"His work was play": Celebrating Ornette, then, now, always

I wrote about it at the time, the poignancy of this image of Ornette Coleman sitting onstage at his own tribute show — the epic Denardo-directed Prospect Park hang of June 12, 2014 — simply listening as all these wondrous sounds took shape around him. Thanks to the new Celebrate Ornette box set, which documents, audiovisually, the entirety of both that gig and his memorial service at Riverside Church the following June, we can relive the night, really get back inside it and see not only what it meant then but what it means now.

One thing that going back to the Prospect Park show confirms is that it was a pretty loose night overall, an Ornette-themed jam session, really, with some beautiful moments of communion but also a charming by-the-seat-of-its-pants quality. As Rolling Stone's David Fricke pointed out in his review of the new box set, as rich as it is, and despite Ornette's own presence on a few of the pieces, this is not so much a definitive summation of Ornette's legacy but more, as the title suggests, a celebratory coda to an extraordinary life, an invitation to witness the beginnings of a post-Ornette, but still Ornette-suffused, musical and creative reality.

Back to the image of the seated Ornette, and how we get to that point in the proceedings. The Prospect Park event begins with a remarkable Sonny Rollins benediction (I don't think I'll ever forget his Ornette paraphrase of "It's all good!" as long as I live), followed by a teary-eyed blessing from the honoree himself, spreading as he always did a message of unity and kindness that feels, now, in this bleak, chaotic 2017, like a dispatch from some sort of long-bygone utopia. Ornette exits the stage for the first piece or two, leaving players like Henry Threadgill and Flea to jam with the effervescent house band, Denardo Vibe (such a pleasure, throughout the show, to just kind of swim in their odd flow, sprightly yet turbulent), then makes a surprise cameo at his own party, blowing lines of sublime fragility, paper-thin but dripping with that swooping, blues-saturated feeling we knew then and always will know as Ornette-ness. (In in a subtly brilliant bit of producer's sleight-of-hand, Denardo places the pieces where Ornette himself played first in the running order on the CD and LP documents in Celebrate Ornette, even though they actually came a bit later as we see on the DVD, so that the first sound we hear on the audio-only versions is Ornette's horn.)

In some ways those first few minutes of "Ramblin'," more or less a Coleman a cappella moment, with some slight accompaniment from guitarist Charlie Ellerbee (a Prime Time member and longtime Ornette loyalist, who tells a beautiful story on the DVD about Ornette sitting his band members down, asking each of them where in the world they would most like to play, and then fulfilling those travel dreams one by one), are the most precious, like fragments of garments worn by a saint. These versions of "Ramblin'" and "OC Turnaround" are the last of Ornette's sound that we have, really, and what his playing here lacks in his old command and swagger, it more than makes up for in feeling. The band comes in behind him on "OC Turnaround"; tapdancer Savion Glover is sitting in. There's not much of an arrangement to speak of — the proceedings are loose. Coleman and tenor players David Murray and Antoine Roney blow simultaneously; the band sings the classic Ellington-esque theme. There's such a happy casual-ness to it all. "Ornette is here, and he wants to play, and we've got these tunes, and all these amazing guests, and we're just going to go for it." Sometimes these tribute events get stiff, overly manicured, but what this concert was, in some of its best moments, was simply a hang, a last chance for Ornette to just exist within this vibrant community, this unique musical and social circumstance — an environment where Geri Allen and Thurston Moore, Patti Smith and James Blood Ulmer, and Jack DeJohnette and John Zorn and Joe Lovano and Ravi Coltrane and so many others could all come together — that his music and presence nurtured for almost six decades.

So after two pieces on which he performs, he remains onstage, seated, listening. (I remember seeing him mouth "I want to stay" to an assistant who had come to lead him offstage, a phrase that I borrowed for my write-up.) The horn rests across his lap. At times he smiles at a musical event — he's clearly delighted by the presence of Wallace Roney Jr., for example, seen in the photo above — but often he's just sitting there, his hands clasped. We can't know what he was thinking, but I like to think it was something like what the audience (at least the one member I can speak for), the musicians and everyone there was thinking that night: Isn't this something. "This" being a joyous occasion for pilgrimage, with so many diverse expressions of whatever this or that artist felt they wanted to bring, from Nels Cline and Thurston Moore's intense, exacting guitar duet to the no-frills jamming of Denardo Vibe and ace soloists like Threadgill and Lovano, to the sort of Lou Reed feedback seance of Zorn, Laurie Anderson, Bill Laswell and Stewart Hurwood, to the big "Song X" jam with the Master Musicians of Jajouka, James Blood Ulmer and others.

There's one powerful moment when Patti Smith, during a break from her powerful recitation piece "Tarkovsky (The Second Stop Is Jupiter)," in which she also plays clarinet, asks Ornette to join in with her. Coleman, still seated there onstage, as dusk has given way to night, one of those magical summer nights in Prospect Park that are so emblematic of the Brooklyn Experience, and here we have two legends on the stage, and one is inviting the other to jam, essentially. And Coleman, clearly done playing for the night, for whatever reason, graciously declines. And there's something about that moment that scans for me as a passing of the torch, as a "this is all going to go on without me" or an "I'm here with you even when I'm not here," a foreshadowing of a time, not so far in the future, when his fans, admirers, collaborators, family, everyone whom his music and humanity touched, would continue on without him literally beside them but always with this sort of ever-proliferating Ornette spirit (that fragile ghost of an OC sound that we hear on "Ramblin'") hanging in the air. I know that his sound, and not just that of his own saxophone, but of the happily shaggy funk that, say, Denardo Vibe lays down, as well as the coiled-spring mirth/mania evident in his best small groups from throughout the years, will persist in our minds. Like with the output of any true icon, you never forget the sensation of Ornette's work, and that night in Prospect Park, even after he fell silent, the feeling and spirit of the Ornette-o-verse was still dancing in all our heads, a state of bliss we can now happily relive.

The film of the Ornette memorial, a lengthy document that I'm still digesting, is another welcome gift of Celebrate Ornette, with copious speeches that are as enlightening as the brief musical episodes by fellow travelers such as Pharoah Sanders and Cecil Taylor — both just getting up and being themselves in the most no-nonsense of ways, Sanders with a solo tenor piece, Taylor with a bewitching few minutes of poetry and piano, paying no kind of explicit tribute in terms of repertoire but expressing a kind of tough solidarity with the late master. I loved hearing New York Amsterdam News writer Herb Boyd recall seeing Ornette's gamechanging early quartet in Detroit in 1960 as part of a meager crowd — after the show, he spoke to Ornette and lamented the turnout, and Coleman simply told him, "It's about quality, not quantity."

In a beautiful speech about all his years covering and conversing with Ornette — I again direct you to the essential Miles Ornette Cecil — Howard Mandel captures the sense of inspiration felt by so many of us whose lives have been touched by Ornette. Wonder in his presence and art, and a feeling that whatever it is that we do, we know more about how to do it well, and humanely, and in a deep lifelong way, because of Ornette's example. Near the end of his speech, Howard says of Ornette, offhandedly, that "his work was play," a simple phrase that sums it all up.

What that night in Prospect Park was, was a night of pure play, inclusive and infectious — like so much of Ornette's greatest work, fun but not frivolous. I like to think that, seated there onstage after he was done actually playing the horn, Ornette was perhaps meditating on this concept, how fun and full of wonder a creative life can be, how it can turn a stage filled with some of the world's greatest musicians from, essentially, a workplace into a playground. And how anyone who takes that principle to heart — call it harmolodics, or what you will — can carry it with them always, not just through art but through life, thus celebrating the great Ornette Coleman long into the future.

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*Learn more about the Celebrate Ornette box here and read Denardo's essential essay.

*Read Seth Colter Walls' excellent Pitchfork review of the box, which has much to say, in particular, re: the preciousness and fragility of these final moments of Ornette-on-alto that we have to savor.

Hands off the wheel: The inspired madness of late Sonny Rollins

It is a great regret of mine that I've never seen Sonny Rollins play saxophone live. Two years straight, I've seen him appear at events where he has not played: last summer's Ornette tribute in Prospect Park, which Rollins opened with a warm introductory blessing, and the Jazz Foundation of America's 2015 A Great Night in Harlem concert, which featured a lengthy tribute to Rollins and beautiful remarks from the man himself. At this point, when Rollins seems to have retired from public performance, it doesn't look like I'll get the chance to remedy my oversight.

Until recently, I'd never been a Rollins obsessive. A Rollins admirer, sure. I bought Saxophone Colossus early on in my jazz listening journey and recognized its obvious joys and wonders, filling in the gaps later with the ’57 Vanguard recordings and other touchstones. But for a listener with my personal set of preferences, Sonny Rollins was easy to take for granted. It sounds strange for a jazz obsessive to say that they're sometimes ambivalent about solos, but that's the case with me. I love to hear great improvisation, but I'm more attuned to the overall framework and vibe of the music than I am to the foreground/background duality that has become more and more codified in mainstream jazz over time. On, say, a ’60s Blue Note recording by Andrew Hill, Grachan Moncur III, Wayne Shorter or Sam Rivers—a period that remains a gold standard for me—there really is no foreground or background, first because every player in every band is always a giant and second because bandleaders like these had a distinct compositional agenda. Like Mingus or Coltrane or Jarrett or Motian, they each crafted an entire soundworld for their small-group music.

