Ornette Coleman Quartet
November 5th, 2005
San Francisco, CA @ Masonic Auditorium - SFJFest
Oade Brothers Audio Micro Condenser Mics (on my glasses, balcony 5th row, 
5 seats right of center) > Sony TCD-D8 with Oade Brothers pre-amp mod 
(@16 bit/48kHz) > DAT > Sony TCD-D8 (@16 bit/48kHz) > Edirol UA5w (Oade 
mod) > Apple iBookG4 > Audio Recorder v1.4 > AIFF > Bias Peak v4.13 > CDR

01. intro
02. Crying Without Tears
03. New York
04. Picolo Pesos
05. Tone Dialing
06. If I Knew As Much About You (As You Know About Me)
07. ?
08. Sleep Talk
09. Guadalupe
10. ? > Song X
11. applause
12. Lonely Woman
13. applause and a blessing

Ornette Coleman - alto saxophone, trumpet, and violin very briefly
Denardo Coleman - drums
Tony Falanga - bass
Greg Cohen - bass

Program Notes:
“Coleman’s tunes reach into an unguarded place…encompassing every kind of emotion. His solos chortle, sigh, exult, and dream…. Every Coleman concert is an event.”
— The Village Voice

Alto sax giant and avant-garde pioneer Ornette Coleman returns to the Festival at the helm of his daring quartet with two virtuoso bassists (Tony Falanga and Masada’s Greg Cohen) and a drummer (son Denardo Coleman). “The unity of quartet vision here hinted at something rare in jazz,” JazzTimes proclaimed of a 2003 performance, “a true ensemble music, as in the first Ornette Coleman Quartet Atlantic LPs, over 40 years ago.” Village Voice critic Gary Giddins concurred: “ Art Blakey famously said that music washes away the dust of everyday life, and so it was when Ornette Coleman took the stage with his new quartet…. At all times the group seemed to breathe together, rising and falling like a pair of lungs, locked together with an emphatic rhythmic integrity…. Nothing in jazz is more moving than the purity of Coleman’s sound and conception.”

“Ornette is the ultimate modernist — a visionary and revolutionary force in jazz. His music is beautiful, and it demonstrates a truly radical approach to harmony, rhythm and group interaction, with a soaring melodicism and a firm grounding in the blues, bebop and other traditions.” — Joshua Redman
Alto sax giant and free jazz pioneer Ornette Coleman returns with his daring quartet featuring two virtuoso bassists (Tony Falanga and Masada’s Greg Cohen) and drummer, son Denardo Coleman. “The unity of quartet vision here hinted at something rare in jazz,” wrote JazzTimes, “a true ensemble music.” In The New York Times’ words: “Nothing in jazz is more moving than the purity of Coleman’s sound and conception.”

Recognized as the founder of the jazz avant-garde, Ornette Coleman created free jazz, introducing new approaches to tonality, melody, harmony, rhythm, and form. He liberated the improvised solo from an adherence to strict meter and predetermined harmonic “changes.” He also wrote dozens of groundbreaking jazz compositions using advanced techniques such as spontaneous polytonality (transposing clefs and keys and improvising in multiple keys), pantonality (divergent keys, simultaneously), and polyphony (parallel, unrelieved motion). He even invented his own “harmolodic” theory, an esoteric philosophy of life that includes, yet transcends, music.

However, you don’t have to be a Ph.D. to appreciate the soul-stirring sound of Coleman in concert. SFJAZZ Collective artist Bobby Hutcherson speaks of the “joy and passion” in Ornette’s music, while others describe its debt to vocal blues inflection, its “unmistakable Southern dialect” (Francis Davis) or the “connection between Mr. Coleman’s earthy art and folk traditions of the south” (Ben Ratliff).
Journalist Derk Richardson observes, “The clearest, most direct revelations of his artistic concepts — as well as the polyphony of personal pain and achievement that shape his enigmatic personality — can be found in the taste of freedom and the bittersweet melodies, tinged with the poignancy of the blues…. Any opportunity to immerse oneself in his musically complex but soulful mix should not be missed.” Gary Giddins, in his book Visions of Jazz, concurs: “His tunes reach into an unguarded place where we store the most elemental tunes of childhood, and embody their universality, encompassing every kind of emotion.”

