Ornette Coleman ~ Beauty is a Rare Thing

I recently received my copy of the above pictured 6CD box that collects all the extant recordings made by Ornette Coleman for Atlantic between 1959 and 1961. I count myself very fortunate to own this. I’ve only managed to begin to get acquainted the first couple of discs so far, I still have the second quartet to go, together with Free Jazz and various other pieces. There’s just so much information encoded into this music, so much to absorb. This is a minor note about the image chosen for the cover which I find rather striking, as I’m sure was intended. If I play into the hands of the designers, so be it. First up, I’m not overly enamoured of the typography, the mix of serif and sans-serif fonts strike me as rather amateurish, the smaller case of ‘ornette’ alongside the larger ‘coleman’, both uncapitalised is annoyingly the reverse of how I always speak his name to myself – after all it’s his first name that’s striking (one of his album’s called Ornette! after all, not Coleman!) – and there are any number of jazz instrumentalists with the name Coleman.

Anyway, back to the image. We’ve been watching a lot of Seinfeld on DVD recently, so I’ll give in to the temptation of writing: What’s with the picture? Mr Coleman is seated on some grass, in the lee of a tree and it’s nighttime. What’s he doing there? He’s sort of playing the saxophone, I know, but he doesn’t look like he’s making a very convincing job of it. He looks like a mixture between pretending and concentrating. Does anyone sit down to play the saxophone? One side of him is lit by artificial light (a streetlamp? a spotlight?) The other side is in darkness, particular his face. Is this supposed to say something about two sides of his personality? Strange if so as his music is so high spirited and open, even as it’s drenched in the blues. It’s got to have been quite warm as he’s dressed in a short sleeved shirt and he doesn’t look cold. That tree’s a pine tree, I hope it wasn’t shedding needles, they give me an allergic reaction. Ornette famously suffered a lot of rejection early in his career, frequently being turned away from guest spots, even once punched in the face by Max Roach. This image, I guess, is Ornette the outsider, but also Ornette the artist at one with nature, a natural. Out there on his own, in the darkness. And the light. Is he practising just prior to the worldwide vindication to come? Are the rest of the band – Charlie Haden, Ed Blackwell, Don Cherry – just out of shot, playing the other side of the tree? Are they sitting down as well? Like I said, a strange image.