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Ornette Coleman Albums
Ornette
Coleman: The Shape of Jazz to Come
By
Kalamu ya Salaam
Ornette Coleman
started rap in 1959 with a record called
The Shape Of Jazz To Come. I don’t mean he
literally invented rap, but aesthetically (in terms
of the three main elements of music from a Western
perspective) what Ornette did in jazz is analogous
to what rap did in popular music.
Western music is based on a triad of melody,
harmony, and rhythm. Popular Western music
emphasizes melody. The high-art music emphasizes
harmony. None of it swings too tough. And in all of
it, a premium is placed on composition and technical
correctness, i.e., adherence to various, abstract
ideal standards that a specific performance is
measured against.
What we call Black music is a different aesthetic.
Hell, we can do away with harmony, simplify the
melody, hit a groove and ride for days—like Mr.
Dynamite recording a nine minute song without ever
crossing a bridge. You know what I’m saying?
By Western standards a lot of James Brown songs
technically aren’t songs. Plus, recordings both
spread the music and froze the music, enabled
cross-cultural (and cross-time, cross-place) study
and appreciation of the music), but at the same
time, the recording device locked the music into a
static/processed thing, whereas in Black music one
factor that is certain is change. It’s always
changing. A record don’t never change. So in one
sense while the record enabled the world to hear
Black music, it also encouraged people to think that
“one” way was “the” way.
(I’m coming to Ornette and rap, right now. Stay with
me.)
Well, Ornette thought, Suppose you didn’t have to
adhere to a standardized harmony? Suppose you could
play whatever note you wanted to play at a given
moment? Suppose your progression was based on your
imagination and not a set of predetermined codes?
Wouldn’t the music sound fresher?
So, that’s what he did. Chord changes? The changes
were no longer predetermined ahead of time. For
those reared to work off of changes, this freedom
was anarchy of the most despicable sort. Hence, when
Ornette hit New York in 1959, a number of seasoned
musicians, not to mention the corps of jazz critics,
thought Ornette was crazy (and that is their
assessment when they were being charitable and
giving Ornette the benefit of the doubt).
In the early Sixties, I was just getting into jazz
and I didn’t know that Ornette was supposed to be
controversial, not supposed to be considered in the
jazz tradition. Of course, once I started
subscribing to
Downbeat, I quickly found out how wrong I
was. I will never forget
Downbeat giving no stars (zero, nada, zip)
to
Meditations by
John Coltrane—but that is another story. Anyway,
because I didn’t know any better I could dig Ornette.
He sounded like he was preaching to me. I mean, in
my estimation, he sounded like a preacher. And then
when he did his trumpet and violin thing with his
then nine-year-old son on drums (the record was
Empty Foxhole), well, something was
definitely happening that hadn’t happened before.
Fortunately or unfortunately (depending on your
point of view) Trane was happening at the same time
and at that time Trane was the Einstein of harmony.
I used to walk out the room when Trane came on the
radio because I couldn’t hear it at the time (circa
1963, early ’64). By 1965 I was deep into Trane, but
again that’s another story. What I’m saying about
Ornette is that his emphasis on melody and rhythm,
on preaching over a beat regardless of how he hooked
the words up, that strongly appealed to me. And of
all of Ornette’s large body of work, the composition
that most strongly appealed to me was “Lonely
Woman.”
So what’s the connection between Ornette and rap?
Well, rap took the popular song form, obliterated
the harmony part, and emphasized preaching over a
beat. And that was a revolutionary development, a
development foreshadowed by what had already
happened in the jazz world.
Meanwhile, over the years, Ornette’s revolution was
absorbed by the jazz world. By the mid-Sixties, even
Trane adopted and adapted Ornette’s approach—late
period Trane is generally appraised as an acquired
taste of the rarest sort, and again, that’s another
story. Trane is another story. But a converging
story in that Ornette’s approach became Trane’s
approach.
By the mid-seventies, James Brown had saxophone
players wailing like Trane—listen to “Superbad”—but
it was really an Ornette Coleman approach: preaching
over rhythm. Which is part of the reason that James
Brown’s music is so often sampled, copied,
appropriated, imitated, re-created, etc. in rap
music. Whether the beat-meisters know it or not,
it’s not simply the beat; it’s an entire aesthetic
that they are plugging into.
An aesthetic that does not come in a linear fashion
from Ornette Coleman to
Dr. Dre, but rather a shared aesthetic that
represents different ways of drinking from the same
well, the water of African musical aesthetics
liberally laced with African-American blues
elements, the melancholy inside of our joy, the joy
inside of our melancholy. The dialectic of getting
down in order to rise above.
I, of course, contend you can hear all of that in
“Lonely Woman,” and even if you can’t hear it, that
don’t mean those elements are not there, just might
simply mean, you ain’t hearing it—I’m aware it could
also be that I’m hearing haints, i.e., hearing stuff
that’s not there, but I doubt it: the scream, moan,
shout, and cry manifests itself too consistently in
Black music to be an accident. The element of
trance, riding a groove to an altered state of
consciousness, is a constant in this ever-changing
music.
So, finally, what I’m saying is that there is
cultural unity or commonality to all forms of our
music that address the basic aesthetic of saying
something over a groove, of inducing a trance as a
way of transformation. And that’s what I liked about
Ornette Coleman.
Obviously, I was not the only person who felt that
way. In 2004 the San Francisco Jazz Festival
commissioned Joshua Redman to lead a small band who
would perform both original compositions and a
program of compositions by a selected jazz composer.
