[Dixielandjazz] Ornette Coleman - Five Spot - Jazz History

[Steve Barbone]

CAVEAT This may be more than most of you want to read or know about Ornette
and his career. IF SO DELETE NOW.

THANKS TO NORMAN VICKERS FOR THIS INFORMATION.

Unique and sometimes bizarre insights PLUS DESCRIPTION OF THE LEGENDARY
"FIVE SPOT CAFE"  on Cooper Square NYC where jazz history was made in front
of some eclectic patrons. Those were the days (see 1st paragraph). I was
there and forever grateful for that good fortune.

Cheers,
Steve Barbone

  
The Art of the Improviser - by DAVID YAFFE
[from the May 14, 2007 issue of "The Nation"]

On or about November 17, 1959, human character changed--according to jazz
mythology, anyway. That week, the Ornette Coleman Quartet debuted at
Manhattan's Five Spot, a club owned by the culturally fortuitous (and
exploitative) Termini brothers, a watering hole for Abstract Expressionist
painters and New York School poets. The Five Spot was on the Bowery, poised
at an intersection of Skid Row and gentrified bohemia, old ghettos and an in
utero East Village counterculture. For a few dollars and a cheap drink, you
could stand at the bar and see jazz history in the making, a glimpse into
the future that would become part of a fetishized past. The Five Spot wasn't
just any dive but a key to the hipster zeitgeist; just two years earlier, in
1957, when the club featured a six-month residency for Thelonious Monk and
John Coltrane, Norman Mailer was perched at a table taking notes for his
essay "The White Negro."

What were these patrons--from the anonymous scenesters to the cultural
icons--hearing, and how were they hearing it? Leonard Bernstein, who had
recently performed with Louis Armstrong, allegedly exclaimed, "This is the
greatest thing that ever happened to jazz!" Bernstein sat in, Lionel Hampton
sang Coleman's praises, John Lewis maintained that Coleman was the first
true extension of Parker, and Sonny Rollins sat at the end of the bar and
moped, in the midst of his Williamsburg Bridge sabbatical. Coltrane came
regularly, and he and Coleman would walk out into the night talking music.
LeRoi Jones (nearly a decade away from changing his name to Amiri Baraka)
would soon hail Coleman's music as the most uncompromising of black
aesthetics, a sonic premonition, a soundtrack to the racial upheaval to
come. But while Coleman spread the gospel from Baraka to Bernstein, other
pace runners were not so impressed--Miles Davis, for example. Davis had
worked so hard to be a man of the moment, but the perch felt precarious when
someone else, for the jazz intelligentsia, was defining The Shape of Jazz to
Come, as the title of Coleman's 1959 album brashly asserted. Staying on one
chord was his thing, Davis must have been thinking as he stood at the bar,
glaring. But this motherfucker wasn't even playing modes. Coleman sounded
like an Abstract Expressionist Louis Jordan, with juke-joint honking and
seemingly random splatter. Davis grumpily agreed to sit in and then told a
reporter he was sure Coleman was "all screwed up inside." (Coleman would
later retort that Davis was a black man who lived like a white man.) Another
prominent detractor was Charles Mingus, standing at the bar, arms crossed,
making Coleman's bassist, Charlie Haden, tremble. Mingus and Coleman would
eventually become friends--Coleman visited Mingus at his deathbed--but
Mingus never stopped dissing him. Coleman, he said after the Five Spot gig,
was "playing wrong right." Near the end of his life, Mingus harrumphed, "His
mama told him he was a genius just because he put the 'm' block next to the
'a' block." 

It is remarkable to imagine that there were days when aesthetics were a
matter of life and death, when a shift in rhythm or harmony would summon the
kind of apocalyptic language usually reserved for war or revolution, a time
when the classical music of the moment--from the Darmstadt school of Pierre
Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen to the New York school of John Cage and
Morton Feldman--struggled to define music's future. Change of the Century,
proclaimed Coleman's second Atlantic title. This Is Our Music, thundered the
third. These were the days when jazz albums were cultural manifestoes, and
when the order, as Bob Dylan put it a few years later, was rapidly fadin'.

