As it happens: Sonny Rollins at the Village Gate, 1962

This has been a year of major ’60s-era finds in jazz. Garth Caylor's Nineteen + shook up my world back in April, and I'm currently fixating on this behemoth, which fits in nicely with my ongoing Sonny Rollins obsession. I'd like to thank Phil Freeman for alerting me to the existence of this set—an exhaustive six-disc issue of the entire 1962 Sonny Rollins–Don Cherry–Bob Cranshaw–Billy Higgins Village Gate run that yielded the severely truncated three-track Our Man in Jazz LP—because I haven't read a single mention of it elsewhere. I'm not sure what rights issues are at play here (this is the first I've heard of Solar Records, who seem to specialize in complete reissues of sessions already put out either in full or in part by other labels)—maybe we're looking at a quasi-bootleg. Even so, I can't look away.

I feel that if this set had come out on, say, Mosaic, it would be one of those landmark archival jazz releases that gets unanimously heralded as the precious find that it is—the 2005 Monk/Coltrane CD, for example. Like the many other great jazz boxes that immerse you in the life of a band during a particular phase—e.g., Miles's Plugged Nickel box or the first two Bootleg Series releases—Complete Live at the Village Gate 1962 feels like an object for lifelong study. It's huge and sprawling and untameable and, as Phil's write-up suggests, nearly impossible to digest in any single sitting, but it's the kind of release that gets inside your head and takes you over. Having spent a couple weeks savoring the set in pieces, it now feels to me like an essential part of the Rollins canon, as well as a key document of the extended Ornette Coleman family and the development of free jazz in general. Beyond all that "historical significance" business, it's simply a source of enormous aural pleasure—an extended document of four great, distinctive improvisers conversing.

I find myself gravitating in particular to the many lengthy pieces here labeled "Untitled Original" (distinguished with the letters A, B, C and so forth), many of them taken from sets played on July 29 and 30 of ’62. According to the liner notes and from what I can tell, these are examples of straight improv, and the results are remarkable in their variety and extremity. This music doesn't simply sound like Rollins stepping into the Ornette world, nor does it sound like Rollins bringing Cherry and Higgins into his world. (The set is a valuable reminder that these players were already unified—as I'm reading in Eric Nisenson's valuable Open Sky, Rollins had practiced with Coleman and Cherry for years before the Coleman/Cherry/Haden/Higgins band's public breakthrough.) It often sounds like, in a very stark way, exactly what it is—these four guys stepping onto that stage on those nights and simply starting to play, sometimes achieving a magical sort of communion and sometimes feeling around blindly in the dark. As Freeman writes, "This is music that's all about the moment." Given that some of these tracks run more than a half-hour, it's not surprising that there are lulls and dead ends, but there are these moments where the music turns a corner and hits upon something startlingly fresh, either in general or in the realm of what we've previously known from Rollins and Cherry, separately or together.

"Untitled Original C" begins with approximately two minutes of weightless, sound-based improv, the borderline-unsettling kind that I associate with early days of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, as documented on the ’67/’68 Nessa box. As is often the case on this set, it's Higgins who pushes the music onto a rhythmic grid—throughout these performances, it's fascinating to hear how the rest of the band reacts to his penchant for hard, propulsive groove, sometimes jumping on the train and other times resisting the momentum. Here, we get a tantalizing bit of the former, but then the bottom drops out again and we're back in this sort of one-sound-at-a-time murmur zone.

In its nakedness and frank experimentation, this music is as radical as what Cecil Taylor, Jimmy Lyons and Sunny Murray would play in Copenhagen seven months later. It's such a pleasure to hear Rollins and Cherry conversing in this sort of private, unhurried way. The music makes perfect sense, but there's no rush to make it make sense, to hurry the process of the improvising, to deliver to the audience anything other than a succession of unfolding sonic phenomena. As "Untitled Original C" progresses, the music enters a sort of march cadence, then leaves it; becomes an uptempo freebop battle, with Rollins and Cherry trading phrases, overlapping them. (In a lot of ways, I hear this band as a direct precursor to the CRHB band discussed here, and to Mu and Old and New Dreams, as much as it's a descendant of anything Ornette had done prior—given the existing bond between Rollins and Coleman, one has to assume that OC was in attendance for some of these performances, or at least that he heard Rollins/Cherry/Cranshaw/Higgins at some point, either live or on record.) Higgins steps on the gas and then stops. Rollins is playing what sounds like a classical etude. The horns trade riffs with the drums. Musical events occur; the band discards them.

