The History of Jazz (71 page)

In the nine months following the release of
Change of the Century
, Atlantic set up a number of additional recording sessions for their new star jazz artist. These featured several different facets of the altoist’s work, including Coleman’s follow-up efforts in a quartet setting (with Ed Blackwell replacing Higgins) and in larger ensembles conducted by Gunther Schuller. But the most daring project took place on December 21, 1960, when Coleman gathered together a double quartet at A&R Studios in New York. The resulting record,
Free Jazz
, represented a radical extreme even by the standards of Coleman’s previous work. In the past, for all his nonconformism, Coleman had favored performances that retained elements of the jazz tradition: his incisive compositions were, for the most part, highly structured; melody statements encapsulated horn solos backed by rhythm section; a 4/4 sense of time predominated; most pieces lasted around four or five minutes.
Free Jazz
, in contrast, broke all these rules. Instead, it took on overtones of a spectacle, serving as a jazz equivalent of those battles royal favored by television wrestling aficionados, brutish encounters in which a number of well-toned bodies engage in simultaneous, extemporaneous sparring. Clearly the talents gathered by Coleman for this session were heavyweights: two quartets were used, separated into the left and right channels of the stereo recording, with Coleman and Cherry, backed by Higgins and Scott LaFaro, countering the efforts of Eric Dolphy and Freddie Hubbard, supported by Haden and Blackwell. The texture of the music was much thicker than earlier Coleman efforts. Churning and seething, sounds ricocheting between the two quartets, a relentless energy permeating the music,
Free Jazz
fulfilled all the prophecies made about Coleman, both positive and negative. Devotees who had sought a sonic revolution in his work were not likely to be disappointed: this was radical music by any measure, a horn-playing assault that could bring down the walls of Jericho all over again. By the same token, those critics who wished to dismiss Coleman as a purveyor of cacophonous, jarring notes and tones, an exponent of shrill noise, found ample ammunition in
Free Jazz
to justify their attacks, seeing it as fulfillment of Shakespeare’s descriptive “sound and fury signifying nothing.”

Yet in the final analysis, Coleman’s embrace of free-form-energy jazz would prove to be prescient. Over the next several years, the work of Albert Ayler, Cecil Taylor, Pharoah Sanders, even John Coltrane, among others, would increasingly gravitate toward longer, uninhibited, loosely structured, often disturbing performances, explosions of sound that are much closer to
Free Jazz
than to any of Coleman’s earlier works. In time this very same approach would become a cliché of free jazz, with even the most impassioned atonal performances tending toward a certain somber sameness. But for at least the next decade, this subversion of the various jazz conventions—chord changes, tempos, song forms, structured solos, and the like—would retain its radical flavor and maintain its credentials as the most progressive strain in jazz. With
Free Jazz
, Coleman not only gave a fitting name to the movement but effectively captured the essence of its sound.

Coleman himself seemed increasingly ambivalent about the path he was now pursuing. Over the next four years, he would enter the recording studio on only a handful of occasions. Four sessions for Atlantic in 1961 resulted in the release of
Ornette!
and
Ornette on Tenor
, but during this period he made just a few public appearances. Coleman’s sole recording during the following year documented his December 21, 1962, Town Hall concert, promoted by the altoist himself in response to his growing distrust of booking agents and club owners. This ambitious affair, which featured Coleman’s trio along with a string quartet and several rhythm-and-blues players, barely broke even. For the next two years Coleman disappeared almost completely from public view. This represented no resignation on Coleman’s part, merely a tactical retreat. In private, the altoist formulated bold, at times grandiose plans. He decided to open his own jazz club and even selected a site. He planned to start his own music publishing company. But, like the Town Hall concert, these attempts to wrest control of the business side of his career met with little or no success. Coleman also aimed to expand his instrumental skills—but instead of embarking on formal saxophone study, he decided to learn trumpet, violin, and guitar. Meanwhile, he turned down offers to work as a bandleader, although around this same time he participated in high-profile jams with Cecil Taylor, Albert Ayler, and John Coltrane.

