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 the Town Hall concert, Coleman left the public eye, establishing another pattern that continues today. He'd burned himself out trying to manage his own affairs in a jazz world of low-paying dives, destructive drugs, and cutthroat competition. He'd gotten ulcers from absorbing so much criticism, and his divorce from Cortez staggered him further. Meanwhile, the phrase "free jazz" was being hung on an impressive roster of musicians storming through the doors he'd opened: celebrated names like Coltrane and Taylor, George Russell, Andrew Hill, Charles Mingus, and Eric Dolphy as well as clarinetist Jimmy Giuffre, soprano saxophone player Steve Lacy, bassist Steve Swallow, pianists Paul and Carla Bley and Burton Greene, trumpeter Mike Mantler, keyboardist Sun Ra, trombonist Roswell Rudd, tenor players Albert Ayler and Archie Shepp, and the Chicago players such as pianist Muhal Richard Abrams who would help organize the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. All were in some sense deeply influenced by Ornette Coleman, and even past critics were beginning to come around. In 1965 Coleman's trio played a three-week stand at the Village Vanguard, and audiences treated him like a grand old man. Then he went to Europe; the two-volume Ornette Coleman Trio at the "Golden Circle" Stockholm, released on the prestigious jazz label Blue Note, unveiled his newfound prowess on violin and trumpet. Returning home, Coleman was once again in demand on both coasts. In 1967 he used the first of his two Guggenheim Foundation Fellowships to compose Inventions of Symphonic Poems, which premiered at the UCLA Jazz Festival. Though he was making enough money to buy one of the first artists' lofts in SoHo—dubbed Artists House, it quickly became a gathering place for the international avant-garde—the familiar start-and-stop patterns of Coleman's career persisted. But his music continued to evolve.
In 1971 Coleman scored another coup when he signed with Columbia Records, his first major label since Atlantic, yielding the warm, kaleidoscopic Science Fiction and Broken Shadows (the latter was not released until 1982). Together, they form the recent reissue The Complete Science Fiction Sessions. Most important, from his point of view, Coleman and the London Symphony Orchestra recorded what remains his most noteworthy symphonic work, Skies of America, inspired by a night sleeping outdoors on a Crow Indian reservation in Montana. Last year's reissue benefits from a remix that brings out a clean elegance and an unsettling eeriness the original album only suggested. But Columbia soon dropped nearly its entire jazz roster, and he has rarely enjoyed major-label distribution since then.
In 1973, after hearing tapes played to him by his friend Robert Palmer, a musician and critic, Coleman and Palmer traveled to the foothills of northern Morocco's Rif Mountains to visit the Master Musicians of Joujouka. This family had been exclusively providing court musicians to the sultans of Morocco since the thirteenth century. Coleman discovered that harmolodic principles allowed him and Palmer to play in unison with the local drums, stringed instruments, and oboelike raitas, even though Moroccan music has no tempered Western scales. Seizing on those possibilities, Coleman has spent the past quarter-century combining American and indigenous musics from around the world; he has, to use his metaphor, found a way for everyone to speak in one language.
His other major breakthrough followed in 1977 and stemmed from his growing fascination with African American funk and disco and the electrified "noise" bands of downtown Manhattan. Dancing in Your Head, his first new recording in five years, presented music for alto, two electric guitars, electric bass, and percussion, none played by musicians previously associated with him. Prime Time, the name he soon gave his electric band, hurled an orchestral maelstrom of sound while staying down to earth with funky rhythms clearly rooted in his old style as well as his new interests. The album, which also included one track made in the field with the Master Musicians—a second was added to last year's reissue—brought Coleman his broadest audience yet. It also opened up careers for young performers who'd studied with him. Most prominent were guitarist James "Blood" Ulmer, bassist Jamaaladeen Tacuma, and drummer Ronald Shannon Jackson (a Fort Worth native Coleman had only recently met). For the first time, there was a school of musicians who identified themselves specifically as harmolodic, putting that word on the tongues of hipsters around the world. And yet, and yet . . .
While the highs—his art—were higher than ever, the lows—his business and personal life—were lower. Old and New Dreams, a group made up of members of his earliest bands that played his music or music inspired by him, was well received when it emerged in 1976. Coleman had become nostalgia fodder. In the mid-seventies he had to vacate his Artists House, after disputes with neighbors that he says were racially motivated. In 1977 he started a label named Artists House that folded two years later. While nearly every significant movement in jazz was proceeding along various lines laid out by Coleman, he was crashing in cheap hotels or in his record label's office.
There were repeated conflicts with concert promoters, especially in America, and work at home threatened to dry up. His interviews grew increasingly strident on the subjects of his income and his rightful place in American popular culture; he talked about going after the Grateful Dead audience (1988's Virgin Beauty, inspired by that rock band and including guitarist Jerry Garcia on three songs, was arguably his most accessible work yet). He was touring—mainly with Prime Time—and making more money than ever but spending it even faster or simply giving it away to friends. He went through a succession of managers, his last best hope from the music biz being Sid Bernstein, the man who first brought the Beatles to America. That relationship lasted from 1980 to 1982, ending in suits and countersuits. Bernstein's eventual replacement was none other than Denardo Coleman, who'd first drummed on Coleman's 1966 album The Empty Foxhole when he was ten years old. "Every manager I've ever had, they didn't get me my money, and it put me in trouble," Coleman says today. "Denardo's never gotten me in trouble."
In 1982 he bought an abandoned schoolhouse in one of the Lower East Side's most drug-infested neighborhoods but fled within the year after being attacked and nearly killed twice. His only albums between 1979 and 1985 were a pair of live sets documenting his launching of the Caravan of Dreams. Both appeared on the club's own barely distributed label. While Coleman had hoped the Caravan could serve as a second base for him, that outfit soon scaled back radically as financial backing decreased and charges likening its staff to a cult surfaced. A bright spot came in 1987, though. Coleman was voted Jazz Musician of the Year by the readers of Downbeat, the Bible of mainstream jazz, and it was official: The man once accused of destroying jazz had become one of its leading figures. Through it all, that big Texas tenor sound remained at the heart of his music, whether he identified with the state or not.
But soon after Virgin Beauty was released, Coleman left public life once again while Denardo sorted out his business affairs and recruited a staff to build and operate a studio on East 125th Street. Finally, in 1995, a new album, called Tone Dialing, was released on his new label, Harmolodic (distributed by the venerable Verve Records). Three more came the next year before mergers left Verve under new ownership and Harmolodic and Coleman without a home. Coleman's price, which he bases on what he regards as his worth rather than on the number of paying customers he can draw, has become almost prohibitive in America; his fee for the Battery Park show reportedly neared $90,000—out of which, it must be added, he flew in numerous musicians from around the world and paid for room and board, per diems, and salaries. (Tickets to sit on the lawn were $20-$25, and regular seating ran $40-$45, hardly out of line for a major jazz show these days, though these prices would increase considerably in a smaller venue with no corporate sponsor.)
He'd like to find backing to take that show on a tour of Texas, but nobody's biting. In Europe and Japan, where state subsidies help pay his fees, he performs twenty to thirty nights a year. He may give audiences a jazz group, Prime Time, an orchestra, some sort of world-music band, or even a harmolodic opera or ballet. No two will sound even vaguely similar, even when they're playing the exact same music. Persecuted genius, his own worst enemy, or both, Ornette Coleman is unlike anyone else in American culture in the past century, and could well hold that distinction at the end of this one too.
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