Nearly half a century later, Coleman's musical revolution has become
official enough for the Pulitzer Prize in Music and a Lifetime Achievement
Grammy--his first. (The year 2007 may well be remembered as a year of
belated awards, when Martin Scorsese and Coleman finally got their due.)
Human character did not change. In fact, the revolution wasn't even
televised. Coleman was on camera (along with Natalie Cole, who won a Grammy
in 1991 for her necrophiliac duet with her great father) to present the Best
New Artist Award to Carrie Underwood, a reminder that in the post-Five Spot
era, Paula, Randy and Simon are on hand to inaugurate the next cultural
moment. But Coleman's lifetime achievement award was presented at a smaller,
B-list ceremony at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre, where they also gave out the
technical awards and other industry marginalia. It is a shame that the
entire speech can't be quoted here, because it's probably the most
remarkable Grammy speech ever made. Here, though, are some highlights:

One of the things I am experiencing is very important and that is: You don't
have to die to kill and you don't have to kill to die. And above all,
nothing exists that is not in the form of life because life is eternal with
or without people so we are grateful for life to be here at this very
moment.
For myself, I'd rather be human than to be dead. And I would also die  to be
human. So you can't die, you can't die to be neither one, regardless of what
you say or think so that's why I believe that music itself is eternal in
relationship to sound, meaning, intelligence...all the things that have to
have something to do with being alive because you were born and because
someone else made it possible for you to be here, which we call our parents
etc. etc.
For me, the most eternal  thing is that I would like to live until I learn
what it is and what it isn't...that is, how do we kill death since it kills
everything? 

You would think that there would be nothing to add to this, that the rest is
silence, but Coleman eventually concludes thus:

It is really, really eternal, this that we are constantly being created as
human beings to know that exists and it's really, really unbelievable to
know that nothing that's alive can die unless it's been killed. So what we
should try to realize is to remove that part of what it is so that whatever
we are, life is all there is and I thank you very much.

Coleman is, in other words, unkillable. In his Lester Young-meets-gangsta
porkpie and impeccably tailored pinstriped suit, the Grammy winner was
unjustly slighted by fashion roundups of the ceremony. But he's still larger
than death. Like Baby Huey, he keeps coming back.

Indeed, Coleman is one of the last immortals. He can still cause ripples in
the jazz world, even if that world and its ripples have gotten much smaller.
Ornette listeners would wait patiently for him to release a serious jazz
album with a serious and worthy rhythm section. Once in a while (the first
half of In All Languages in 1987, the two Sound Museum CDs in 1996), he
would. Then only live performances, rumors, man-about-town spottings of him
at Harlem fried chicken dives and Upper East Side museums and long spells of
silence. Pretty soon, people were waiting for him to release
something--anything. This was one of the last surviving jazz musicians who
changed the way we hear music. Would he get one more chance to preserve it
on disc? 

Last year, after nearly a decade without officially released recordings
(with incendiary performances along the way), Coleman released Sound
Grammar, a 2005 live recording from Germany, on his own label of the same
name. If the title evokes a lesson, The Shape of Jazz to Come, his 1959
album released a few months before the Five Spot gig, announced a prophecy.
Could the new title be a shine on those who want to lay down the jazz laws
he so legendarily subverted? Is the shape of jazz to come now so well
defined that, as the old surviving mavericks roar into their 70s, few even
care? When Coleman appeared at the Five Spot, he had already recorded a
couple of albums for Contemporary, the second of which, Tomorrow Is the
Question!, also blared a jazz future few could hear, delivered on a tiny
indie label that paid him next to nothing.

Coleman had arrived from LA by way of his hometown, Fort Worth, Texas, a
veteran of the rhythm and blues and minstrel circuit who'd been beaten up
for playing atonal choruses for crowds that shouted for "Stardust." He had
been dissed by beboppers (including Dexter Gordon and Max Roach), who
thought him incapable of invoking Charlie Parker (a charge refuted by one
listen to "Bird Food" or, really, anything he ever did), in and out of the
Jehovah's Witnesses, sporting long hair and a beard in a crew-cut era. He
was so ragged and weird, it was a testament to his genius (and more than a
little luck) that he found the right people to figure him out. After his
tenor saxophone was smashed by hostile listeners, he switched to alto, and
the sound he created was, for those willing to listen, the instrument's
major step after Parker's revolution in the 1940s; John Lewis was onto
something. (In the mid-1960s, Coleman also began playing trumpet and violin
without any formal training. His trumpet playing has demonstrated a learning
curve over the years but still makes one nostalgic for Don Cherry. His
violin playing, on the other hand, remains, shall we say, an acquired
taste.) This funky elevator operator got a prized fellowship at 29 to study
with the Third Stream guru Gunther Schuller at the Lenox School of Jazz in
summer 1959, a contract with Atlantic Records and that Five Spot residency,
leading him on an eccentric and improbable path to immortality. Schuller
wanted to teach Coleman music theory, but when he finally made a
breakthrough, Coleman vomited. There would be no more lessons.

