It’s such a blessing for a writer to find publications that “get” them and I continue to enjoy the support from Jerry Jazz Musician. This short tribute to OC appears in my collection The Blackened Blues, and if I’m able to introduce anyone to the majesty of Ornette Coleman, this work is well done.
Ornette Coleman’s Question
Imagine if entire realities could burst into being,
fully formed like perfect rows of grain—the same
way an artist’s sweat dissolves into air, is subsumed
by clouds that grow pregnant and explode: this torrent
of water soaking the soil; a ceaseless, restorative cycle.
1991: I still remember everything about it.
Fall semester, senior year. The more I learned at college, the more I understood how little I knew. Something, obviously, was working.
I was wise, prescient or just plain lucky enough to sign up for an elective called “Introduction to Jazz”. I knew the genre was vast, intimidating and would take considerable effort to navigate; I’ll always credit this class for giving me a framework to acquaint myself, a three credit Rosetta Stone® for my Rosetta Stone. We’d gone through the century, decade by decade, and it got better as we went. Yes, Bebop was what I’d been missing all along without realizing it.
But it was what came next, the more formless expression that started creeping out of the margins like lava oozing through ancient stones, that portended obsession. Those names: Mingus, Monk, Miles, Trane. And then, as we tackled the topic of “free jazz”, a cat who had the audacity to name his 1959 (the best year in musical history, by the way) album The Shape of Jazz to Come.
Ornette Coleman, the canary in the post-bop coal mine. Like all iconoclasts, initially greeted with indifference, then disgust, then fear. Chords? We don’t need no stinking chords, his compositions scoffed, a freak flag flying out of the underground into the avant-garde. I still remember how quiet the room was and how concerned my ears got: What is this? Like nothing I’d never heard or felt; a new language, a new sensation, a new way of seeing everything, that first amoeba slithering onto shore. How is it possible, I thought, to make instruments scream in agony and shriek in joy, at the same time? (And those song titles, telling everything you needed to know: “Lonely Woman”, “Congeniality”, “Focus on Sanity.”)
I walked around campus after, the autumn sky all schizophrenic yet serene with colors. And those notes I couldn’t get out of my head. This is it, I thought. This is music. This is addiction. This is love. This is the first day of the rest of my life.
