“Jazz is the only music in which the same note can be played night after night but differently each time.” ~Ornette Coleman
“We in the Western world suffer from too many categories and classes; we’ve forgotten that we all still have diapers on. We’ve separated music from life.”
~Ornette ColemanOne of the most important (and controversial) innovators of the jazz avant-garde, Ornette Coleman gained both loyal followers and lifelong detractors..
~Scott Yanow
Ornette Coleman – Gent Jazz (2010):
Wikipedia:
Birth name | Randolph Denard Ornette Coleman |
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Born | March 9, 1930 (age 85) Fort Worth, Texas, United States |
Genres | Jazz, free jazz, free funk, avant-garde jazz, jazz-rock |
Occupations | Saxophonist, violinist, trumpeter, composer |
Instruments | Alto saxophone, tenor saxophone, violin, trumpet |
Years active | 1958–present |
Labels | Atlantic, Blue Note |
Associated acts | Charlie Haden, Don Cherry, Eric Dolphy, Paul Bley, Scott LaFaro, Billy Higgins, Ed Blackwell, Greg Cohen, Jackie McLean, Jamaaladeen Tacuma, Lou Reed, Yoko Ono, Pat Metheny, Denardo Coleman, Jack DeJohnette |
Website | ornettecoleman.com |
Randolph Denard Ornette Coleman (born March 9, 1930, Fort Worth, Texas) is an American saxophonist, violinist, trumpeterand composer. He was one of the major innovators of the free jazz movement of the 1960s.
Coleman’s timbre is easily recognized: his keening, crying sound draws heavily on blues music. His album Sound Grammar received the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for music.
“It’s the hidden things, the subconscious that lies in the body and lets you know: you feel this, you play this.”
~Ornette Coleman
Dancing In Your Head (live)
Legacy
Coleman 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 progressive bluegrass versions of Coleman tunes (by Richard Greene). 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.
..it just has to be this remarkable masterpiece:
The Shape of Jazz to Come (1959)
..a watershed event in the genesis of avant-garde jazz, profoundly steering its future course and throwing down a gauntlet that some still haven’t come to grips with. The record shattered traditional concepts of harmony in jazz, getting rid of not only the piano player but the whole idea of concretely outlined chord changes. The pieces here follow almost no predetermined harmonic structure, which allows Coleman and partner Don Cherry an unprecedented freedom to take the melodies of their solo lines wherever they felt like going in the moment, regardless of what the piece’s tonal center had seemed to be.
~Steve Huey (allmusic.com)
-Egil & Hallgeir
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