Things get even rawer on "Untitled Original E/Untitled Original A #3," with Rollins juggling Morse code bleats and ragged fanfares, turning off the brain and just sound-making. And then, on a glorious, nearly 40-minute "Oleo" on the last disc, a performance that deserves legendary status: pure, hurtling abandon, Rollins racing along like liquid steel.

This set is glorious or it's tedious, depending on where your head is at, what you're asking of the music at that time. But objectively, as a document of these artists at work, Complete Live at the Village Gate 1962 is essential. We get to sit with this band, watch them grind through the process, sweat it out, have fun. There's a conspiratorial glee about the best of these recordings; you can almost sense Rollins breathing deeply the air of freedom*. We get to savor these players' beautifully idiosyncratic voices, separately and together, as we would those of great actors whom we'd known as individuals, but not as a unit—at least not as well as we do now.

We accept the phrase "free jazz" as though it means one thing, as though the music of say The Shape of Jazz to Come bears any real relationship to that of Spiritual Unity, other than that they're both wonderful and both share certain instrumentation and common inspirational roots. But were the Who really anything like the Beatles, once each had achieved a mature style? When I hear Complete Live at the Village Gate 1962, I hear an all-in kind of improvising. Rollins led the band, but he wanted the band, the situation to lead him. These players swing and they suspend time; they jell and they clash. They do what they do in the order that they do it, for as long as they happen to, and that's the music for that set, that night.

You can cling to the notion that Rollins, on one hand, and Cherry and Higgins, on the other, were musicians from different schools. You can worry about what it "means" for these supposedly disparate artists to have shared the stage. Or you can accept that all it means it what it sounded like—not an unbroken string of profundity, but a search, that thing that Rollins has been about all along. The revelations, yes, but also the fits and starts, the muddles and the missteps along the way. Sound, just like life, as it happens.

*"I use a variety of systems… What I'm trying to do is get to the point where I can have a really complete expression of what I'm thinking about… I'm trying to play jazz, creative jazz, where you play things in the moment, at the moment that I get it—it comes into your mind and you're able to play it… I might use any kind of technique or harmonic system… Everything is going in the service of trying to reach Sonny Rollins and play myself." —Rollins in Eric Nisenson's Open Sky

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.

Somewhere we've never been: Farmers by Nature at ShapeShifter Lab

The debate over the now-infamous "Sonny Rollins" New Yorker piece continues. I'm not going to get into what I think of the original article, or the points made by its various supporters and detractors, or even Sonny's own response, mainly because I think both the incident and its aftershocks are beside the point. That point being: music ("jazz," or what have you) as an actual human practice, happening now, in real time—rather than an idea to be lobbed about abstractly.

I bring up the Sonny business mainly because I read Justin Moyer's jazz-bashing response in The Washington Post yesterday, and then went out to see a very satisfying night of what you might call jazz—the Aum Fidelity–backed double-record-release bill of Darius Jones and Matthew Shipp and the Farmers by Nature trio (Craig Taborn, William Parker and Gerald Cleaver, pictured above, left to right) at ShapeShifter Lab; and a trio set by Travis Laplante, Mick Barr and Nick Podgurski in a Clinton Hill living room, part of the Home Audio series. One of Moyer's points ("There’s not much difference between a screechy performance by avant-garde saxophonist Peter Brötzmann from 1974 and one from 2014") stuck with me—the idea being that "free jazz" always sounds the same. I've seen enough supposedly free performances to know that, when it comes to the post-Coltrane/Ayler tradition, at least, "free" can indeed refer to a well-rehearsed script. I happen to love Peter Brötzmann—’74, ’14, whenever—and I think he's a much better listener/collaborator and more diverse performer than he's given credit for. But yes, you go to see him, and you know that a certain flavor of ornery, macho catharsis is going to be part of the deal.