You can praise Sonny Rollins in 1,000 different ways, but though he's written many standards, his contribution to jazz—at least as I see it—is not primarily compositional, not overly fixated on a complete soundworld. (I know that I'm being reductive here—Freedom Suite is one obvious counterpoint—but I'm speaking about the macro-level impact of Rollins in jazz, what he'll be best remembered for.) He is, maybe second only to Charlie Parker, the immortal soloist, the man who could take even the most mundane of source material—and, let's be honest, the most mundane of ensembles; unlike Coltrane and Miles Davis, his other rough contemporaries, though Rollins has often worked with outstanding bands, he's never had a truly stellar, sustained, identifiable working group to call his own—and spin it into gold with his superhuman prowess on the horn. Even more so than the early masterworks such as Saxophone Colossus and The Bridge, I'm particularly blown away by the Sonny Rollins of the ’80s, where he attained a level of command, power and sustained poise that I've never heard in any other saxophonist. Read ’em and weep: 1980, 1986. The bravado, charisma, mastery are just dripping off him.

I could watch performances like those for days. But they're not the Rollins that's turning me on most at the moment. In the days since the JFA event, I've been on a serious Sonny kick that's focused almost exclusively on the past 15 years or so. Rollins in the present tense is a much less "perfect" musician than the one seen in the clips above, and in my opinion a more fascinating one. Recent Sonny Rollins is a rejoinder to the idea that jazz is something to be mastered; it's a demonstration of how the further along you go with improvisation, the more questions you raise, the weirder and more distinctive you can sound. When I hear recent Sonny Rollins, I hear a total lack of fear or hang-up. It's not about dominance and mastery. It's about searching.



I'm particularly interested in the first two tracks above. "Sonny, Please," the title track to the 2006 Rollins album of the same name, is a perfect illustration of the weird alchemy of late Rollins. A straightforward vamp piece. A catchy but brief head. The band is there almost wholly as a backdrop. Around 1:40 is when I really snap to attention. Rollins's tone start to fray, his lines becoming both jagged and weightless—shards of scrambled notes, fluttering above the imperturbable rhythm. There is one thrilling passage, from about 1:54 to 2:09, where Rollins sounds as liberated as any other saxophonist I've ever heard, liberated from conventional ideas of mastery, where surface fluidity is equated with virtuosity. He sounds like he's inventing at the very edge of his imagination, producing  a stream of pure thought, a brittle and mercurial sound. Not the sound of a colossus, a king; the sound of a seer. He gets going again at 2:30, tossing ideas into the air, attaining this sort of growling, fluttering momentum. If I heard the phrase from 2:51 through 2:56 in a blindfold test, I would never think "Sonny Rollins"—well, never before this recent listening jag. Evan Parker on tenor might be my first guess, for the way the lines have this paradoxical supple jaggedness, proceeding gruffly without evolving into a full on post-Coltrane scream. The solo settles a bit from there, as Rollins starts to sound like he's drifting with the song rather than wrestling against it. Then at 4:10, it again becomes choppy and violent. I love the harshness of these passages, the way they rub against the oppressive normalcy of the music around them, the way they exemplify the restlessness of the Rollins quest, his commitment to actually getting somewhere new with each solo, or at least trying to, a quest that seems to have grown ever more extreme in Sonny's later years.

"Biji" is a 2001 live recording from the intensely rewarding Road Shows series. As a song and a performance, it is even more mundane than "Sonny, Please." It's classic feel-good mainstream jazz, complete with an ’80s-sounding funk bridge, the kind one could easily write off as cruise-ship fluff. After the head, Sonny spars a bit with Clifton Anderson's trombone, then cedes the stage to his band. Long solos by Anderson and pianist Stephen Scott ensue. (I've never really been a Dean Benedetti–type jazz listener, but recent Rollins often has me fast-forwarding past his sidemen's solos in search of the good stuff.) We're six minutes into an eight-minute track before we get to the meat of "Biji," and for a bit, Rollins is playing along with the prevailing feel-good vibe. But listen to what happens at 6:56, how through around 7:18 Rollins sounds like he's driving a sputtering Harley through a polite dinner party, trailing noxious exhaust. There's a kind of willful derangement at work here, a bullish commitment to seeing the idea through no matter how abrasive or jarring. Sonny sounds like the lines are playing him rather than the other way around. It's not the imperturbable command of Rollins in the ’60s or the ’80s; it's the sound of man taking his hands off the wheel.

Late Sonny, in these moments of lift-off, embodies the true meaning of free jazz, not the phrase but the literal truth of the words—like Progressive Rock versus rock that's actually progressive. To go as far as Sonny Rollins has in order to achieve not a kind of ultimate comfort but a newfound recklessness, to have the courage to produce at this late-career stage a stream of sound that reminds the listener that jazz is not an equation to be solved but a tireless inward-directed journey, that to me is the real genius of the lifelong improviser's art.

*****
The playlist above features a couple other examples of late Sonny at his wildest and most inspired—buckle up for the turbulence at 3:30–3:50 in "Nishi"—as well as an extended solo on a 1986 "Best Wishes" that harks back to the walking-on-air madness of the other ’80s clips discussed earlier in this post. Rollins's fierce solo on the 1980 "Blossom" is the perfect blend of these two approaches. This 1993 performance is another must-hear: The passage from about 50:00–50:40 is a feast of the kind of jagged, rapid-fire improvising that makes the more recent material so thrilling.

Coiling the spring: Ornette & Co.'s fast-forward mirth/mania

I've spent the past few days glued to WKCR, which is spinning Ornette around the clock through Wednesday, June 17, at 9:30am EST, and to my own rapidly growing Ornette Coleman collection. The concentrated listening is wonderful; the occasion is sad. Every time a major artist dies, I wonder about the cycle of tragedy and tribute—why was I not immersing myself in Ornette's music, say, a week ago, filling in the gaps in my knowledge? (The 1987 reunion of the classic quartet, both studio and live, and the pair of Sound Museum albums from 1996 are two spots in the discography that I'm now seriously investigating for the first time.) That said, I've returned to Ornette regularly since I first began loving his work roughly 20 years ago—WKCR's March 9 birthday broadcasts were always drop-everything propositions for me—but there's just so much music out there. At least we know the man felt the love while he was still alive. This is a good opportunity to mention that Ornette's friends and contemporaries Sonny Rollins and Cecil Taylor, born approximately six months after and one year before OC, respectively, are still with us. Remember it well, every day.

I think that when you love an artist's work, you carry their sound in your head, the same way you carry a friend's voice. That's why I don't place much stock in canonical thinking regarding music or the arts in general. An artist may be great, but if what they do doesn't speak to you on that private level, all the talk of their greatness, as though it were a foregone conclusion, can grow oppressive. And that can be the case even if, maybe especially if, the given artist's work does speak to you. Sometimes, for me, it can be hard to square the writer-about-music's job of having to dutifully recite the reasons for an artist's "importance" with the private sensation of why I love their work. I get why the "important" part is important. It's because, in some larger sense, the very act of speaking about a key figure's life in shorthand is important. When a major artist dies, we summarize their achievements for the benefit of those who might not be familiar with their work. But as I hinted at in this quick, by no means definitive (not being modest; just saying that definitiveness wasn't even my intention) Ornette piece for Time Out New York, the tagline version of a given artist's greatness can often feel very remote from the private truth of that same greatness, as it plays out within the heart and mind of a specific listener.

I love Ornette Coleman not because he Revolutionized Jazz, but, in part, because he was able to cultivate a circumstance in which something like this might occur:


It's no coincidence that I also cited a track from Science Fiction when we lost Charlie Haden just 11 months ago. With very few exceptions, when I think about what a given jazz hero means to me, I think about that figure in an ideal group context. For me, there were two ideal Ornette Coleman group contexts (all respects to the best of the electric years, esp. this 1978 ensemble): Coleman/Cherry/Haden/Higgins (CCHH), heard on "Civilization Day" above, and Coleman/Redman/Haden/Blackwell (CRHB). I feel that both reached their apex during the early ’70s, and specifically on this album, which features performances by each of these two configurations, as well as by a hybrid ensemble; the 1971 Belgrade concert by CRHB is equally godly. (Though I should say that judging by the 1987 recordings I'm currently savoring, CCHH kept right on evolving upon their reunion, and, though technically Ornette-less, Old and New Dreams, the Redman/Cherry/Haden/Blackwell band which fused the two groups cited above, illustrated the Coleman Concept just about as well as the master's own greatest groups.)