In 1959 people were waiting for someone to play outside meter and chords
while still providing blues and bop signposts. That year Kline and de
Kooning were dribbling; Robert Lowell was confessing; Allen Ginsberg wrote
"Lysergic Acid"; John Cassavetes's Mingus-scored, jump-cutting Shadows swept
through art-house movie theaters; and curiosity seekers were lining up on
that chilly Bowery street to check out the man with the plastic saxophone.
Miles Davis's Kind of Blue had come out a couple of months earlier, just a
few months after John Coltrane's Giant Steps, each disdaining chord changes
in favor of solemn inquiries into chords and modes. Davis's "So What" coolly
navigated between a couple of minor Mixolydian modes; Coltrane's "Giant
Steps" circled the circle of fifths. Surrounded by a West Coast posse of
young, like-minded musicians in short trench coats--including bassist
Charlie Haden (who had grown up playing hillbilly music in a family band),
Don Cherry (just shy of 23, blowing on a pocket trumpet) and drummer Billy
Higgins (who kept time all to himself while sharing his leader's eccentric
sense of it)--Coleman showed up at the Five Spot and blew the other band on
the bill (Art Farmer and Benny Golson's Jazztet) off the headlines, a gig
withered into a footnote.

Who wasn't in the band was just as important as who was: namely, a pianist.
Gerry Mulligan and Chet Baker's pianoless quartet had already popularized
"cool" jazz a few years earlier; Sonny Rollins had already cut out the piano
and filled in the missing chords on tenor on the trio dates Freedom Suite,
Way Out West and A Night at the Village Vanguard. But the absence of piano
in Coleman's quartet called attention to what else was missing--chords,
rhythms, structures.

Coleman's alto was white plastic, like the one Charlie Parker would pick up
in haste after leaving his brass one in hock. The plastic was not only
preferable for its harsher sound--one with less vibrato than Parker's--but
for what was read and perhaps misread, as its aesthetic of artifice: Ce
n'est pas un saxophone! Of all the ink spilled on Coleman's impact, perhaps
the most memorable came from Thomas Pynchon's 1963 debut novel, V., in which
the character McClintic Sphere (with a last name nodding to Thelonious
Monk's middle name) sets the jazz world on end at a club called the V-Note,
making everyone rethink space and time with a motto of equilibrium: "Keep
cool, but care." Sphere's alto is ivory, not plastic, but his impact is
similarly divisive and shape-shifting:

He blew a hand-carved ivory alto saxophone with a 41Ž2 reed and the sound
was like nothing any of them had heard before. The usual divisions
prevailed: collegians did not dig, and left after an average of one and a
half sets. Personnel from other groups, either with a night off or taking a
long break from somewhere crosstown or uptown, listened hard, trying to dig.
"I am still thinking," they would say if you asked.

Unlike Dylan's 1965 electric performance at Newport (a Rite of Spring for
another genre and another orthodoxy), Coleman's Five Spot gig, in one of the
great blunders of music industry history, was never recorded. We have to
rely on hearsay and conjecture--and Pynchon!--to get an idea of what
everyone was arguing about. Fortunately, Coleman clocked in hours of studio
time in the two-year flurry that followed, resulting in a body of work for
Atlantic collected on the six-CD box set Beauty Is a Rare Thing, a title
evoking the mélange of lyricism and clangor he was summoning with empathetic
musicians. By the time of its 1993 release, it was an expensive canonical
artifact, meant for the mantle like a Pléiades edition of Proust. The liner
notes were hyperbolic, but by then the people who were going to be convinced
already were. 

Perhaps the most telling measure of Coleman's impact was his influence on
his detractors, notably Miles Davis, whose great mid-'60s quintet featured
the Ornette-inspired virtuosity of pianist Herbie Hancock and drummer Tony
Williams. Mingus, who'd developed a novel approach to collective
improvisation in his jazz workshops, would also come around, recording his
own version of free jazz with Duke Ellington and Max Roach on the 1962 trio
session Money Jungle, and sublimely collaborating with multireedist Eric
Dolphy, who teamed up with Coleman on the 1960 landmark Free Jazz. (Free
Jazz's original cover was famously adorned with a reproduction of Jackson
Pollock's 1954 drip painting White Light.) Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane
both plucked members of Ornette's Atlantic ensemble of those anni mirabili
for memorable recordings; Coltrane's The Avant-Garde is a classic, and every
note on every track of Rollins's On the Outside (also known as Our Man in
Jazz) is a revelation. It's astonishing to hear how the era's most powerful
improvisers took Coleman's audacious conceptions and ran with them with a
broader vocabulary than he was ever technically capable of developing
himself. 