But I take issue with the idea that actual freedom, actual improvisation, is a myth, and that, to cite another one of Moyer's points, improvisation is overrated as a rule. Again, I agree with him in the macro sense. Moyer writes, "…the fact that music is improvised doesn’t make it great." Amen to that—I think the idea of improvisation (or any other philosophical construct that informs music's creation or performance, be that serialism, or graphic scores or Conduction, or what have you) being presented as an inherent virtue of that given piece of music is b.s. I'm really only interested in the result, and very often songs, or more generally, compositions, are what I'm after. As a metalhead, I love riffs; as a jazz guy, I love melodies—Ellington, Mingus, Andrew Hill, etc.; as a lifelong pop fan, I love hooks.

But, in some cases, improvised music appears before you as a kind of miracle. Watching Farmers by Nature last night, I felt like I was witnessing the honest-to-God creation of something out of nothing. It wasn't free jazz, or any other kind of calcified thing. It wasn't self-important about its method. It was just an honest shot at doing what improvisers ought, ideally, to do every time, which is not simply to empty your closet of every idea you might have stuffed in there, but to deal with the moment, with its possibility, and to listen, really listen, to what your collaborators have to say, and concern yourself with supporting those ideas, as well as the overall continuity, as fragile as a bubble, of the collective statement.


The set had a real elegance of design to it. Parker started out solo, and the other two slowly built up a kind of murky groove, rising out of nothingness. From there, over roughly an hour, the music visited roughly six or seven different zones, like track demarcations on an album. Each proceeded logically from the one before, and never arrived till the group had fully explored the prior area of inquiry. I remember an episode of fractured funk, with Taborn and Cleaver clanking out jagged accents, completing each other's sentences; an exquisitely chill section that felt almost like placid bossa nova; a couple of frenzied Taborn flights, where he came off like a short-circuiting cyborg, juxtaposing single, percussive notes from different registers of the keyboard; a long unaccompanied Cleaver solo that took full advantage of some expert tom-tom tuning—the drum kit was really singing, in the melodic sense—and ramped up to torrential density; and maybe most profound of all, a section featuring Parker on arco. I don't think I've ever heard a double bass cry out with such grain and elegy and deep feeling as it did last night in Parker's hands. Taborn accompanied with superhuman restraint, serving up quiet yet extremely resonant chords.

So, yes, sensitivity and restraint are a big part of why this music succeeded. But as I attempted to describe above, the group raged plenty as well. I think what impressed me so much was, again, this sense of continuity, of each player's—and the trio's, as a collective unit—awareness of the overall arc. Too often, long sets of improvised music follow a predictable quiet-loud-quiet shape. This felt more like a suite, with each movement taking on its own special mini contour. The band went for the climax when it was there, but they never milked it. Intensity was only one color on the palette. And the same goes for the hierarchy of the music, as it were. For long stretches, the band played in a way that seemed totally collective, i.e., sans soloist, almost in the way that groups like the Necks improvise. But, as with the varied dynamics, collectivity was just one strategy. During plenty of other moments, the more traditional soloist-plus-accompanists concept was very much at play. Each of the three players starred in turn.

Most amazing to me, though, was how the moment, the actual spontaneous unfolding circumstance, seemed to drive the set, as much as the will of any one player, or even of the trio as a whole. I'm thinking, for example, about how Gerald Cleaver's smallest cymbal—the size of a splash, but with a more ping-y, less tinny sound than I've often heard out of splashes—turned out to be something like a central character during the last 10 or 15 minutes of the set. Throughout the performance, Cleaver moved this cymbal around the kit—sometimes it was perched on its own stand to his right, sometimes it was resting on the hi-hat stand above those cymbals or on the floor tom or snare. So, in the middle of one such transfer, Cleaver happened to drop this little cymbal. He reached down beside the bass drum and picked it up, and then he went to put it back on its original stand to his right. But this act became, in and of itself, a sort of tic or weird fixation. He didn't just replace the cymbal and go on playing the full kit. He began obsessively, continuously spinning the cymbal around on the stand, eliciting a faint little creak. The other players didn't seem to directly respond, but as Cleaver turned the cymbal around and around, it was almost like he was drawing the accumulated momentum of the set down into a final moment—draining the water from the tub, funneling the creative material out of the air. Taborn and Parker gradually quieted, and Cleaver was striking the still-spinning cymbal with a wire brush, almost inaudibly. He stopped spinning it and continued whacking the brush into the air, engaging in movement but producing essentially no sound. And that was the end of the set.