"Civilization Day" illustrates one key facet of that Coleman Concept, which is speed. The threshold thereof in jazz. How far can you push it? Charlie Parker had already pushed it pretty damn far. But Ornette, it seems to me, did as much as anyone to explore the border of chaos and control. Certainly there was plenty of that happening in the work of both Davis/Shorter/Hancock/Carter/Williams and Coltrane/Tyner/Garrison/Jones, but neither group ever concerned itself with the kind of gleeful mania heard on Science Fiction.

When I take a personal inventory of what I love about Ornette, I arrive at the idea that he drilled these bands so extensively, coiled their collective springs so tightly, that all four players, whether in the CCHH or CRHB configurations, could just blast off into this white-hot yet almost mirthful kind of fast-forward mode. "Free jazz" was many things to many people: explosion, expulsion, dirge, catharsis, meditation. To Ornette it was the license to dance on a molecular level, at tempos so extreme they seem almost cartoonish.

The deployment of the drums in "Civilization Day" is masterful. The way Higgins drops out after the head (:14), leaving Coleman and Cherry to twist and writhe and wriggle, coiling that spring tighter and tighter before blasting back in with a swing at once steely and buoyant. The brashness, the drive of the band at full-tilt during Cherry's solo. This is the banishment of all that has ever been boring about jazz. Haden doing his part to further coil the spring around 2:25, embarking on one of his epic, brain-bending, upward-moving Haden Slides, till you think your skull's going to burst at the simultaneous tension and drive and motion of it all. And then Higgins out again around 2:50, leaving Coleman and Haden to rev in the starting gate for a few precious seconds before the drums come back in. And once they do, Haden sounds even more hellbent, perversely shifting registers/gears (3:14–3:25) as Higgins steps on the gas. The zipping, darting Coleman wail, the expression of a man on a sonic trampoline, soaring ever higher. Wiggling and shimmying. Singing and dancing. Higgins coiling the spring for 15 almost unbearably tense seconds (4:35–4:50), bashing out snare-cymbal accents at three-beat intervals as Coleman whoops and screams. And as before, when the full-tilt swing resumes, it sounds even more maniacal, more driven, more fun. The drum solo ironically a quick breather, a respite from the CCHH mania, which returns in classically hyperbolic form during the final head.

Is this "free" jazz? Or is it the most controlled, the most together that jazz has ever sounded? It's a circumstance of group sympathy so profound that these concepts become synonymous. So that the band, collectively, is unfazed by an objectively absurd tempo. So that they sacrifice no control or precision of expression even in these circumstances of pure, adrenaline-fueled daredevilry. (There is this speed-demon aspect to the later Coleman bands with Denardo on drums, bands that, as you can hear on the Sound Museum sessions and Sound Grammar, summoned their own special kind of fast-forward mania, but with all due respect, no drummer could rival Higgins and Blackwell when it came to the challenge of maintaining a flawless sense of pocket/groove at breakneck tempos.)

As a listener, you feel like a kid on a carnival ride: "Faster! Faster!" This to me is the core OC sensation, the one to which my listening brain flashes when I think about the Ornette I know and love. It's him, yes, but it's also the hive-mind circumstance he was able to foster among his bandmates. Like Coltrane or Davis or Lacy or Braxton or Ellington or Giuffre or Shorter or Rivers or Evans or Mingus or Lehman or Threadgill or any other major figure in composed/improvised music who at one time or another has managed to align their concept perfectly with one or more fixed groups of collaborators, Coleman found that group ecstasy with CCHH and CRHB. It's there on record, and it is immortal.

Ornette

Humbly, via Time Out New York.

Am of course reflecting on last June's Prospect Park show, almost a year ago to the day.

The Times has a definitive piece.

"…as long as there's an Earth": Celebrating Charlie Haden at the Town Hall

At some point during last night's Charlie Haden tribute at the Town Hall, I realized that the expectations and considerations I'd walked in with were meaningless. As I attempted to convey last year, upon Haden's passing, I adore this man's music and felt compelled to show up to this public event to pay respects. I also, I'll admit, felt a bit of what they call FOMO—fear of missing out. Denardo Coleman was listed among the participants, and as I had learned over the summer, that meant that Ornette himself might show up. And who could say for sure, I thought, that Keith Jarrett, whose Haden collaborations have been a recent obsession of mine, wouldn't surprise us all and make an appearance?

So when was it that I chucked this admittedly narrow-minded checklist mentality? It could've been when, during a duet by Lee Konitz and Brad Mehldau, I realized that I was witnessing one of the most relaxed and conversational musical events I've ever seen take place on a stage. "Performance" seems almost too pretentious a word for such a casually majestic and—to use a word that Joshua Redman, after his own too-brief turn with Kenny Barron, Scott Colley and Jack DeJohnette, attributed to Haden's own musicality and humanity—empathic duet, which found Mehldau gently buoying that exquisitely sweet, breathy Konitz alto sound, as well as the saxophonist's impromptu scat-style vocalizing. Or during a piece commemorating Haden's love for and collaboration with Alice Coltrane, which featured staggeringly gorgeous harp ripples from Brandee Younger, saxophone work of stunning poise from Ravi Coltrane and Geri Allen's warm, subtle piano magic. (Yes, I'm running out of terms of breathless praise here, a feeling that anyone who was in the audience last night can probably relate to.) Or maybe it was when Dr. Maurice Jackson, an author, Georgetown professor and Civil Rights Movement veteran, spoke movingly about his longtime friendship with Haden, singling out the bassist as one of "too few good white men" and aligning him with Anthony Benezet, an 18th-century French Quaker whom Jackson, in a 2010 biography, labeled the "Father of Atlantic Abolitionism."

What I'm trying to get across is that during last night's proceedings, a certain kind of alchemy occurred, through music and through speech and through the projection of emotion, that made the late subject feel palpably present, as though, at the event's conclusion, Haden's name would be called and the audience would all turn to face him, standing in the crowd or onstage, and honor him with an ovation. Having not attended many political rallies in my lifetime, I can't remember being present at any other gathering where I felt such a strong sense of consensus, shared by audience members and those onstage alike. And the collective conviction was, simply, that Charlie Haden was an extraordinary man and an extraordinary musician, and that these two qualities were inseparable.

Haden's wife, Ruth Cameron, a wonderfully dignified, gracious host throughout the three-hour event, spoke candidly about her husband's struggles with addiction, about how he had always told her that he was "in trouble" as soon as he put down his bass and had to navigate life as it existed apart from music. True as that may have been, Haden must have sorted out his issues to some degree, because nearly every associate who stepped on the Town Hall stage last night spoke about how knowing Charlie Haden and playing with him had enriched their lives. From Cameron herself, who spoke of Haden's sense that it was his mission to bring beauty into the world. To Mehldau, who, speaking after his performance with Konitz, alluded to his own history with substance abuse and how Haden's example had helped him cope. To Pat Metheny, who played a beautiful acoustic medley of Haden pieces and then reflected on his countless collaborations with the bassist, and on how he had shared things in conversations with Haden that he had never shared with anyone else. To Denardo Coleman, who spoke, self-deprecatingly but with great dignity, on his father's behalf, and discussed how Haden had always—from their first session together, when Denardo was only 10—helped him feel happy and at ease, as well as personally and musically validated. To Joshua Redman, who, remarkably, spoke of listening to Haden's many collaborations with his father—Dewey Redman, who had been mostly absent during his upbringing—and how the intimacy he felt radiating from that music actually helped him learn to love a dad he hadn't really even known.

Everyone spoke of Haden's zeal for beauty and positivity, each in their own way: Putter Smith, a fellow bassist (in the extraordinary Mintz Quartet, for one) who had known Haden in L.A. in the ’50s, asserting that Haden's contribution to the language of the bass was a certain kind of profound intimacy, the handling of the instrument as though it were a baby to be cradled. Ernie Watts, saxophonist in Quartet West, which played a marvelous two-song mini set near the end of the show, with Colley on bass, talking matter-of-factly about how Haden's musical language was nothing less than the manifestation of God speaking through him. Haden's friend and lawyer Fred Ansis and friend and record-industry associate (seemingly there was no figure in Haden's life that did not also earn the distinction of friend, along with whatever other role they might play) Jean Philippe Allard recalling with good-natured exasperation their years of fielding Haden's ever-urgent phone calls about session budgets or packaging design, all of which would begin with, "Hey man…" (Haden's religious use of that phrase became an in-jokey refrain throughout the evening), and how despite the day-to-day difficulties, they were always happy to help Haden realize his unwavering commitment to excellence. And the comedian Richard Lewis, who in a video statement spoke of how much he valued Haden's friendship and inspiration and, like Ravi Coltrane, Maurice Jackson and several others, alluded to the bassist's deeply corny sense of humor. ("Charlie—in heaven, if there is a heaven, play bass; do not tell jokes.")