The inaugural year featured composer was Ornette
Coleman. It’s a brilliant idea, wonderfully
executed.
A limited-edition 3CD set of music was released—one
CD is all Coleman interpretations and the other two
CDs feature one composition from each of the eight
band members.
“Lonely Woman” is on the recording and features the
excellent alto work of Miguel Zenon. In fact, they
ought to release the Coleman interpretations as a
single CD—it’s just that good. . . . Additionally, I
strongly urge you to check out a video documentary
called
Freestyle, The Art of Rhyme by Kevin
Fitzgerald. Why? Well, because the art of freestylin’
in rap is aesthetically the same approach as Ornette
Coleman.
Ornette and rap, for me it’s not a case of one
leading to the other, or even one coming before the
other, it’s simply what happens when the same
sensibility is manifested by different individuals
in different eras and different contexts. So
actually I should have said: Ornette Coleman is a
pre-rap manifestation of rap and rap is an Ornette
Coleman approach to popular music. Seen? Heard?
Source:
Breath of Life*
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Ornette
Coleman, after an unsuccessful spell with R&B in his
Texas homeland, moved to the freer atmosphere
of the West Coast. There he hooked up with other
sympathetic artists including Don Cherry and Charlie
Haden who he would later collaborate with on a
number of ventures.
Innovation has
been the hallmark of Coleman’s career and though he
has at times been regarded as being ahead of his
audiences, he has released a number of highly
regarded albums, widely praised as moving free jazz
forward. Among his releases, the albums
Change of the Century (1959),
Science Fiction (1971) and
Sound Grammar (2006) are considered to be
among his strongest. The Sound Grammar album,
released almost 50 years after his first, earned him
a Pulitzer Prize.—
Amazon.com
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Ornette Coleman
(born 9 March 1930 in Fort Worth, Texas) continues to
push himself into unusual playing situations, often
with much younger musicians or musicians from
radically different musical cultures, and still
performs regularly. An increasing number of his
compositions, while not ubiquitous, have become
minor jazz standards, including "Lonely Woman,"
"Peace," "Turnaround," "When Will the Blues Leave?"
"The Blessing," "Law Years," "What Reason Could I
Give" and "I've Waited All My Life", among others.
He has influenced virtually every saxophonist of a
modern disposition, and nearly every such jazz
musician, of the generation that followed him. His
songs have proven endlessly malleable: pianists such
as
Paul Bley and
Paul Plimley have managed to turn them to their
purposes;
John Zorn recorded
Spy vs Spy (1989), an album of extremely loud,
fast, and abrupt versions of Coleman songs.
Finnish jazz singer
Carola covered Coleman's "Lonely Woman" and
there have even been country-music versions of
Coleman tunes (by
Richard Greene). |
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Coleman's playing has
profoundly influenced, directly or otherwise,
countless musicians, trying as he has for five
decades to understand and discover the shape of not
just jazz, but all music to come. On February 11,
2007, Ornette Coleman was honored with a Grammy
award for lifetime achievement, in recognition of
this legacy. On May 1, 2010, Ornette was awarded a
honorary doctorate.—Wikipedia
posted 18 May 2010
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Ornette Coleman Website
music website >
http://www.kalamu.com/bol/
writing website >
http://wordup.posterous.com/
daily blog >
http://kalamu.posterous.com
twitter >
http://twitter.com/neogriot
facebook >
http://www.facebook.com/kalamu.salaam
Guarding the Flame of Life
/
Strange Fruit Lyncing Report
John
Coltrane, "Alabama" /
Kalamu ya Salaam, "Alabama"
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A Love Supreme
A Blues for the Birmingham Four
/ Eulogy for the Young Victims
/ Six Dead After Church
Bombing
Audio:
My Story, My Song (Featuring blues guitarist Walter Wolfman Washington)
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Greenback Planet: How the Dollar Conquered
the World and Threatened Civilization as We Know It
By H. W. Brands
In Greenback Planet, acclaimed historian H. W. Brands charts the dollar's astonishing rise to become the world's principal currency. Telling the story with the verve of a novelist, he recounts key episodes in U.S. monetary history, from the Civil War debate over fiat money (greenbacks) to the recent worldwide financial crisis. Brands explores the dollar's changing relations to gold and silver and to other currencies and cogently explains how America's economic might made the dollar the fundamental standard of value in world finance. He vividly describes the 1869 Black Friday attempt to corner the gold market, banker J. P. Morgan's bailout of the U.S. treasury, the creation of the Federal Reserve, and President Franklin Roosevelt's handling of the bank panic of 1933. Brands shows how lessons learned (and not learned) in the Great Depression have influenced subsequent U.S. monetary policy, and how the dollar's dominance helped transform economies in countries ranging from Germany and Japan after World War II to Russia and China today. |
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Sex at the Margins
Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry
By Laura María Agustín
This book explodes several myths: that selling sex is completely different from any other kind of work, that migrants who sell sex are passive victims and that the multitude of people out to save them are without self-interest. Laura Agustín makes a passionate case against these stereotypes, arguing that the label 'trafficked' does not accurately describe migrants' lives and that the 'rescue industry' serves to disempower them. Based on extensive research amongst both migrants who sell sex and social helpers, Sex at the Margins provides a radically different analysis. Frequently, says Agustin, migrants make rational choices to travel and work in the sex industry, and although they are treated like a marginalised group they form part of the dynamic global economy. Both powerful and controversial, this book is essential reading for all those who want to understand the increasingly important relationship between sex markets, migration and the desire for social justice. —Lisa Adkins, University of London |
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
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Enjoy!
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
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January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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2012
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