-bar cycles of chords that made up the usual jazz standard. Instead, the musicians created the structure as they went along--& all parts of the group were equally important, were in a sense "soloing" at the same time. Though such intuitive polytonality had long been a feature of jazz (for instance, in Miles Davis's 1950s group with Coltrane), Coleman put it centre-stage, & only musicians of the calibre & empathy as those in his group--Don Cherry on trumpet, Charlie Haden on bass, Ed Blackwell or Billy Higgins on drums--could have made it work so well. Ears used to the polish of, say, the Jazz Messengers will be startled by Coleman's deliberate microtonality & distortions; one's sense of what is unison, what is harmony is disoriented & then reoriented by the theme statements of Coleman & his trumpeter Don Cherry--they are stating the same melody, but so individually that the lines are complementary, not blended. While Coleman is often paired with Coltrane as one of the radicals of the early 1960s, I can hardly think of two more dissimilar musicians; the high seriousness & hypnotic devoutness of Coltrane are the opposite from Coleman's earthiness & mordant sense of humour--Charlie Parker's ironic doodles of "Country Gardens" around "Lover Man" or Rachmaninov around "All the Things You Are" reached their culmination in Coleman's devastating take on "Embraceable You". -- The other key to Coleman's music is his ability as a composer: he is with Wayne Shorter the major post-bop composer, & his tunes have become more & more frequently performed by musicians of every stripe. (I even have a bluegrass version of "Ramblin'" in my collection!)This CD is a shrewdly selected survey of Coleman's music, mostly focussing on the brief period where Coleman recorded for Atlantic in the early 1960s; the Atlantics remain the cornerstone of his oeuvre. "The Sphinx" comes from his mid-1950s work for Contemporary--a lesser body of work, certainly, though perhaps deserving of a little more representation, as those albums are where you can find some of Coleman's most famous tunes, such as "Turnaround", "The Blessing" and "Tears Inside" (a blues that became one of the first Coleman tunes to be covered--by Art Pepper, on _Smack Up_). No arguments with this compilation's choice of "Congeniality", "Embraceable You", "Lonely Woman", "Blues Connection" & "Ramblin'" from the seminal Atlantics; these are classics, no less than Armstrong's "West End Blues", Parker's "Parker's Mood" or Rollins' "Blue Seven". Kudos go to this compilation for including the "First Take" of _Free Jazz_, a risky move: this is a 18-minute track that samples some of Coleman's most daring but difficult music, a double quartet of musicians assembled in the studio who were given the task of creating a large-scale piece from the most skeletal of fanfares as the only pre-composed material; the original _Free Jazz_ had just the 38-minute master version but the much shorter first take was first issued in the 1970s & is a useful pocket-sized version with its own contours. Difficult but necessary listening. -- One criticism I'd have here is that room might have been found for Coleman's quartet from the Atlantic period with the doomed virtuoso bassist Scott LaFaro on _Ornette!_, an album that also features some of Ed Blackwell's best playing. -- After the Atlantics this compilation quickly moves through the rest of Coleman's career. That's perhaps inevitable, given that that career has been somewhat erratic & uneven since the mid-1960s. As usual with the Ken Burns project, there's a distinct implication that jazz took a wrong turn after the mid-1960s, especially with electrified jazz-rock, funk & fusion (there's only one track here from this aspect of Coleman's oeuvre). The compilation would have given a fairer impression of Coleman's career by representing recent work--for instance, the incendiary encounter with Pat Metheny in the 1980s, _Song X_, or the fine 1990s duets with Joachim Kuhn on _Colors_. -- But these are nitpicky points: this is about as good a one-disc job as could have been done."

Great intro to the cutting-edge of modern jazz!

J. Lund | SoCal, USA | 02/13/2001

(5 out of 5 stars)

"The success of Ken Burns' JAZZ video series has obviously revived interest in the music, and particularly for these single-disc representations of the careers of a number of all-time jazz greats. I can imagine more than a few potential collectors of the Ken Burns CD series coming upon this disc and getting a little queasy, given the "avant-garde" label tagged on Ornette Coleman's music. To those potential purchasers, I would recommend this CD if your newfound affinity for jazz extends to the likes of modernists Charles Mingus, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, and John Coltrane (all of whom are also represented in this series). Yes, Ornette's music is perhaps less formally tied to the structural paradigms of the bop / post-bop era of modern jazz. Yet most of the music here follows a familiar theme / solos / theme approach, the musicians are top-rate (Haden, Cherry, Higgins, Blackwell, Lafaro, Tacuma, etc.), the melodies are generally memorable (often joyous and witty), and the blues has an overt presence, albeit taken to somewhat more abstract levels than even his modernist predecessors. Indeed, if you like Charlie Parker's playing, you might feel quite at home with most of Coleman's solos, even though Ornette uses slurred phrases and other vocal sounds to a greater extent than Bird....and if FREE JAZZ (FIRST TAKE)--the most "avant-garde" cut on this CD--is a bit of a struggle to get through at first, you're not alone. However, there is a method to the seeming madness that becomes clearer with subsequent hearings. Other than that, this CD primarily focuses on small-group recordings, including a number of Ornette's most-famous compositions (LONELY WOMAN, etc.). The last two tracks demonstrate Coleman's willingness to find dramatic new contexts to his approach: THE GOOD LIFE and THEME FROM A SYMPHONY (variation 2) is the same tune performed first with a symphony orchestra, second with an avant-funk/jazz electric ensemble (two guitars, two basses, two drums). THEME takes the listener to 1975...in a perfect world there would be a disc two to bring us up to the present. Nonetheless, this is as good an intro to Ornette as one will find."

Definitive

Blues Bro | Lakewood, Colorado USA | 05/01/2002

(5 out of 5 stars)

"With over 70 minutes of music, you definitely get your money's worth with this one. And there is no other compilation that includes tracks from various labels for which Ornette recorded. One track from Ornette's first session, two tracks from the 'shape of jazz to come' one from 'the golden circle'and even some of his later work like 'Dancing in your head'. You even get 17 minutes of 'first take' from 'Free Jazz'. Quite simply, the definitive compilation of Ornette Coleman out there."