And those who didn't honor Haden's quest for beauty verbally did so through music. As epitomized in the Konitz/Mehldau performance, there was a deep humanity and soul coursing through all of last night's musical events, one that like Haden himself, transcended genre, transcended the notion of a "tribute concert" and felt like nothing less than a collective embrace, an affirmation, with each player summoning an almost superhuman, and quintessentially Haden-esque generosity. Trombonist Curtis Fowlkes, saxophonist Tony Malaby, trumpeter Seneca Black and others taking, in turn, stupendously emotive solos during the Liberation Music Orchestra's rendition of "Amazing Grace" during their show-concluding mini set, presided over by the magisterial, impossibly cool Carla Bley; Ernie Watts displaying, in his tenor work with Quartet West, otherworldly degrees of virtuosity and passion; Henry Butler and Gonzalo Rubalcaba offering solo piano performances (the former also singing) that blended staggering command with wrenching tenderness; Petra, Tanya and Rachel Haden (a.k.a., the Haden Triplets) and their brother, Josh Haden, accompanied by Bill Frisell and bassist Mark Fain, displaying their magical vocal harmony on the gospel song "Voice From On High," an echo of the honoree's own upbringing singing country and folk with his family's band. (We got a taste of that via one of several clips from Reto Caduff's wondrous Haden documentary, Rambling Boy, still sadly unavailable as a DVD or download due to music-rights issues. Can anyone help remedy this?)

There was no intermission, no lull. The unfamiliar faces were as riveting as the stars, the speeches as profound as the music. The event, and here I have to credit Ruth Cameron again, had a real narrative arc; it told a story of a musical life, and gave you a sense of the life in and around that music. There was so much giving, verbally and sonically. What wasn't there—Ornette, Keith or, and this last part was strangely welcome, any sort of imitation, invocation or even recorded representation of Haden's own bass sound; nor did the program feature what to me is the bassist's signature composition, "Song for Che," which had to be a calculated decision—was ultimately irrelevant, because of the bountiful richness of what was.

Any Charlie Haden fan feels, through the countless recordings, through the immense humanity and courage of his sound on the bass, a certain kind of, to borrow the title of one of my favorite Haden albums, closeness with this folk hero of modern music. Last night's event affirmed that feeling, the sense that anyone who knew this man in life, worked with him in music, felt his presence in any way, came away uplifted. As I suggested above, I have a sense that a lot of what I've written here might, to those who weren't in attendance at the Town Hall, read like hyperbole. But just as Haden's various friends and associates related, I felt nothing but beauty, joy and profundity from this event; in short, it was like a megadose of what I feel every time I listen to Charlie Haden—with Ornette, with Keith, with Old and New Dreams, with the Liberation Music Orchestra, on his many treasured duet albums. I thank Ruth Cameron and all the other participants for affirming everything I already knew I felt for this giant of music, for encouraging me to explore all the Haden I don't know (I need to get familiar with the Quartet West catalog, pronto) and for generally illustrating in such a poetic, human way how music and emotion are the same thing, how true artistic generosity, the kind that Charlie Haden achieved, can only be achieved by living a truly empathic life. The story we heard last night is a story that bears infinite retelling. Fortunately, as Richard Lewis put it, with funny yet sincere hyperbole, it's a story—the Charlie Haden story—we'll be telling as long as there's an Earth.

Four free spirits: Jarrett/Redman/Haden/Motian, together and apart

Happy New Year to anyone who might be reading this!

Since I last checked in on DFSBP, I completed my listening survey of the entire output of Keith Jarrett's American Quartet and the Jarrett/Haden/Motian trio that preceded it, a body of work that spans just under 10 years, from the May, 1967 session that produced Life Between the Exit Signs to the October, 1976 ones that yielded both Byablue and Bop-Be. I skipped over most of the Jarrett releases from this period that don't feature this band, though I did make time to revisit the pianist's excellent 1971 solo debut, Facing You, and to check out Jarrett's sketchy but intriguing 1971 duo album with Jack DeJohnette, Ruta and Daitya, and his stunted yet weirdly charming 1968 singer-songwriter effort, Restoration Ruin. (Fascinating, and in a way, completely logical, that Restoration was recorded while Jarrett was working with Charles Lloyd and already leading the Haden/Motian trio.) I did take a stab at Köln but it didn't really stick—I enjoyed what I heard but wanted to stay focused on the group recordings.

Conclusions, beyond what I wrote about the earlier records? Listen to these albums! Every one of them is worthwhile. In terms of the Impulse! period and beyond, which starts with 1973's Fort Yawuh, the ones that really struck me this time around were 1974's Treasure Island (which plays like a tidier sequel to the mighty Expectations, discussed in the prior post), The Survivors' Suite, Eyes of the Heart and Byablue. The latter is basically a Paul Motian album as played by the American Quartet, and it's everything you'd hope for from a session of that description. The two ECMs, Survivors' and Eyes, recorded in April and May of 1976, respectively, are mandatory for any fan of these players working together during these years. The former, in particular, is simply overwhelming, that rare jazz album that has a real narrative arc and isn't simply a series of performances. As the years went on, the American Quartet seemed to settle into a sort of comfy way of working, with the wild idiosyncrasy of the early-’70s Jarrett output crystallizing into a more or less predictable aesthetic; that is to say, you know you're going to get roughly one raucous burner, one gorgeous ballad and one world-music-y texture piece per record. There's not a dud among the mid-to-late period Impulse! releases by this band, but I admit that some of them—Back Hand, Death and the Flower, Mysteries, Shades, Bop-Be—do blur together a bit for me.

Survivors' bucks that trend in a big way. It does play with many of the same elements, but it feels entirely other to me, 1) because it's split into two big uninterrupted chunks, 2) because it's so packed with great writing and urgent ensemble performance and 3) because of the marvelous production values, which make the Impulse! American Quartet albums sound rickety by comparison. I only played it through once, but I felt absolutely spent afterward, wrung out. I feel comfortable calling it a classic, and the apex of these musicians' long, fruitful collaboration. I really wish someone had steered me toward this record sooner; seems to me like desert-island material.

Eyes is less monumental, but summons a similar kind of grandeur. An intriguing aspect of this album is the fact that, aside from Hamburg ’72, it seems to be the only album-length document we have of Jarrett, Haden and Motian working as a trio from after the point when Dewey Redman began playing with the group. Yes, Redman is on Eyes of the Heart, but—for reasons I haven't been able to fully verify—half of the album's roughly 50-minute running time goes by before he enters. As several Amazon commenters suggest, the intensity of the final section of "Eyes of the Heart (Part Two)," once Redman does begin playing, is extraordinary, so much so that it almost seems like a strange blessing that he's absent from what came before. Eyes is a mellower album than Survivors', but as with Survivors', the loud sections really go for the throat. ("Encore A" features some of the most ecstatically bashing Paul Motian drumming I've heard.) Chronologically, these albums sit within the greater American Quartet discography, but in terms of the listening experience, they almost seem like a little two-volume side project, during which these four musicians entered into some sort of collective trance and propelled themselves beyond where they went on any of the Impulse! discs, entering a truly elite realm. To me, if you're going to argue, as Ethan Iverson has and I'd second, that Keith Jarrett's American Quartet belongs in the jazz-working-band-hall-of-fame, along with, say, Davis/Shorter/Hancock/Carter/Williams and Coltrane/Tyner/Garrison/Jones, these are the albums you point to, particularly Survivors'. Both of these are records I need—and, more importantly, want—to spend way more time with.

I'm exaggerating, of course, but in a way, the American Quartet is a prism through which all jazz of this era (late-’60s through late ’70s, a period that's often been unfairly labeled as a low point for the music) can be understood. You have all these strains colliding in one band, currents crossing: alumni from bands led by giants such as Ornette and Miles, collaborators of major figures like Bill Evans, Charles Lloyd and Paul Bley. And just as importantly, you have three other budding bandleaders aside from Jarrett, who were working out their own respective personal aesthetics while helping to shape the group one. Just as Jarrett had when he was a member of Lloyd's and Miles's bands, all of these players made masterpieces under their own names during the time they were in Jarrett's band: Haden's classic duet sessions Closeness and The Golden Number, both recorded in 1976, not to mention the Liberation Music Orchestra's debut, from ’69; Redman's The Ear of the Behearer and Coincide, from 1973–74, albums which I've loved in the past but really need to revisit; and two remarkable Motian records, Conception Vessel (a nearly fully improvised album, featuring Haden and Sam Brown, a frequent American Quartet collaborator, on guitar, that to me feels beautifully empty of compositional, directional content in the same way that Survivors' Suite feels so beautifully full) and Tribute, from ’72 and ’74, respectively. (Also, it's crazy to think that just two months after participating in the July, 1971 sessions that yielded Jarrett's Birth, El Juicio and The Mourning of a Star, Redman and Haden were recording the immortal Science Fiction with Ornette, and that two months after that, they were doing this onstage with Ornette and Ed Blackwell. Still think the early ’70s was a fallow period? That's a rhetorical question; chances are, if you're reading this in the first place, you don't subscribe to that outdated shorthand.)