I trust that none of the above episodes, the high-intensity Taborn solos, the Parker arco feature, the concluding Cleaver small-cymbal mini drama, were planned. Befitting their group name, the three musicians actually were harvesting moments, turning them over, wringing out all their potential. The overall result didn't sound anything like any stereotypical idea of "free jazz," or any other style of improvised music I can think of. But at the same time, it wasn't alien; it felt fully logical, narrative, directed, harmonious, complete. The set lasted for exactly the right amount of time, and for the band to have played a single note after the ending would've felt (to me, at least) superfluous. This Farmers by Nature set wasn't great because it was improvised; it was great because of, as I've attempted to describe, the brilliance of the various individual moments and the coherence of the overall form. At the same time, I think the set's uniqueness, the fact that what happened last night hasn't happened before and won't happen again, was part of its immense appeal. We shouldn't fetishize the means of production—how something was made, or according to what principle—but when something truly special arises from a certain method, or lack of method, it's good to remember that, yes, that method has potential. It is absolutely no guarantee—not whatsoever—but improvisation can, under certain circumstances, take both players and audience somewhere they've never been. Last night's Farmers by Nature set reaffirmed that fact for me. As always, I'll be staying tuned.

/////

P.S. My focus on the Taborn/Parker/Cleaver performance isn't intended to slight the other sets I saw last night. Both were fierce and beautiful. Darius Jones and Matthew Shipp burrowed ever further into the special kind of poignant, stormy melancholy—doled out in three- or four-minute chunks, the so-called Cosmic Lieder of their album titles—they've been creating as a duo for the past few years. And Travis Laplante and Mick Barr, both scarily extreme, virtuosic and idiosyncratic musicians, unleashed their respective aesthetic selves, but with no sense of autopilot whatsoever, building something collective and response-based, with help from Nick Podgurski's expertly tension-ratcheting percussion, moving imperceptibly from sparseness to brutal density. A hell of a night all around.

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.

Basra lives: RIP Pete La Roca

I'm not an authority on the work of drummer Pete La Roca (born Peter Sims), who, as Ethan Iverson, A Blog Supreme and Sonny Rollins have reported, passed away this past Monday. But I am a fan of his work. I remember some friends turning me on to Basra—La Roca's 1965 debut as a leader, and the only session he led for Blue Note during that period—in college, and it grabbed me hard. I've returned to the record periodically, and it's had the same effect every time. I spun it yesterday when I heard the news, and it seemed stronger than ever—dark, swirling, heady, raw but incredibly tender. The tones of the instruments are so present and unadorned; you feel like you're right there within the mix.

It's because of this kind of record that I get queasy when I see all-time "Best Jazz Albums" lists that stick to the same old narrow canon. Kind of Blue is a great album; I like A Love Supreme very much. But not only are there tons of respective Miles and Coltrane records that I love more, there are so many classics that you'd just never see on a list like this, records that might hit neophytes harder that the so-called staples. Basra is one of these records.