Yet just as Pollock's work still provokes sneers from abstraction's
adversaries (my kid could do that!), so Coleman's innovations still draw
resentment from older luminaries. I saw the great swing-era alto player
Benny Carter at 90 squeak a wrong note in a club date, only to announce,
"That was my Ornette Coleman impression." Was Coleman an idiot or an idiot
savant? Gunther Schuller and Martin Williams thought that there was a
structure to his music; you just had to learn to hear it. But were they
imposing order on a chaos that defied definition? Coleman's playing didn't
really change no matter what he played. He was already fully formed. The
theorists were just gilding a fascinating but inscrutable lily.

By the time Coleman came up with a theory, "harmolodics," to explain what it
all meant--something about harmony and rhythm being the same (and to justify
his bloated, though intermittently brilliant 1972 symphony Skies of
America)--it already seemed redundant. Coleman's best work was behind him,
and he had disappeared from the scene a decade earlier, having vowed never
to play clubs again, only to perform and record for extravagant fees, which
he didn't receive often enough despite memorable recorded dates in
Stockholm, lofts and infrequent studio appearances. He took sabbaticals from
the American scene for long stretches, but like Nina Simone and Jerry Lewis,
he was greeted in Paris with amour fou.

Ornette has been appearing and disappearing steadily now for the past
forty-four years, setting up shop in his Prince Street loft for a spell in
the '70s (performing for friends and neighbors and letting the tape roll),
only to be evicted; jetting off to record with the Master Musicians of
Joujouka and a New York Times music critic, Robert Palmer, on clarinet;
hanging out with William Burroughs and Brion Gysin in Morocco; forming the
fusion band Prime Time (where the harmolodics act was more droning,
repetitive and often dull); performing with body-piercing artists, with Lou
Reed, on the Naked Lunch soundtrack and with Kurt Masur and the New York
Philharmonic. He had such a monastic devotion to his art, he once asked a
doctor to castrate him (he was talked into getting circumcised instead). He
let his son Denardo play drums with him from the age of 10--the result can
be heard on the 1966 album The Empty Foxhole--causing listeners to yearn for
the days when his drummers included masters like Higgins, Ed Blackwell and,
briefly, the titanic Elvin Jones. Since the 1997 release of Colors, a duet
with the German pianist Joachim Kühn, Coleman watchers have had to subsist
on live performances, reviews, anecdotes and hope. Coleman would reunite
with Haden, Cherry and Higgins once in a while before Cherry's death in 1995
and Higgins's in 2001, and his final appearance with Higgins, at an outdoor
concert in lower Manhattan's Battery Park in 2000, was vintage Coleman. He
spent most of that set playing uninspired ragas with a confused-looking
tabla player. Finally, he brought out Haden and Higgins, played some
blistering harmolodics (or call them what you will), summoning the shock of
the new one more time. Then the park was shut down by Rudy Giuliani, the
last call of last calls and an infuriating curfew.

Coleman may have called an album and a composition Free Jazz, but the term
was in many ways a misnomer. Far from ignoring chords and meter, Coleman's
music forces listeners to rethink how they hear them. The notion of complete
freedom from formal constraint is even less convincing when applied to
Coleman standards like "Peace" and "Lonely Woman." (Free Jazz, with its
double quartet and layered cacophony, is sloppier but still weirdly
ordered.) Coleman and his early collaborators were not merely playing
whatever aleatory utterances happened to suit them. Those tunes have
melodies (or "heads") and solos to go around, but the musicians were
restless, wanting to inject spontaneity and maybe a little shock into what
had become a postbop routine. "Lonely Woman" is a standard with chord
changes and a melody line, but playing it in strict 4/4 time (as Branford
Marsalis has, in an intriguing, intensely brooding interpretation on Random
Abstract) won't really get to what Ornette was driving at; pianist Geri
Allen's "Lonely Woman," like the Modern Jazz Quartet cover of 1962, made the
melody clear without diluting its unsettled glory (eventually inspiring
Coleman to break his forty-year recording ban on pianists to hire her for
his band). Coleman once remarked that he wished he could have an entire
ensemble play like an off-tempo Robert Johnson, all scattered emotions and
wailing without having to keep time, as if there were nothing more outside
than being the King of the Delta Blues.