All of this music above rewards attention. All of it is worthwhile. And the tangled who-played-with-whom account above speaks to something I hinted at in the Jarrett post that precedes this one. There, I quoted an essential 2008 Ted Panken interview with Jarrett, in which the pianist characterizes his trio with Haden and Motian (the one that fed directly into the American Quartet), in contrast with his later group with Gary Peacock and Jack DeJohnette, like this: "The early trio represented three free spirits, and I chose them because of that." This "free spirits" concept isn't necessarily novel; it's a driving force behind just about any great jazz. But the way it played out in and around the American Quartet during the ’70s is really remarkable. The same way Miles or Charles Lloyd did, Jarrett wasn't just recruiting top players to staff his groups, he was also growing great bandleaders. The same way everyone seemed to leave Miles a great leader (Tony Williams, to name just one shining example!), or Jarrett and DeJohnette did in the case of Lloyd, so did Jarrett's "sidemen" do the same.

The more leeway you give, the freer you allow "your" spirits to be, the more cross-pollination you foster, the more leadership you inspire, the better your jazz is, the better their jazz is and the better jazz is as a whole. Yes, the American Quartet broke up, but its members took bits and pieces of that aesthetic and spread it ever outward, Jarrett himself into his European Quartet, Motian into a series of compelling groups that culminated in his landmark trio with Bill Frisell and Joe Lovano, Haden and Redman into Old and New Dreams (which, though of course primarily Ornette-inspired, could also be looked at as a continuation of the Haden/Redman partnership that started in Ornette's bands and only strengthened in Jarrett's) and beyond.

As with Miles's bands, and many other era-defining partnerships in and outside of jazz, Jarrett/Redman/Haden/Motian was impermanent, non-exclusive. "Fleeting" would be wrong because, after all, these four musicians did play together for the better part of a decade. But what I mean to say is that each artist had somewhere else to go, a personal destiny to fulfill, a freedom of spirit to realize. And these sorts of alliances, groups composed of equally masterful, equally distinctive, equally free spirits, each a born leader and an aesthetic dynamo in his or her own right, are where maybe the greatest pleasures in jazz lie. What a gift that this particular alliance, as well as its countless offshoots, was so well-documented.

Ornette Coleman and New Vocabulary: Old friend; fresh context

Update, 5/30/15: News of the lawsuit regarding this album has now spread far and wide. Read the story so far and make up your own mind.


Update, 12/30/14: Read an exclusive interview with Jordan McLean and Amir Ziv on the making of New Vocabulary here, via the Time Out New York blog.

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Black Messiah isn't the only surprise release from a major figure in American music this month. Ornette Coleman has a new record out. Yes, Ornette Coleman.

No, it's not an Event Album like 2006's fantastic, Pulitzer-winning Sound Grammar. New Vocabulary, apparently the self-titled debut by a group of the same name, is a low-to-no-fanfare release on NYC label System Dialing Records. It features OC in a trio with System Dialing principals Jordan McLean (trumpet, the same instrument he plays in Antibalas, and electronics) and Amir Ziv (drums), augmented on some tracks by pianist Adam Holzman, McLean and Ziv's bandmates in the group Droid. Just to be clear, the tracks aren't exactly new; everything on the album was recorded in July of 2009. But as far as I can tell, the album just came out. You can order it right now in a variety of physical and digital formats. Yes, right now. I won't be offended if you simply click over there and stop reading right this minute.

New Vocabulary made, and is making, me think. An unsolicited package containing LP and CD copies of the record showed up at the Time Out office yesterday, along with a press sheet featuring quotes from, among others, actors Peter Sarsgaard and Maggie Gyllenhaal, both of whom are also thanked on the record. (No idea what the connection is there.) I'd heard nothing about it beforehand, and judging by the response when I mentioned the album on Twitter, no other writers in my circle had either.

That's kind of cool, no? Like if Bob Dylan randomly turned up as a sideman on some local alt-folk group's Bandcamp demo. This is an odd situation any way you slice it. For many years, I've heard rumors of Ornette jamming with younger musicians, but we don't typically get to hear the fruits of it. And how often is it that the maestro appears on albums not released under his own name? I can think of only a small handful of instances like this: Jackie McLean's New and Old Gospel (on which OC plays trumpet); For the Love of Ornette, an under-the-radar 2010 release by Jamaladeen Tacuma; guest appearances onstage with the Grateful Dead and on record with Lou Reed, as well as the Naked Lunch soundtrack. I'm sure there are other examples that I'm not aware of. But I know enough to know that the release of New Vocabulary is a pretty special occurrence.

For one, because Ornette appears on the entire album. This is no cameo situation; it's an honest-to-God group effort, and OC is a full-fledged member. From what I can tell, the album is entirely improvised. It sounds like a pretty casual affair—the result of a few days spent jamming in the studio. At the end of the ninth track, "The Idea Has No Destiny" (a title that sounds like it could be plausibly be Ornette-derived, as do some of the others: "Baby Food," "Sound Chemistry," "Wife Life"), we hear Ornette say, "You know that wasn't the plan; there was no plan there." It's a good summation of the feeling of New Vocabulary as a whole. There's a certain aimlessness to the recording, a sense of turning on the tape and seeing what happens. When I first played the record, I found myself wishing for a greater sense of structure or direction. Now, on my third or so listen through, I'm relishing the meandering, almost casual character of the project.

What New Vocabulary sounds like to me is a portrait of a guest artist stepping into an established group's insular world. McLean, Ziv and Holzman clearly have an established M.O. as collaborators. Having sampled a bit of Droid and checked out their contributions on New Vocabulary, it seems to me that they're working in sort of a contemporary dub framework, not specifically reggae-oriented, but simply in reference to a philosophy of music-making that values atmospherics, vibe and the malleability of sound as much as melody, rhythm, harmony, etc. They're clearly engaging with elements of electronica and a sort of murky, aqueous funk. You could broadly call New Vocabulary a free-jazz record, but rather than a post-Coltrane soundspace, this group operates in a post-Miles one—touching on the more otherwordly reaches of Davis's late-’60s/early-’70s period ("He Loved Him Madly" comes to mind). I love, for example, the noirish strut of "Value and Knowledge." (Now that I think about it, to throw out another reference point: the overall character of the sound isn't that different from recent albums by Chicago Underground Duo.) There are tracks here that have a bit of a recognizably Ornette-ish feel—some of Ziv's beats, as on "Alphabet," seem to channel Denardo Coleman's jittery, irrepressible grooves, for example; and on "H2O," the drummer gets pretty damn Blackwell-ian—but there's no sense that OC's collaborators on New Vocabulary are making any effort to accommodate him in any obvious way. They're not imitating any OC context that we know—the tracks with Holzman, such as ominous, slow-burning closer "Gold Is God's Sex," really hint at something new, and not just because hearing Ornette with piano has been a relatively rare occurrence—and for that, they deserve serious kudos. It must be pretty difficult to approach your instrument with Ornette Coleman in the room and just play as you normally would.

When I mentioned New Vocabulary on Twitter yesterday, someone asked me, "How does Ornette sound?" He sounds like Ornette! And he sounds fantastic. There are a few moments here where he plays signature licks that any OC fan will recognize immediately with a knowing grin. (Examples: 1:40 in "Bleeding," and :17 in "H2O.") But he's not just going on autopilot during this session; not at all. He's embracing the context fully. He doesn't want to dominate; he wants to participate. It says something about Ornette's composure and confidence as an improviser that he doesn't seem disoriented in the slightest by his bandmates', well, vocabulary. Toward the end of "What's Hotter Than the Sun," the track breaks down into a kind of pure ambiance, with McLean's ghostly, glitchy electronically treated trumpet echoing into the distance. And there's Ornette's alto, dancing away, broadcasting OC's signature rambling, lifeloving joy, but also engaging in real time with the starkly abstract character of the soundworld taking shape around him. You hear a similar phenomenon on "Baby Food," where McLean and Ziv work with pure rumbling, burbling texture, suggesting only the faintest hint of form. And there's Ornette, playing. Fearlessly, yes, but not obliviously.

It's an attitude and an approach that reminds me of this past summer's Prospect Park event. And Ornette's willingness to embrace the moment on New Vocabulary makes the album essential for any OC fan. Is it a great record? That seems to me to be entirely beside the point. What it is, is a document—a very honest, straightforward, unfussy document—of Ornette and these other musicians getting to know each other musically. It isn't technically an Ornette album, per se, any more than it's a Jordan McLean album, an Amir Ziv album or an Adam Holzman album. New Vocabulary is a hang, a jam, a session, a snapshot, a document. It has no agenda, no compositional objective, and therefore, as an album, it demonstrates all the pros and cons of most fully improvised recordings. But if you're in the mood for it and you put it on, you'll hear interaction, engagement, celebration and the establishment of a very genuine group dynamic.