Finally, in January 1965, Coleman returned to the bandstand, performing at New York’s Village Vanguard, an engagement that in retrospect can be seen as initiating a second phase in his career, one that lasted for the next eight years and would culminate in Coleman’s collaboration with local musicians in Joujouka, Morocco. In place of the sharply focused altoist of his early work now stood a restless musician running in many directions at once. Ornette the altoist? Ornette the trumpeter? Ornette the violinist? Ornette the serious composer? Ornette the explorer of world music? Ornette the jazz traditionalist? Ornette the theorist of harmolodics? He was all of these, and more. There were passing glances backward: his live recording at the Golden Circle in Stockholm, for example, recalled the focused energy of his work for the Atlantic label. But other efforts broke surprising new ground. He wrote “Forms and Sounds” for woodwind quintet. He was awarded his first Guggenheim fellowship (a rare honor at that time, when jazz players seemed all but blacklisted from this prestigious award), which resulted in his orchestral work
Inventions of Symphonic Poems
. His composition “Emotion Modulation” was performed on trumpet and violin, and found Coleman backed by two bassists, a drummer, and vocalist Yoko Ono. Coleman himself emerged as a vocalist, singing as part of a backup chorus on a Louis Armstrong album. “Sun Suite of San Francisco” was written for trumpet soloist Bobby Bradford backed by Coleman’s quartet and a thirty-five-piece orchestra. Other pieces were composed for string quartet. The range of Coleman’s new music was documented on a series of recordings, including
The Empty Foxhole
,
New York is Now!, Science Fiction
, and
Skies of America
.

In the liner notes to the latter album, an ambitious project featuring the London Symphony Orchestra, Coleman first referred to “harmolodic theory.” Harmolodics, Coleman explained, was based on the use of “melody, harmony and the instrumentation of movement of forms.”
⁶
This doctrine would loom large in Coleman’s public pronouncements during later years. As a theoretical approach, harmolodics came to represent more a metaphysical doctrine than a musicological tool—a sort of Rosicrucianism for improvisers. And even the loose links with music theory were ultimately subverted by Coleman himself: he eventually came to insist that harmolodics could help in almost any area of creative expression, including fiction and poetry. From the vagueness of Coleman’s comments, one suspects that it could equally apply to bricklaying or the culinary arts.

But the ultimate test of Coleman’s artistry during this period was not as a theorist, but as a musician. On the heels of his harmolodic philosophizing, Coleman began experimenting with new approaches to combo playing. For years, he had avoided hiring harmony instrument players, such as pianists or guitarists, for his band. But in the early 1970s, Coleman began an association with guitarist James Blood Ulmer. Ulmer brought a radically different texture to Coleman’s ensemble, mixing free jazz with elements of funk, rock, and experimental electronic music. Bassist Jamaaladeen Tacuma and drummer Ronald Shannon Jackson also became prominent Coleman sidemen, furthering the altoist’s new direction with their hard-grooving, dance-oriented styles. The A&M release
Dancing in Your Head
revealed how far Coleman had come since
Free Jazz
. At the height of the fascination with jazz-rock fusion, Coleman showed that it was possible to use electric music as a springboard for improvisation without resorting to the overtly commercial, slickly streamlined sounds that were now drowning the jazz world in wave after wave of synthesized slush. Follow-up releases such as
Body Meta
and
Of Human Feelings
built on this same approach, presented under the banner of “Prime Time,” a name chosen by Coleman to represent this facet of his music. This greater comfort playing with harmony instruments could also be seen in later Coleman projects, such as his
Song X
collaboration with Pat Metheny from 1985, his invitation to Jerry Garcia to join in Coleman’s
Virgin Beauty
project from 1988, and his work with pianists Geri Allen and Joachim Kühn in the mid-1990s. Coleman recorded little after this point, but his 2006 release
Sound Grammar
was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in music, only the second time a jazz artist had received that honor.

