#248 - Ornette Coleman - The Shape of Jazz to Come (1959)
MUSIC HISTORY COMPILED BY ADAM BERNARD:
BACKGROUND – ORNETTE COLEMAN
Randolph Denard Ornette Coleman was an American jazz saxophonist, trumpeter, violinist, and composer. He was best known as a principal founder of the free jazz genre, a term derived from his 1960 album Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation. His pioneering works often abandoned the harmony-based composition, tonality, chord changes, and fixed rhythm found in earlier jazz idioms. Instead, Coleman emphasized an experimental approach to improvisation, rooted in ensemble playing and blues phrasing. AllMusic called him "one of the most beloved and polarizing figures in jazz history," noting that while "now celebrated as a fearless innovator and a genius, he was initially regarded by peers and critics as rebellious, disruptive, and even a fraud."
Born in 1930 and raised in Fort Worth, Texas, Coleman taught himself to play the saxophone when he was a teenager. In high school, he participated in band until he was dismissed for improvising during "The Washington Post" march. He began his musical career playing in local R&B and bebop groups, and eventually formed his own group in Los Angeles featuring members such as Ed Blackwell, Don Cherry, Charlie Haden, and Billy Higgins. From 1948 to 1958, Coleman moved between New Orleans, Fort Worth, and Los Angeles, working various jobs and developing his own unique sound that was often met with hostility. His unique approach to jazz initially made it difficult to make ends meet by playing music. While employed as an elevator operator in L.A. he studied music theory and harmony and developed an idiosyncratic take on country blues and folk forms.
Coleman's big break came in Los Angeles when he caught the attention of bassist Percy Heath and pianist John Lewis of the Modern Jazz Quartet. Lewis encouraged Coleman and his trumpeter Don Cherry to attend the Lenox School of Jazz (a seminal summer jazz education program) in Massachusetts in 1959, at which Lewis was the director. Lewis also secured Coleman a deal with Atlantic Records, who paid his tuition at the Lenox School of Jazz. Though both Coleman and Cherry were already rather accomplished by this point in their careers, Lewis wanted to use their attendance at the Lenox School of Jazz to generate buzz amongst jazz circles. Their presence at the school was not without friction amongst students and faculty alike, but in the end, their attending the school accomplished what Lewis hoped to achieve. After his stint at the Lenox School of Jazz, Coleman was booked by Lewis to play at the 1959 Monterey Jazz Festival in California. These were all pivotal events in Coleman's career, who in June 1959 suggested that he was considering abandoning music in order to study religion. A confident of Coleman's told him to think about his potential, and urged him to reconsider. This leads us to today's album
On November 17, 1959, shortly after the release of today's album, Coleman's quartet began its residency at the Five Spot in NYC. This engagement was arranged by John Lewis and was initially scheduled to last two weeks; it was eventually extended to 2.5 months. The performances were well attended and generated controversy among attendees, critics, and jazz musicians alike. Some musicians and critics praised Coleman for an inventiveness not seen since the emergence of be-bop, including Charles Mingus, who said "It’s like organized disorganization or playing wrong right. It gets to you emotionally like a drummer." Others, including Miles Davis, were unimpressed by Coleman's music. In 1966, he recorded The Empty Foxhole with his son, Denardo Coleman, who was ten years old. It was regarded this as an ill-advised piece of publicity on Coleman's part. Despite his youth, Denardo Coleman had studied drumming for several years. Coleman formed another quartet. Haden, Garrison, and Elvin Jones appeared, and Dewey Redman joined the group, usually on tenor saxophone. In 1968, Coleman performed live with Yoko Ono at Albert Hall. One song was included on the album Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band (1970). He explored symphonic compositions with his 1972 album Skies of America, featuring the London Symphony Orchestra. Coleman, like Miles Davis before him, took to playing with electrified instruments. The 1976 funk album Dancing in Your Head, Coleman's first recording with the group which later became known as Prime Time, prominently featured electric guitars. While this marked a stylistic departure for Coleman, the music maintained certain similarities to his earlier work. These performances had the same angular melodies and simultaneous group improvisations – what was referred to as "nobody solos, everybody solos" and what Coleman called harmolodics – and although the nature of the pulse was altered, Coleman's rhythmic approach was not.