Will there ever be another New Vocabulary record? Will this group ever perform live? Both seem unlikely, but you never know. In lieu of any sequels, I'm glad we have this album. The more I listen to it, the more I appreciate its humility. It has no pretension of brilliance, of instant-classic-hood, and I hope that writers/listeners don't jump to ascribe those qualities to it simply because a giant like Ornette is involved. It's enough that it exists. No, New Vocabulary might not belong on an Ornette Coleman discographical short list, but in terms of a document of what it's like to be in the room with OC as he is now (or close to now), it's essential.

Ornette's sound is absolutely intact, and just as importantly, his ears and reflexes are intact. He's engaging, working as one third (or fourth) of a collective, and nothing more. He steps forward; he recedes; he offers what he can, which is that inimitable sound. And that inimitable way of embracing an improvisational flow. On New Vocabulary, you hear him taking sonic events as they come rather than stepping out in front of the group. There's real profundity in that, especially coming from a veteran of OC's stature.

To listen to New Vocabulary is to visit with an old friend in a totally unfamiliar setting and to realize anew how much you'd missed their company, how life-affirming their presence is, how much beauty there is in the simple sound of their voice and the character of their conversation, the way they view and interact with the world. It's good to see you, Ornette; I've loved your work for years, but I've never thought of you in quite this way.

Folk hero: Goodbye, Charlie Haden

Charlie Haden, 1937–2014

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I'm listening to Ornette Coleman's "Street Woman" (fall, 1971), probably my favorite Charlie Haden performance.



There is a joyous, maniacal folk energy coursing through this recording, and Haden is its nerve center. I don't know the technical term for what it is that Haden is doing during the opening head, but it's a sound I know, and cherish, as the Haden Slide—this sort of sticky, slippery journey down the neck of the bass, creating a descending drone that underpins the horn flurries like a subterranean river of molasses. (There's another beautiful Haden Slide, this one running low-to-high, from about 1:03 to 1:07.) And then the zoned-out ecstasy of the bass break at 2:07, as though Haden were weaving his ideas on a foot-controlled loom, heaping momentum on momentum. Then slamming on these completely punk, throbbing offbeat notes underneath Don Cherry's solo at 3:59. And then back to the Haden Slide for the concluding head—aspirating, invoking, drawing in and out, and up and down. Charlie Haden is the dark, pulsating heart of this piece, and, I'd argue, of the Ornette Coleman aesthetic in general. (He is also, of course, the keeper of the trance on the original "Lonely Woman.")

He served the same function in Keith Jarrett's American Quartet and Old and New Dreams—this collective body of work, the output of these two groups as well as the various Coleman recordings over the years, is highest-echelon art, the most human that jazz, or music in general, can get. Charlie Haden was the steward of what I think of as the earth element in jazz. He was the soft, dark, rich, fertile soil of any performance he participated in. Last night, a friend referred to Haden's principal contribution simply as love, and yes, that is really the most direct way to say it. He dug in and spurred himself to emotive ecstasy so that the music could take off. As jazz attained lift-off in the late ’50s, and in new ways on through the ’70s, Charlie Haden was right in the middle of that. What he represents is "free jazz" not as obscurantism but as a quest for utopia, for greater humanity. He was always just trying to get to the song, and, through it, to you.

The aforementioned collaborations are my favorite Charlie Haden contexts, the ones I know best. The Liberation Music Orchestra and Quartet West, to name just two other major Haden endeavors, are more or less blind spots for me, and I need to fix that asap. In a somewhat more obscure vein, the two 1976 Horizon duo albums, The Golden Number and Closeness, are treasured items in my LP collection: A) because they're every bit as special as the personnel (Jarrett, Coleman—who plays alto on Closeness and trumpet on TGN, and would reprise this team-up on ’77's Soapsuds, Soapsuds—Cherry, Paul Motian, Alice Coltrane, Hampton Hawes, Archie Shepp) would lead you to believe, and B) because they sum up so poetically the Charlie Haden ethos of music-making:



This is—forget "jazz"—music as communion, with a collaborator and with something higher. It's only listening—yes, closeness. This is music that smothers the rarefied, chops-and-theory-forward impulse in jazz beneath its pillowy bootheel. It's about spending time, getting into it, sublimating, chasing collective beauty. But not some New Age–y ideal. This music is frequently meditative and gorgeous ("Ellen David"), sure, but also hard and gritty when it needs to be (see "O.C.," with its wiry physicality). Mostly it's about meeting his collaborators where they live—plunging into Alice Coltrane's blissed-out universe during "For Turiya," for instance, or reveling in Hampton Hawes's deep blues bag on "Turnaround." Or forging pan-ethnic sound spaces with Paul Motian and Don Cherry on "For a Free Portugal" (demonstrating Haden's trademark way of making political music feel noble and artful, not pretentious and heavy-handed) and "Out of Focus," respectively.

The liner notes to these records are masterpieces unto themselves, with so much love, wisdom and goodwill being tossed around among Haden, his collaborators and the listener. You read all this, and it drives home what you already knew: Charlie Haden was a true American folk hero.

A few selections:

"Charlie Haden plays for the existence of the listener. This reason alone makes him a musical guru."

"Charlie's music has its roots in Viva la humans. It is not Capitalistic, Communistic or Socialistic. His music does not dictate."

—Ornette Coleman

"As inner-directed musicians continue to become rarer…, Charlie Haden becomes more of a phenomenon each year… His stature is very often not even admitted among musicians themselves, as they, in general, are externally directed by mere circumstantial forces. He is one of the very few consistently musical players I know… and my participation on this album is a small tribute to his commitment."—Keith Jarrett

"He has contributed much to JAZZ and ranks as one of the greatest players of all time. To say that he is a sensitive, sympathetic musician would be an understatement. He is a natural, original and beautiful player and on this album has created music from the heart."—Paul Motian

"One of the rewards in playing music is the opportunity of meeting and playing with special human beings that come along, not very often, but when they do, bring a message so strong and beautiful that you feel and you know a giant has come to play. This is the feeling I experience whenever I hear Charlie."—Hampton Hawes

"Closeness: one part of the creative process; feeling a closeness to Life; having a need inside to express your feelings in a creative language; dedicating your life to the language we call Jazz (creative music born in the United States); being close to others who have also dedicated their lives to creative music; wanting and hoping to communicate this closeness to as many people as possible through music. These are some of the things this album is about."—Charlie Haden

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Some of the great tributes that have turned up so far:

*Fred Kaplan // Slate
*Peter Hum & Co. // The Ottawa Citizen
*Patrick Jarenwattananon // NPR (plus this awesome archived Haden/Jarrett encounter)
*Nate Chinen // NY Times

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And finally, a gem you may not have seen. Three fourths of the Jarrett quartet, playing with Baikida Carroll under Haden's leadership:

Road music: James Blood Ulmer's Music Revelation Ensemble at Vision Festival 19

Photo by Geert Vandepoele

Some sets are built with variety and pacing in mind; others, like the one I caught at Vision Festival last night by James Blood Ulmer's Music Revelation Ensemble, have a quality of infinity about them. Hearing them is like stepping into a river that was flowing long before you arrived, and will continue long after you leave.

I don't know the Ulmer discography well, and Thursday night's Ornette Coleman tribute was the first time I'd ever seen the guitarist live. I've heard bits and pieces of past MRE recordings—the membership has revolved over the years, but drummer Cornell Rochester, who joined Ulmer last night, is a mainstay—but never anything that sounded like what I heard at Vision Festival. The MRE record I know best, No Wave (with Ronald Shannon Jackson on drums), is one of the most jittery, hyperactive and straight-up punk fusion (for lack of a better classifier) albums I've ever heard. That music's greatest strength is its volatility.

Rochester brought quite a bit of flash and bash to last night's set, but the overall mood was serene, trancelike. The M.O. of this band is something like: rhythm section plays a sort of tumbling swing with a droning, static harmony—the Jimmy Garrison / Elvin Jones team seems to be a clear reference point—and Ulmer rides the wave to his heart's content. Pungent, ear-bending chords, spidery lines—deep romantic sonorities with a sort of flamenco-via–Sonny Sharrock feel to them (e.g., the solo around 1:00 here).

I wish I had a more precise theoretical vocabulary to describe the sensation of Ulmer's playing. The closest I can come is that he conjured some sort of blues-jazz raga—deeply earthy but also wildly exotic. Dramatic but not flashy, and so intensely colorful—a kaleidoscope of moods. Themes introduced, obsessed over, played in a kind of self-round that often reminded me of the cyclic, mantric beauty of Ornette's best electric band (no coincidence there; see the opening version of "Sleep Talking" here, played by a group that features both Ulmer and Shannon Jackson). Rhythmically driving but elastic, rubato, infinitely expandable. The set put me in the mind of all my other favorite infinite-feeling, emotionally dialed-in trance musics: I thought specifically of Sandy Bull's haunting "Blend" duet with Billy Higgins, the post-Coltrane-jazz-as-psychedelic-lullaby vibe of "As We Used to Sing" from Sharrock's Ask the Ages and the droning roots fusion of the first Gateway trio album.