It was not for nothing that Coleman called a classic (currently
out-of-print) Prime Time album Of Human Feelings. Feeling, not theory, has
always come first for Coleman, harmolodic explanations notwithstanding.
There's a hypnotic pulse to the 1959 "Lonely Woman" that defies explanation.
You hear Higgins's high-wire cymbal rides with Charlie Haden strumming
against the beat, a disconnected melody to match discombobulated emotions.
Coleman said he was inspired to write the song watching a woman fight with a
man, but the loneliness is also pure Coleman, a sound that has inspired
shock, misunderstanding, even violence, while persuading
listeners--sometimes delicately, sometimes forcefully--to hear the world the
way he hears it. "He plays all the notes Bird missed," says one of the
McClintic Sphere onlookers in Pynchon's V., and nearly half a century later,
those notes sound like an indelible vocabulary. What you also hear in
Coleman's work--which is more debatable in the free jazz of, say, pianist
Cecil Taylor--is swing and the blues, and this has helped his work of this
period make its way into the Jazz at Lincoln Center canon, stretching the
boundaries of what, for lack of a better term, is called swing. According to
this version of jazz history, the Coleman Atlantics represent its ultimate
culmination, a blues as deep, in its own way, as Robert Johnson's, and a
particular kind of flexibility that is the rhythmic bedrock of Louis
Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker--the canon. What was called
avant-garde now sounds more like a culmination of a tradition. And whether
he played funk, rock, symphonies, ragas or as a Grateful Dead sideman, he
sounded like the same Ornette Coleman who drew from this well and came up as
himself. 

You can hear that tradition--and Coleman's ingenious flight from it--on the
Sound Grammar version of "Turnaround," which Coleman first recorded on
Tomorrow Is the Question! in February 1959, months before the turmoil on the
Bowery. The blues, which would become one of Coleman's most covered and
requested compositions, is one of the less adventurous tracks on the album,
not least because it is one of only three numbers with the comparatively
mainstream bassist Red Mitchell. (The other tracks had the more enabling and
endorsing Modern Jazz Quartet bass player Percy Heath.) Despite the odd fact
that it is an eleven--as opposed to twelve--bar blues, Coleman's punch line
comes, as the title suggests, on the turnaround, when a repeated blues
phrase is given a response in a few different keys, veering outside just for
a few bars before coming back to where the blues began, suggesting a shape
of what was to come.

On Sound Grammar's "Turnaround," Coleman's blues lines are given a
polyphonic response, with Greg Cohen plucking with enough open space to let
Coleman breathe and Tony Falanga bowing a lyrical counterpart. (By featuring
two bassists, Sound Grammar finally makes good on an experiment Coleman
started on Free Jazz, when he played with Charlie Haden and Scott LaFaro.)
Denardo meets his father's phrase with a thud, and Coleman, not usually
known to quote, throws in Stephen Foster's "Beautiful Dreamer" and, maybe
unconsciously, the start of Vernon Duke's "I Can't Get Started." It was more
of a Sonny Rollins moment in improvisatory allusion, but in a world Coleman
made. What would have been a concession in 1959 is a valediction in 2005.

On June 16, 2006, on what happened to be the 102nd anniversary of Bloomsday,
Ornette Coleman played Carnegie Hall in the most anticipated performance of
the JVC Jazz Festival. On a day that was the setting for James Joyce's
Ulysses--a novel that had begun as avant-garde and ended up on the top of
the Modern Library list--paying respects to a revolution turned
inevitability seemed appropriate. Coleman added a third bassist, Al McDowell
on electric, to the ensemble that played on Sound Grammar, muddying the
polyphony and the hall's acoustics. But even if McDowell hadn't plugged in,
this was not to be a night on par with those triumphs of a few years
earlier. Bernstein had crashed the Five Spot back in 1959, but now the
musical chairs were reversed. Coleman had been more accustomed to playing
concert halls for some time, and the music he played was about as
avant-garde as Mozart or King Oliver. A 76-year-old virtuoso played some
crowd-pleasing versions of "Lonely Woman" and "Turnaround," pained,
heartfelt and defiant, on an alto that somehow sounded as clear as a bell.
Even if his tone was more refined, it seemed no less wounded. Outside the
hall, it was a new century, one that he would not change. A few months
later, 1,085 pages of a new Thomas Pynchon novel would thud into selected
mailboxes, opening with a cryptic Thelonious Monk epigraph: "It's always
night, or we wouldn't need light." All these years later, a couple of
elusive tricksters from the old twentieth century still had some mysteries
to illuminate.