Listening to Ornette Coleman

I’m walking along from the tube station to my workplace. It’s a short walk, 5 minutes or so. The weather’s grey and blustery. I’m listening to Ornette Coleman playing saxophone in 1959 in my headphones. He’s playing with Charlie Haden, Don Cherry and Billy Higgins. As I listen I think to myself: ‘There are so many notes’. This isn’t a Salieri-like horrified response, it’s just that there’s so much going on that the experience is an intense one. The music is playful and often good humoured, creative and lyrical. (So many memorable melodies seem to pour from Ornette, that it’s strange they haven’t become standards. Perhaps this has something to do with how recognisable they are as Ornette compositions, in the same way that Thelonious Monk’s are.) At the same time, the music is intricate, labyrinthine even. Brimful of detail, from moment to moment it turns, quavers, soars, dives, traces ziggurat steps, curves, stretches, wavers, recoils, pushes forward, slows down, busies itself, looks inward, puts its best foot forward, pauses, makes and emphasises a point, rallies, takes a left turn, sallies forth once more, hums a tune to itself and to anybody listening, treads on eggshells, makes things simple so you can understand, reaches back in time to Bebop, and further, deep into the history of the Blues and further back still, then races forward into futures that it’s busy constructing as you listen. And still the possibilities unfurl like… what? Like maybe only itself. It makes me feel like an awestruck child.

I hear a note, a phrase, a line, the sum of three – sometimes four – lines. Momentarily there, then gone: developed into or succeeded by others. For a brief moment the realisation of each part forms in my mind, then it becomes a brief, evanescent memory as it fades like a scene glimpsed from a speeding train. What am I hearing? Group painting in sound? Perhaps. A four-way conversation? Perhaps. Experiments in rhythm, timbre, melody? Maybe a little warmer. Real-time, deep-time exploration of thought, feeling and intuition? Time passing, delineated, shapeshifted and approached from any angle the artists want to take, four ways? Music, I’m listening to music, but like Zeno’s Paradox, the closer I try to approach, the further I appear to be from realising anything. Good. I’m wondering how many ways there are to approach one piece of music – historically, politically, socially, emotionally, intellectually, musically, structurally, philosophically, visually, sonically, aesthetically and so forth.

At the same time that I’m thinking and feeling these things, I’m aware that despite years, decades even, of listening to jazz, I’m painfully ignorant about its structures and forms. I’m a naif, deliberately so, but I wonder how do other, more knowledgeable people hear this music? What do they hear? I want to ask my musician friend Pete – a very knowledgeable fan of Ornette and particularly Charlie Haden – to write something about maybe one song. If he’s interested and agreeable, I’ll post his response up.

I wrote the foregoing in my lunch hour. The next morning, a Saturday, I’m trying to catch up on the various webpages that have accumulated over the last week. Some of these consist of the more interesting posts to the Ornette Coleman mailing list that I’ve been reading through in the online archive (I’ve currently reached number 418 of 1023 – it’s an occasionally excellent store of information), in which I find the following:

Ornette Coleman Wins the Japanese “Praemium Imperiale” by Mike Zwerin

PARIS, 27 September 2001 – In his home town of Fort Worth, Texas, before he had ever “even once” sat next to a white person, 20 year old Ornette Coleman was playing the saxophone in a rhythm and blues club. He saw drunken women and men cut each other up, and women beat up their husbands for spending the family’s money on booze and gambling. He told his mother: “Oh mother, I don’t want to play this kind of music any more. There’s all this violence. And the music is inspiring them to do it.”

“What’s wrong with you?” his mother replied: “What do you want? “People to pay you for your soul?”

A light went on in his brain. Although he could not say it in so many words at the time, that was exactly what he wanted.

Is that what I’m listening to? Some may recoil at such a suggestion, but I’m less sure than I once was about such things. It’s an intriguing possibility and the closest, in small part by being unexpected, in larger part by touching on the unknown, that I’ve come to a satisfactory description.