In other words, visionary modern American guitar music, spearheaded by players hip to and fluent in advanced jazz but who choose to set aside away flashy soloing in favor of this eternal (modal?) drone. When this kind of thing works well, as it did last night, you get a kind of snowball-effect profundity. Pieces would end, but the next one would always seem to pick up exactly where the prior had left off. Bassist Calvin Jones providing the droning bedrock, Rochester tossing rhythmic Molotov cocktails Ulmer's way, explosive, post–Billy Cobham fills and punctuations (not to mention the occasional gravity blast—a sort of one-handed snare roll that's become commonly used stunt technique in grindcore; I spoke with Rochester after the set, and he admitted to stealing ideas from Slipknot's Joey Jordison, among others) and Ulmer just pressing on unperturbed. Foreground and background, "soloist" and rhythm section not interacting so much as coexisting—the music just rambling, ambling steadily on.

I was sitting with fellow Kansas-born jazz obsessive—as well as exemplary blogger and Sunnyside Records mainstay—Bret Sjerven, and after the first piece ended, I turned to him in ecstatic disbelief. (I hadn't really known what to expect, but this sort of kaleidoscopic trance jazz was a particularly wondrous surprise.) He knew Ulmer and the band well and simply nodded and said, "Yep, it's road music." It was a perfect summation of the MRE's appeal: fire up the engine, hit the highway, turn on cruise control and just embrace the weird haze of a long journey. Monotonous in the macro sense but exhilarating in the micro. A song that rumbles and drones, cycling imperceptibly through vivid hybrid colors—magentas, purple-blues, crimson-into-yellows—coming to rest momentarily but never truly halting or changing direction.

Introducing the band afterward, Ulmer said of Rochester, "He's from North Philly"—apparently offering some explanation for the drummer's particular strain of chops-forward badassery, gloriously flaunted in a midset solo, one of the more punishing, crowd-awing displays of onstage bravura I've seen in a long while—and then added, "I'm still trying to figure out where I'm from." To judge by what I heard during the set, he might have been getting at the idea that one's point of origin is less important than one's wanderlust, willingness to stay on the move, rolling purposefully and steadily toward ecstasy.

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P.S. Bret has kindly offered to help me get acquainted with the Ulmer discography, specifically the MRE albums. Would appreciate any additional tips, since this is a new obsession for me. (I've already purchased In the Name Of…, and I can't wait to spend good time with it.) Fine 2003 footage of the current MRE lineup—with guest Pharoah Sanders—is here.

I want to stay: Celebrating Ornette in Prospect Park

Last night's Celebrating Ornette tribute show at Celebrate Brooklyn (part of the ongoing Blue Note Jazz Festival) ended pretty much how everyone hoped/expected—with a stage full of star players performing "Lonely Woman." But the depth and intensity of that performance—it sounded more profound to me than any other version of the piece I've heard aside from the original—was indicative of just how right this entire event felt.

No rhythm section to start, just Geri Allen playing a swirling textural introduction, setting the stage for the horns to enter—and what an insane assemblage of talent: Ravi Coltrane, Joe Lovano, Branford Marsalis and, eventually, David Murray. To hear them each solo in turn was magical, but to hear them unite in service to this, one of the greatest compositions I know—the late Lou Reed made the same point in a recorded excerpt—was even more so. Jazz, and culture in general, is glutted with homage that feels rote, slight. But these musicians didn't need any goading to celebrate Ornette. In just about every performance that went down last night, you sensed a very genuine kind of reverence, deference, humility in the presence of the man and his music.

And there was no guarantee beforehand that he'd appear. I'd heard troubling rumors about Ornette's health, so I expected maybe a brief glimpse at the end, if that. But there he was onstage, minutes after the show began. Shockingly, the man who preceded him was Sonny Rollins (second from the right in the photo, with Ornette to his left and Denardo Coleman to his right—sorry for the blurriness!), returning the favor to the saxophonist who had shown up and jammed at Rollins's now-legendary 2010 80th-birthday gig—and who, more than 50 years ago, helped open up new vistas in Rollins's playing. I must admit, it was a slight disappointment that Rollins didn't play, but his brief benediction—that's the only word I can think of for what his speech felt like—was priceless in and of itself. I don't remember the exact content of his remarks, but what I do remember is the graciousness with which he spoke, and the sincerity of his affection for Coleman.

There was one repeated phrase, Rollins relaying something Coleman had told him years ago: "It's all good" or "It's going to be okay," or something similar. Ornette spoke briefly, simply and equally profoundly, stressing the importance of happiness and unity. He was visibly shedding tears. There was a real sense of knowledge learned and earned—especially from Coleman, who faced so much aesthetic (and, no doubt, social) adversity early on. He is the opposite of bitter. When he first came out, he clutched Rollins's hand and kissed it. It was one of the most moving human moments I've ever seen on a stage.

Rollins's "It's all good" was a prescription for the show (and maybe, in the end, the perfect summation of Coleman's famously hard-to-define harmolodic system). The event was long, occasionally—as during some of the longer, more crowded jams—chaotic. Denardo Coleman, Ornette's son, was drumming, and ostensibly in charge, but from what I could tell, there wasn't a whole lot of bandleading going on, or predetermined form. For the most part, the guests would emerge, a head would be played (a lingua-franca Coleman theme such as "Dancing in Your Head"), and then everyone sort of took it from there. That was just fine. Nearly every one of the guest-star turns felt special. Flea was there from the beginning, bringing an infectious energy and willingness to jam; David Murray was a volcano of passion and soul; Ravi Coltrane, as he always seems to, avoided pyrotechnics in favor of sublimated intensity; James Blood Ulmer strummed away, providing a compellingly insular sort of commentary; Henry Threadgill, almost seeming relieved not to be, for once, playing the mastermind's role, offering up his patented gritty, torrid alto lines, Coleman-inspired, but not at all Coleman-like; Joe Lovano, humbly laying waste in customary fashion.

Whatever anyone contributed did indeed feel all good. Certain sets were their own little isolated pockets. Some felt rushed (a Branford Marsalis / Bruce Hornsby duet) or a tad prolonged (a Patti Smith Band interlude; though I'll say that I loved her clarinet playing and wished there had been more), but others served a perfect palate-cleansing function, e.g., a gorgeous ambient quartet featuring Laurie Anderson on violin, Bill Laswell on bass, John Zorn on alto and the ghost of Lou Reed on guitar drone. (A Reed associate whose name I didn't catch had set up Reed's actual guitars and amplifiers in a Metal Machine Music sort of formation, and he "played" this apparatus along with the other three. As Hal Willner indicated in a spoken introduction, Reed was a Coleman fanatic, and it was no minor happening for the late to be there in spirit last night.) A Thurston Moore / Nels Cline guitar duet was similarly brief and similarly successful—a humble offering placed at the altar of the master.

The supporting cast—Denardo Coleman's so-called Vibe ensemble, featuring core Ornette associates such as guitarist Charles Ellerbee, bassists Al MacDowell and Tony Falanga, and saxist Antoine Roney—mostly stayed in the background, but occasional a weird and wonderful Ellerbee guitar squiggle would burble up to the fore, or Falanga would take the lead; the latter's arco introduction to "Sleep Talking," one of my absolute favorite Coleman themes, was one of the highlights of the entire show for me.

At times, as during the "Lonely Woman" finale, Denardo's drumming felt perfectly attuned; at others, it seemed overpowering, the backbeat rhythms boxier than what I would've liked to hear. But his presence was vital for this family affair—I loved his spoken introduction; something to the effect of "I'm biased, but Ornette is the greatest musician on the planet"—as was that of gregarious MC Gregg Mann, a longtime Ornette engineer and associate.

And, it must be said: a beautiful night in Prospect Park. A free, public event should feel exactly like this. Challenging, nourishing music, presented without pretense of artiness or "high culture." A tribute that doesn't bore you with ponderous context; that instead simply rounds up the heaviest presences possible, invites them onstage and lets them figure out their role on the fly. A context that leaves room for accident, for meandering, for brain-scrambling collisions. I remember seeing the Master Musicians of Jajouka onstage with, among others, Bruce Hornsby, Branford Marsalis, Bill Laswell and James Blood Ulmer and thinking, man, what other figure could've united all these folks?

Ornette's music is people music—that was the message. When I was first getting into jazz, around 20 years ago, friends tipped me off to Kind of Blue, certain Monk records—you know, the canon. But it was Ornette's Shape of Jazz to Come that really set me off. It spoke to me directly; I'd heard the baggage about "free" this and "avant-garde" that. But all I really needed to hear was Coleman, Don Cherry, Charlie Haden and Billy Higgins performing "Lonely Woman," or "Peace" (which also made a welcome appearance last night), and I got it. Of course you would want to listen to this music. It's for everybody. It's not that its once-controversial radical-ness has been tempered; it's more that the music has been given ample time to disseminate to its true audience, the public, flowing past the gatekeepers/naysayers and eventually submerging and silencing them.

