Ornette Coleman
In a way, Ornette Coleman’s four-night stand in the hallowed halls of Lincoln Center would have been exceptionally gratifying no matter how the actual performances turned out. As the founding father of free jazz, Coleman has fought long and hard for acceptance. He’s been catching flak for his unorthodox ideas almost since he started playing saxophone, as a teenager in the late 40s. According to John Litweiler’s biography, Ornette Coleman: A Harmolodic Life, bluesman Pee Wee Crayton paid Coleman not to take solos when he played in the guitarist’s horn section in 1950–and a modernistic one he had taken a year earlier in bluesman Clarence Samuels’s band actually got him and his saxophone beaten up. By the end of that decade he had a contract with Atlantic, but the freedom he granted his own soloists from standard harmonic moorings led many of Coleman’s peers–including Roy Eldridge and Miles Davis–to dismiss him as a fraud.
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“? Civilization,” the Lincoln Center series, sought to highlight three distinct sides of Coleman–composer, improviser, and postmodern conceptualist–though in reality all three were at work each night. The first two evenings featured performances of his rarely heard “classical” work Skies of America, the third reunited him with bebop compatriots Charlie Haden and Billy Higgins, and the finale augmented his electric band, Prime Time, with videos, dancers, rappers, contortionists, and, inexplicably, in-your-face lovebirds Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson. Judging from the two shows I saw, the second Skies of America performance and the trio gig, the event was an accurate retrospective of Coleman’s career: uneven and riddled with artistic contradictions, but marked by some utterly transcendent music.
The first set of the following night’s performance, on the other hand, bristled with creative energy almost from start to finish. The death of trumpeter Don Cherry and drummer Ed Blackwell eliminated the possibility of reconvening Coleman’s original quartet from the 50s, but Higgins, who used to trade off drumming with Blackwell, and original bassist Haden succeeded in turning the trio performance into something special. Rather than offer a nostalgic selection of classics, the forever restless Coleman reportedly composed most of the set the day before. The tunes themselves weren’t particularly memorable, but they served as effective launch pads for some dazzling improvisations. For me the highlight of the evening came while Higgins was tapping out a minimal but sophisticated pattern on his high hat. Coleman grabbed his violin (he also took up the trumpet on a few tunes) and began playing a screeching seesaw line that fit with it like a puzzle piece. In the quartet’s heyday this sort of intuitiveness was common. It wasn’t here, for obvious reasons, but the clarity and melodic inventiveness made the set remarkable anyway.