In the 1980s, albums such as Virgin Beauty and Of Human Feelings continued to use rock and funk rhythms, sometimes called free funk. Jerry Garcia played guitar on three tracks from Coleman's 1988 album Virgin Beauty: "Three Wishes", "Singing in the Shower", and "Desert Players". Coleman joined the Grateful Dead on stage in 1993 during "Space" and stayed for a few songs including the encore. Another collaboration was with guitarist Pat Metheny, with whom Coleman recorded Song X (1985); though the album was released under Metheny's name, Coleman was essentially co-leader (contributing all the compositions). In 1995, Coleman and his son Denardo founded the Harmolodic record label. His 2006 album Sound Grammar received the Pulitzer Prize for Music, making Coleman the second jazz musician ever to receive the honor. In September 2006 he released a live album titled Sound Grammar with his son, Denardo Coleman, and two bassists, Greg Cohen, and Tony Falanga. This was his first album of new material in ten years and was recorded in 2005. It won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for music, Coleman being only the second jazz musician to win the prize. Although Wynton Marsalis won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1997 for Blood on the Fields, which is an oratorio on slavery, Sound Grammar is the first jazz album to win the award.
Coleman died of a cardiac arrest at the age of 85 in New York City on June 11, 2015. His funeral was a three-hour event with performances and speeches by several of his collaborators and contemporaries.
In 2012, the Library of Congress added this album to the National Recording Registry.It has been called one of the 20 essentia free jazz albums. The album was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2015. Coleman was inducted into the Down Beat Jazz Hall of Fame in 1969. He also received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2007 and the. Miles Davis Award at the Festival International de Jazz de Montréal in 2009
Shape of Jazz to Come had a deep effect on a completely different vein of jazz musician from the Miles Davis and Art Blakey camps. It was the precursor to Coleman’s “Free Jazz” album (released only two years later), which cemented that term as a subgenre that had to be dealt with in opposition to other streams in the field. Out of this approach came others, including those of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACAM) (see Malachi Favors and Art Ensemble of Chicago), and it encouraged younger musicians such as John Coltrane and Albert Ayler to stretch the limits of this music.
ALBUM BACKGROUND – THE SHAPE OF JAZZ TO COME
Although Coleman initially wished for the album to be titled Focus on Sanity, after one of the songs on the album, it was ultimately titled The Shape of Jazz to Come at the urging of Atlantic producer Nesuhi Ertegun, who felt that the title would give consumers “an idea about the uniqueness of the LP.”
Coleman's quartet was unusual in that it did not employ a chordal instrument such as a piano or guitar.It was early in his career, in an attempt to further emphasize focus on melody over harmony, that he stopped including a piano as a part of his ensembles. Each composition contains a brief thematic statement, then several minutes of free improvisation, followed by a repetition of the main theme. While this resembles the conventional head-solo-head structure of bebop, it abandons the use of chord structures. The Shape of Jazz to Come found Coleman and his quartet elaborating on the sound and themes he had been developing throughout his career.
One prominent feature of Coleman's signature sound was that he played a plastic Grafton saxophone, which some feel contributed to the harshness of his timbre. He bought a plastic horn in Los Angeles in 1954 because he was unable to afford a metal saxophone, though he didn't like the sound of the plastic instrument at first. He coined the term "harmolodic", a combination of harmony, movement, and melody, to describe his philosophy of improvisation which heavily emphasized melody rather than harmony. Coleman continues with this tradition on The Shape of Jazz to Come, dispensing with harmonic accompaniment and focusing solely on improvised melodies and variations on themes and motifs. Coleman had a unique approach to pitch as well. His use of microtonal intervals was central to his sound, and he even went as far as to suggest that the same pitch should sound different when played in different contexts, stating that "jazz is the only music in which the same note can be played night after night, but differently each time"
Jazz descended from the streets of New Orleans, where “King” Oliver and Louis Armstrong participated in “backline” street music, mostly for funerals, weddings and Mardi Gras. This style of performance is apparent in every track on “Shape of Jazz to Come.” Ornette’s method of improvisation, later coined by him as Harmolodic, pushed for group participation in deference to the solo, an approach important to classic Bebopop artists such as Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk.
The political context of “Shape of Jazz to Come” is equally important. It is rooted in the Civil Rights Movement and is a commentary on the “Shape of Things to Come.” The titles of Coleman’s next albums also speak to the political upheaval of the time, well as the power and significance of Black American Music (“Change of the Century”, and “This is Our Music”. The same year the genre-coining album “Free Jazz” was released in 1960, freedom fighters from the North went South to fight for the anti-segregation laws. Within mere months of the assassinations of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy, Ornette released his album “Crisis” with a dramatic picture of the Bill of Rights in flames on its cover. 3 To understand Ornette Coleman’s music one must put it in the political context from which it emerged.