That populism is at the core of Ornette's music, and it was the driving principle of last night's concert. Everyone's invited: musicians, fans, the honoree himself, who sat onstage for an extended period, listening, soaking up the sounds. (At one point, an assistant came to lead him backstage, and I could clearly see Ornette mouth, "I want to stay.") There were so many highlights that I've forgotten to mention until now that, yes, Ornette played. Damn, did he play, and for a good while. That alto cry sounding slightly more fragile or faint than we're used to, but still, as identifiable as the laugh of a cherished friend. A welcoming wail—the sonic star of the show, but only one voice among many. Ornette wanted to stay—to relish this extended communal affirmation, celebration, meditation—and so, it goes without saying, did we.

'call it art': The vindication of the NYAQ

The New York Art Quartet isn't a household name. Even among my fellow free-jazz enthusiasts, they're still something of a cult-favorite group. That seems a little odd, because the three principal members, saxophonist John Tchicai (R.I.P.), trombonist Roswell Rudd and drummer Milford Graves, have all made major marks in the roughly 48 years since the NYAQ first disbanded. But the fact remains: In the shorthand history of free jazz, you're talking about Ornette, Trane, Cecil, Ayler, Sun Ra, etc.

I've always thought this was a bit of a shame. I've loved the NYAQ's self-titled ESP debut for a long time; to me it's a core-collection free-jazz document. I haven't spent as much time with the follow-up, Mohawk, but it's sounded great when I've sampled it, and the 35th Reunion album is also surprisingly sturdy.

There have been stirrings in the NYAQ camp over the past couple years. First came the Cuneiform release Old Stuff, an archival set that features Tchicai and Rudd with a different rhythm section (including the great Louis Moholo), and then, more recently, the mothership landed: call it art, a new five-LP box set from Triple Point Records.

Some readers of this blog are likely familiar with Ben Young. I will say up front that he is a friend of mine and also a mentor, dating back to my early college days at WKCR. I will follow that by saying that he is absolutely exemplary scholar and advocate of jazz in general—and of free jazz specifically. You might recall the Albert Ayler box he put together for Revenant, or Dixonia, which set a benchmark for Bill Dixon research. Having only cracked open call it art, his latest project, last night, I feel comfortable saying that it's a new pinnacle in the Ben Young oeuvre, and a cause for celebration for anyone who's ever felt that the NYAQ deserves a lot more recognition than they've gotten.

What we have in this set is a trove of unreleased NYAQ recordings. Some are outtakes from the studio sessions we already know, but others are live tapes, either in a concert or radio setting. I'm only on the second LP so far, but the music is divine (and, for the record, the sound quality is excellent, rivaling that of The New York Art Quartet and Mohawk); I already feel my passion for this group reigniting in a serious way.

Speaking of passion for the NYAQ, the book that comes with the set—and though not book-length, per se, it is a book, meaty and hardbound—is a phenomenal work. I mentioned the term "advocate" above, and what we have in these liner notes is a passionately argued advocacy of the NYAQ's central (i.e., rightful) position in the development of free jazz. It is a setting straight of the record, in a sense, but more importantly, this essay is a tying-together of many different threads, an exegesis of the entire scene surrounding this group. As anyone who knows Tchicai, Rudd and Graves's histories could tell you, the NYAQ did not come together in a vacuum; it grew directly out of, e.g., Rudd's so-called School Days collaboration with Steve Lacy (the famed Monk repertory band); the New York Contemporary Five, which included Tchicai along with Archie Shepp and Don Cherry; and the Bill Dixon–Archie Shepp Quartet, which ended up roping in both Tchicai and Rudd. Young's essay takes us through the entire musical history of each NYAQ member, touching not just on the aforementioned groups but also on activities that will be news to all but the most die-hard enthusiasts of these great men. For example, I knew that Milford Graves came up playing Latin jazz, but I had no idea that he led his own group (the Milford Graves Latin Jazz Quintet) in the early ’60s which (A) included a young Chick Corea and (B) appeared at Town Hall in support of Cal Tjader and Herbie Mann. In this booklet, you'll see not only a photograph of the band, but an advertisement for the concert. The research is that deep.

It isn't just facts that we get. We get a case, as it were, an argument about what exactly it was that made the NYAQ special, revolutionary even. I love this observation: "We would want Ornette Coleman's music of the Eisenhower administration to be Free Jazz's big bang, but finally his new style was still wearing a suit that belonged to an older Jazz pattern." Nothing against Ornette, whatsoever, but this is absolutely true. When you're talking about the freedom of jazz, you're talking about the rhythmic explosion—not necessarily some incendiary meltdown, but the literal freeing up of the time, which was a post-Ornette occurrence. The Cecil Taylor–Jimmy Lyons–Sunny Murray group, captured live in those brilliant 1962 recordings, is a major next step, and as Young points out, so is the Ayler–Gary Peacock–Murray band heard on 1964's Spiritual Unity. But the NYAQ was onto something different, something subtler. This is how Young puts it:

"The NYAQ's perfection of the New Thing impulse depended on omitting Ayler's thrust. Where Ayler played strong lines to lead his band, the NYAQ floated translucent phrases into a bubbling pool that diffused attention."

What Young seems to be getting at here is that there's more than one free-jazz paradigm. We've come to know and love the so-called "energy music" designation, but we've also learned that it's been a double-edged sword in the long term, this notion of free-jazz as some sort of quasi-religious expressionism, some heroic shout to the heavens that inevitably takes at least an hour to exhaust itself. I'm not taking aim at Ayler or Trane here. I'm just taking issue with the idea that free jazz has to be very obviously cathartic to be great.

Enter the NYAQ. I'm not sure I can do better than the "bubbling pool" designation above. Their music has this sort of unsettled but also sublimely unhurried quality. It wiggles; it tests the water; it pauses; it digresses. There truly is no leader. There is a ton of space. The music can be fast or slow. The constant, though, is a sense of deep listening, of non-autopilot improvisation, of working together in a very real kind of freedom, a freedom which, crucially, encompasses the freedom not to conform to a clichéd Free Jazz orthodoxy, which, even back then, was already crystallizing. You hear musicians conversing in this music, searching, exploring what their instruments can do, and how their aesthetic personalities can interact: Graves's fragmented yet remarkably supple flow; Rudd and Tchicai's vocal-like unspoolings, thoughtful and spare. There's an amazing sense of patience and delicacy to this music that is not the same as tentativeness. It's simply a taking of time, even when the music is, so to speak, cooking. (And thanks to Graves, it does very often dance in its own abstractly buoyant way.) I know what Young means when he speaks of the NYAQ "omitting Ayler's thrust." It's thanks to this omission that this music has aged beautifully. Hearing it now, you don't hear any of that ’60s-ness that's so often spoken of, in many cases rightfully so, when, say, Ayler or late Coltrane comes up, the sense of free jazz as the soundtrack to widespread social unrest. The NYAQ weren't screaming; they were probing.

The music I have on right now is from record 1 of the set. It's a recording of Rudd's "Rosmosis," made live on 12.31.64 at Judson Hall on W. 57th St. during the Four Days in December concert series. Any student of free jazz has likely heard of this series, presented by the Jazz Composers' Guild. (The NYAQ played on the last of the four bills, along with Sun Ra; 12/28 featured bands led by Cecil Taylor and Bill Dixon; 12/29 paired Paul Bley with the Jazz Composers' Guild Orchestra, led by Carla Bley and Mike Mantler; and 12/30 included the Archie Shepp Quartet and The Free Form Improvisation Ensemble.) But did any of us have any idea that this material had been recorded? It's amazing what a work of scholarship like call it art does; it brings this history—which previously seemed shadowy, mythic, unattainable—right to your door. And it isn't just the sounds; we also get reproductions of Rudd and Tchicai's scores, letters sent between the members of the group, period advertisements, stunning photographs.

I could say more about this set, but as I've indicated, I'm still very much in the process of digesting it. It was important to me to record my initial awe, though. Given the price, call it art is obviously a connoisseur's piece, but if you are one of those connoisseurs, someone for whom either the NYAQ or the early history of free jazz matters, I feel absolutely assured in informing you that you need to get your hands on this set. Ben Young's Albert Ayler box delved deeper into the life and work of a widely recognized genius; call it art, on the other hand, reclaims from relative obscurity a music that was every bit as game-changing, and—now, almost 50 years on from its making—still has the power to arrest, to induce wonder, to make you marvel at its wit, its dexterity, its inquisitiveness, its sense of play and wonder, its living optimism. This is a vindication.

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*Learn more about call it art and Triple Point Records here.

*Rudd and Graves will perform together, along with frequent NYAQ affiliate Amiri Baraka (featured prominently on call it art), at The Vision Festival on June 12, 2013.