Cecil Taylor, whose influence on the free jazz movement would come to rival Coleman’s, presents a stark contrast to the altoist. Where Coleman was self-taught and struggled to learn the rudiments of music theory, Taylor boasted a blue-ribbon musical education. Where Coleman drew much of his early inspiration from bebop, blues, R&B, and other African American forms of music, Taylor called upon a wider range of influences, including contemporary classical composers such as Stravinsky and Bartók—the latter’s use of Hungarian folk music in his compositions was seen by Taylor as a counterpart to his own relationship to the jazz tradition—and his tastes in jazz were notably expansive, ranging far beyond the reigning bop figures of his formative years, and spanning Fats Waller, Jimmie Lunceford, Chick Webb, Cab Calloway, Erroll Garner, Dave Brubeck, Jaki Byard, Dick Twardzik, Horace Silver, and, above all, Duke Ellington. Where Coleman’s later works drew on popular dance styles with pronounced funk and rock elements, Taylor gravitated to formal dance, writing and performing original pieces for ballet artists and modern dance companies. Above all, Taylor’s music, despite frequently being mentioned in the same breath as Coleman’s, is cut from different cloth. It is denser, atomistic, more explosive, more insistently percussive, more thoroughly purged of romantic sentiment. In place of Coleman’s human cry on the saxophone, one finds Taylor’s fusillade of notes, unforgiving and unapologetic.

Born in Long Island City, New York, in 1929, Taylor was raised in the predominantly white neighborhood of Corona. His father was a cook and servant who worked for a state senator, his mother a housewife with diverse interests: she spoke French and German, played the piano, enjoyed the theater, and counted Ellington drummer Sonny Greer as one of her childhood friends. “Music to me was a way of holding on to Negro culture, because there wasn’t very much of it around,” Taylor has recalled.
⁷
At age five he began studying the piano. Lessons were supplemented by instruction from his piano teacher’s husband, a tympanist who had played under Toscanini—an especially fitting early association given the extremely percussive nature of Taylor’s mature style. In 1952, Taylor entered the New England Conservatory of Music, where he expanded his knowledge of contemporary classical music but grew disenchanted with the academy’s indifference to the black musical experience. This same period found Taylor deepening his knowledge of the jazz idiom. Writer Nat Hentoff, who first met Taylor around this time, has recalled that “no one had clearer, firmer and more unexpected opinions about music than Cecil.”
⁸
This confident sense of direction was critical for Taylor, since his music, even at this stage, was increasingly deviating from the then prevailing styles of late bop and cool jazz.

“By 1954 my style of playing was developed,” Taylor has noted.
⁹
A half-decade before free jazz emerged as a controversial new movement, Taylor was already employing arch dissonances, fragmented improvised lines, disjointed rhythms, and the jackhammer piano attack that would characterize his mature work. His 1956 session for the Transition label indicates the scope of these experimental leanings. At first hearing, Taylor’s approach reveals a number of connections to the jazz tradition: the repertoire here draws heavily on standards based on conventional song forms, and the instrumentation is a typical jazz combo (Taylor is supported by bassist Buell Neidlinger and drummer Dennis Charles as well as, on some tracks, by saxophonist Steve Lacy). But on a deeper level, the music is unflinchingly subversive. Taylor sometimes follows the chord changes played by Neidlinger, other times imposing his clashing polytonal structures on top of them, elsewhere trying to undermine any assertion of an underlying harmonic roadmap. His piano attack, with its rumbling thick chords and caustic single-note lines, is somewhat reminiscent of Thelonious Monk’s. But in place of Monk’s sly humor and masterful use of space, we encounter a more treacherous and overgrown aural landscape. Restless, insistent, at times foreboding, this is music that seemingly bypasses the listeners’ faculties of judgment and evaluation and instead heads straight for the central nervous system.

During the late 1950s and early 1960s, Taylor recorded and performed on only a handful of occasions, but each of these outings further reinforced his image as the most intransigent of the young jazz modernists. He shook up the audience at the 1957 Newport Jazz Festival, where his performance was recorded and released. A stint at the Five Spot in New York spurred further controversy and attracted an enthusiastic following among artists and bohemians. Follow-up recordings for Contemporary and United Artists (including a session that paired the pianist with John Coltrane) found Taylor playing in a vein similar to the Transition releases, employing ponderous dissonances and an acerbic piano attack in dramatic reworkings of standards, supplemented by probing new compositions.