Читать книгу The Mojo Collection - Various Mojo Magazine - Страница 25

Record label: Atlantic

Produced: Nesuhi Ertegun

Recorded: Radio Recorders, Hollywood; May 22, 1959

Released: October 1959

Chart peaks: None (UK) None (US)

Personnel: Ornette Coleman (as); Don Cherry (p); Charlie Haden (b); Billy Higgins (d)

Track listing: Lonely Woman; Eventually; Peace; Focus On Sanity; Congeniality; Chronology

Running time: 37.56

Current CD: Warner Jazz 8122731332

Further listening: Free Jazz (1961); At the Golden Circle, Stockholm, Vols 1/2 (1965)

Further reading: Ornette Coleman: A Harmolodic Life (John Litweiler, 1992); Ornette Coleman (Peter Niklas Wilson, 1999); www.ornettecoleman.com

Download: Not currently legally available

Ornette Coleman was arguably the last musician to introduce a truly seismic shift in jazz styles. He ushered in the Free Jazz movement of the 1960s, a tag borrowed from one his albums (although he said it was a record company invention and claimed to dislike it). He grew up with the Texas tradition of tough, blues-rooted saxophonists, but from his earliest experiments evolved a singular and idiosyncratic approach to jazz and was regularly shunned from bandstands in his native state and later in California, where he finally made contact with musicians capable of empathy with his radical ideas. They included the members of what became his seminal quartet featured on this disc. They burst upon the New York jazz scene in 1959 as a fully fledged phenomenon. Their residence at The Five Spot was the talk of the town for months, their radically new sound polarising critics, musicians and jazz audiences alike, continuing to do so even now.

Bass player Charlie Haden remembered hearing Ornette for the first time: ‘This guy came up on stage and asked the musicians if he could play, and started to sit in. He played three or four phrases, I couldn’t believe it – I had never heard any sound like that before.’

Atlantic Records had made its name as a rhythm and blues label, but was building up an impressive jazz roster, with Ray Charles and John Coltrane among its stars. The Ertegun brothers seized the opportunity to pick up on this new and controversial sensation, and launched with the defiantly titled The Shape Of Jazz To Come.

It followed his debut for the California-based Contemporary label, Something Else!!!, and laid down a marker which he would develop across the ensuing decades. His new approach proved – and remains – crucially influential on subsequent generations of innovative musicians all around the world, but many listeners reared on jazz’s well-defined rhythmic and harmonic relationships heard only chaotic polyphony.

‘I play pure emotion,’ he claimed at the time. ‘Musicians should be free to play as they feel it, the way it’s comfortable for them.’

Coleman’s music of this period sounds much more approachable today, to the point where it’s hard to see why it was thought so untoward. Coleman’s revolutionary notion centred on the abandonment of the harmonic structures which had been central to all previous jazz styles in favour of a musical system which he came to call Harmolodics. His approach was predicated on improvisation along melodic rather than chordal lines of development, with the traditional rhythm instruments of bass and drums being called upon to contribute equally with the two horns. A genuinely new sound had arrived in jazz.