Unsentimental Journey
Five decades ago Ornette Coleman left a segregated Fort Worth to pursue his music, enduring the insults of critics, the resistance of performers, and the fickleness of the record industry.
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After seeing Dizzy Gillespie on a trip to New York when he was fifteen, Coleman immersed himself in bebop with local saxophonist Red Connors. Coleman, who already considered himself more of a composer than a musician, was drawn to the freedom that bop's harmonic structure allowed soloists, but he kept upping the ante. On the road in 1949 with the archaic New Orleans minstrel show of Silas Green and later with the rhythm and blues band of Clarence Samuels, he'd sneak in wild, careening solos that completely abandoned the song's rhythm, melody, and chord changes and went for its pure feeling. To him it seemed like such a natural sound that he's still incredulous that fans and fellow musicians objected. But when he was in Baton Rouge with Samuels, customers who were infuriated by his unorthodox style and appearance (including long hair and beard) beat him up and smashed his instrument. After taking six months off in New Orleans and then working in an Amarillo house band for another four, in 1950 he signed on for a tour as a tenor player for Pee Wee Crayton, a T-Bone Walker-style guitarist then riding high with "Blues After Hours." After Coleman uncorked his first free solo, Crayton started paying him not to play. But he hung in long enough to reach Los Angeles, which had been his goal all along. "I thought I would be able to find a band there that could better play the kind of music I wanted to play," he says. Except for a couple of dispirited trips home during his leanest years, he has since returned to Texas only for family funerals and appearances at the Caravan of Dreams.
Not that Los Angeles proved much more receptive. Its fifties jazz scene was cool and conservative, consisting largely of crew-cut white men in between big-band or studio gigs who read music expertly and played solos more closely related to architecture than to improvisation. Enter Coleman—dressed in white robes, with a bushy beard and hair to his waist, barefoot, vegetarian, deeply religious—his combustible, raggedy, Texas-blues-based alto solos skittering all over the place with no clear beginning or end. When he tried to sit in on after-hours jams, he was thrown off bandstands or the other musicians simply walked away. So he took a job at a department store while studying harmony and composition voraciously. In 1954 he married poet Jayne Cortez, and in 1956 she gave birth to their son, Ornette Denardo Coleman. Two years after that, though, their marriage was all but over (she divorced him in 1964). By then Coleman's radical notions were intriguing a few local musicians, old friends like Fort Worth trumpeter Bobby Bradford and New Orleans drummer Ed Blackwell and new acquaintances like trumpeter Don Cherry, drummer Billy Higgins, and tenor James Clay. In the late fifties he released his first two albums, Something Else!!!! The Music of Ornette Coleman and Tomorrow Is the Question!, on Contemporary Records, an adventurous but respected label. Marked by his implacable resolve and deep blues feeling, along with his idiosyncratic tone and rhythmic aggression, the albums offered jarring departures while barely hinting at what was to come.
Modern Jazz Quartet's pianist John Lewis, one of the genre's most respected arbiters of taste, championed Coleman's cause, arranging for a contract with Atlantic Records. Before the first Atlantic album was released, Coleman's quartet (with Higgins, Cherry, and bassist Charlie Haden) began an extended booking at the Five Spot Café in Greenwich Village, the hippest club in the nation's jazz capital. Those dates from 1959 and 1960 were as momentous as Bob Dylan's decision to go electric five years later at the Newport Folk Festival: As if overnight, the world became a whole 'nother place. Coleman wasn't the only musician then forging free jazz; he was joined by John Coltrane and pianist Cecil Taylor. But Trane had an unimpeachable jazz pedigree, and Taylor was classically trained. As far as New York knew, Coleman's raw, screechy, self-taught sound came out of nowhere. His detractors actually argued that he sounded that way because he didn't know how to play chord changes. Miles Davis pronounced him "psychologically . . . all screwed up inside," which was one of the kinder reactions.