Re-listening yesterday, what struck me about Basra was its droney expanse, the patient way it constructs a mood and just lets it ride. Iverson used the word "folkloric" to describe La Roca's left hand, but I'd apply that term to the entire feel of this album. Listen to the title track, how it sprawls out, like an improvisatory incantation. The rhythm section brings out some of the freest, most speaking-in-tongues playing of Joe Henderson's career, not via commonplace fire (I think here of La Roca's astute critique of free jazz in the interview Iverson links to, e.g., "Free music is in a constant state of surprise and, consequently, presents no surprise at all.") but via hypnotic drift, an authoritative yet almost ghostly pulse, like a James Brown groove slowed way down so that the funk becomes merely implicit. The Henderson figure that starts at 4:43, this overblown, Spanish-sounding thing, just slays me; and then listen how he trails off into this writhing tail of a phrase. What I feel when I hear this saxophone solo is that it is a sort of conjuring on the part of the rhythm section, i.e., that these strange sounds are being drawn out of him by Sims, pianist Steve Kuhn and bassist Steve Swallow. Not to take any credit away from Henderson—just to say that this is a band discovering sound together in real time.

Listen around 5:37 as Sims begins to imply a backbeat feel, faint yet stealthily funky. Then into a kind of bass-drums joint solo, with La Roca limiting himself to hand work: snare rolls that remind me of Tony Williams and the occasional thunderous, Elvin-style tom thwack. But the dynamics and the groove are all his own; he's soloing, yes, but also protecting the pocket, riding the drone. When Henderson reenters at 8:55, the entire band sounds like it's in a stupor, hypnotized by La Roca's faint, earthy churn and Kuhn's eerie high-end textures. I really can't think of any other jazz like this, so engaged with the drone and the sprawl, the way-sublimated funk. And this vibe is no accident, heard on this track alone; it pervades the entire album. La Roca was in search of a mood here, and he nailed it. Blue Note albums, as wondrous as they tend to be, don't often feel fully coherent, holistic in this way, which is why a deliberate concept album like Wayne Shorter's The All-Seeing Eye (recorded just five months after Basra) seems like such an anomaly among the BN discography of that period. I think Basra deserves to be called a concept album as well; its concept is its sustained mood, the one that propels Henderson to an ecstatic trance state, sounding, to me, more unfettered and in-the-moment than on any other of his countless sessions.

La Roca does provide some clues to Basra's otherworldly mood in the aforementioned interview, citing how his two early records as a leader—the other is Turkish Women at the Bath, an interesting LP but not the intoxicating powerhouse that Basra is—were built around "ethnic themes." He cites "Basra" in particular as a Middle Eastern melody (the title comes from a city in Iraq), though it seems to be credited to La Roca himself in the various discographies. Does anyone know if this is a traditional tune of some sort?

The opening track on Basra, "Malagueña" (by Cuban pianist-composer Ernesto Lecuona) uses a very different rhythm than the title track—a classic, Elvin-y 6/8 swing feel—but the vibes of the two pieces are similar, and Henderson reaches that same place of ecstatic incantation. I love "Malagueña," dearly, but during my pass through Basra yesterday, the other track that stood out most prominently was "Lazy Afternoon." I'm not sure that it's possible for a ballad performance to conjure more mystery or more grace than this one does. It feels to me as though the entire quartet is dreaming the same dream, drifting along on the same cloud. Pieces like this, where you stop feeling the genre, the style and start feeling total mood immersion, are the ones that really sold me on jazz in the first place (Andrew Hill's "Black Monday" is another one that hits me this way) and the ones that still fuel my devotion. Listen to how La Roca's brushwork starts pushing ever so slightly harder at about 4:10, like a whisper growing more passionate without getting very much louder. And then by 4:50, back down to that hushed dream state, which sounds like it could last forever. That's how I think of Basra as a whole, as a reverie with no defined beginning or end. It's a sensation you step into, along with the players: a group trance, a collective prayer.

When I hear the record now, in light of the sad news, I imagine it as an ongoing present, where Kuhn and Swallow—both still with us—continue to coexist with the late masters Henderson and La Roca, tapping into that otherworldly flow. La Roca is gone, but Basra lives.

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*I recommend this brief take on Basra, from last August, by the outstanding metal drummer Aesop Dekker (Agalloch, ex-Liturgy), via his fine Cosmic Hearse blog. Dekker cites the "exotic, yet grave" feel of "Malagueña" and has this to say of "Basra": "The title track is an absolutely gorgeous landscape of sound, sultry, sexy, and altogether mysterious."

*Anyone heard this 1997 La Roca/Sims session, SwingTime? The samples sound really nice.