But the controversy was good for business, and some listeners even "got it." The art and bohemian worlds adopted Coleman, and Dorothy Kilgallen mentioned him regularly in her daily Journal-American gossip column. Acknowledged jazz masters like saxophonist Jackie McLean joined Lewis in supporting and eventually exploring Coleman's path. Nine astonishing albums Coleman recorded for Atlantic between May 1959 and March 1961 (three weren't released until the seventies) fleshed out his ideas, with a strong sense of swing and rich, durable melodies such as "Lonely Woman" and "Ramblin." The biggest eye-opener was Free Jazz, in which two quartets, one played through each stereo speaker, improvised on a single theme for more than 35 minutes. (The 1993 box set Beauty Is a Rare Thing: The Complete Atlantic Recordings gathers all nine albums, six previously unreleased compositions, and two cuts from compilation albums of that period.) Today, using the term "harmolodics" instead of "free jazz," Coleman likens the music to a conversation in which everyone expresses his feelings freely, sometimes all at once, sometimes separately, but with each participant remaining sensitive to what the others say. If that's hard to visualize, consider that Coleman has been writing a book about harmolodic theory for more than two decades, "finishing" it numerous times before starting over. Consider too that practically everyone who plays harmolodically was taught one-on-one by Coleman. It works—it's just hard to explain. "He gives you the freedom to play, bringing out the best in yourself. Playing with Ornette, you become yourself," says German pianist Joachim Kühn.
I watched Kühn and Coleman in action as they prepared for a spring 1997 tour of duet concerts in Europe. Coleman, who rarely names a tune before recording it, called each one by number as the two men moved through their set. After some slow, sweet tunes, they settled into a noirish ballad that left Kühn drained and sighing audibly. "Number nine," Coleman continued, quickly stating the theme on his alto, then playing Afro-pop-sounding lines while Kühn rhythmically built the piece to a crescendo. The two men barely glanced at each other as they worked, but Coleman was pleased. "That piano sounds so good today. It's open. That's what we're trying to get to," he said. The next piece built on alto, one phrase at a time, to a startling wail; Coleman suddenly dropped it back down and then added chunks of rhythm until he was at full cry again. Kühn's piano seemed to dart in several directions at once as Coleman blew unison lines on top of it. The music sounded like it came from one mind but two hearts. Later, over oxtails, goat, pork chops, and sautéed codfish at a nearby Caribbean restaurant, I asked how much of it was composed. He asked me what I thought, and when I replied that it all sounded composed though I knew it wasn't, he chuckled. "Then I must be doing my job right. It's really about fifty-fifty composed and improvised," he said.
Achieving notoriety, or even status as a big fish in a small pond, is one thing. Making a living is another. Coleman has never had problems coming up with new music, but since the early sixties he's had nothing but problems when he has tried to release it or play it in concert. Ornette Coleman will be the first to tell you that he is no businessman—and that the music business stacks its cards against him anyhow. Both assertions ring true. The Five Spot breakthrough led to more New York engagements and some of the only real touring Coleman has done in America. But by March 1961 the quartet had been torn apart by heroin (everyone but him) and the desire of his sidemen to try their newly developed styles in other settings. The deal with Atlantic ended, and not much later, Coleman quit playing clubs, partly because he disliked the smoke, booze, and sexually charged atmosphere but also because cool—and white—pianist Dave Brubeck was commanding fees more than twice what Coleman was paid while drawing smaller crowds to the same rooms. Yet sometimes when a promoter agreed to his sky-high price, Coleman would demand even more (he still does, according to some exasperated promoters). Coleman soon fired his manager and his booking agent and was staging his own concerts; a December 1962 program at New York's Town Hall featured Coleman's new trio (with bassist David Izenzon and drummer Charles Moffett), a three-piece rhythm and blues band, and a string quartet playing his first-ever classical compositions. He has continued to work with both jazz and classical units ever since. "Classical musicians are people who read music. That's all it means," he insists. "People who play jazz improvise. That's the only difference."
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