Born in 1930 in Fort Worth, Coleman learned the alto saxophone at age 14. He began working professionally in the 1950s, performing with carnival bands and on the rhythm-and-blues circuit, until, at the encouragement of esteemed jazzmen Percy Heath and Red Mitchell, he commenced formal studies at the Lenox School of Jazz in Massachusetts under John Lewis of the Modern Jazz Quartet.

Coleman made his mark on jazz history (as an alto saxophonist, composer, and bandleader) in the period of 1958 to 1961, with a series of recordings on the Atlantic label that would revolutionize jazz, including Something Else, Tomorrow is The Question, The Shape of Jazz to Come, Change of the Century, This Is Our Music and Free Jazz. According to Giddins, “The Coleman Atlantics are imperishable recordings [embodying] a unique way of looking at music and life.”

Throughout his career, Coleman continued to expand this vision, playing the violin and trumpet, penning works for diverse ensembles, and fearlessly embracing diverse modes of expression, from chamber music (Forms and Sounds) to electronic music (Science Fiction), from a symphony (Skies of America) to jazz-funk (Prime Time). Coleman’s magnum opus — the controversial multi-media Tone Dialing — received its World Premiere at the 1994 San Francisco Jazz Festival.

Although he is now recognized as one of the greatest musical minds of the modern era, Ornette Coleman was not always so revered. When he made his New York debut in 1959 (a double bill with Art Farmer and Benny Golson at the Five Spot), the reactions were extreme. According to Down Beat’s George Hoefer, “Some walked in and out before they could finish a drink, some sat mesmerized by the sound.

Many jazz musicians who came to hear him were particularly upset. Dizzy Gillespie commented, “I don’t know what he’s playing, but it’s not jazz.” Roy Eldridge issued a terse “I think he’s jiving, baby.” Miles Davis observed, “Psychologically, the man is all screwed up inside.” Ultimately, however, nearly all came to respect the power and brilliance of his art.

Today, Coleman’s towering significance in the history of jazz — as innovator, multi-instrumentalist, iconoclastic composer, musical theorist, mathematician, modern art collector, humanist and philosopher — is undeniable. He remains one of the most important and revolutionary figures in the music’s development over the last 100 years. As expressed by biographer and historian John Litweiler, “There are four artists whose music and presence were major turning points in the course of jazz history: Buddy Bolden, Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker, and Ornette Coleman.”


David Rubien in the San Francisco Chronicle, November 4, 2005:

When the headliner of a jazz festival checks into a hospital three weeks before he is set to perform, it causes worry, no matter how minor the medical procedure may be described as.

When the patient is Ornette Coleman, 75 -- one of a handful of true 20th century music innovators -- that worry can turn to dread. Coleman, just back in New York after a concert in Germany, underwent an operation for a hernia Oct. 21, and his son and drummer, Denardo Coleman, says it was successful: "Everything went well; he got a clean bill of health." The alto saxophonist will headline the San Francisco Jazz Festival on Saturday at the Masonic, as planned.

The turning of the millennium has not been kind to jazz's elders. A few weeks ago we lost Shirley Horn. Gone in recent times are Elvin Jones, Percy Heath, Artie Shaw, John Lewis, Billy Higgins and many more. Of the true titans, very few remain, Coleman, Cecil Taylor and Sonny Rollins among them.

When Coleman performed at Davies Symphony Hall for the 2002 jazz festival, many noted how frail he seemed when he took the stage. But then they observed with astonishment that the saxophonist played for two hours straight, leading his trio from one ecstatic climax to the next, until the audience erupted in a resounding ovation.

His quartet with Denardo, bassists Greg Cohen and Tony Falanga and the maestro on alto saxophone and occasional trumpet and violin has been earning similar reviews. "From the evening's opening selection ... the band created more exquisite strands of melody than one might have thought possible from four players," critic Howard Reich recently wrote in the Chicago Tribune.

People tend to such effusiveness about Coleman. There was a time when plenty of folks considered him a charlatan -- including many of his peers -- but no one harbors that notion anymore. Nowadays his music is taken up in repertory by outfits such as San Francisco's own SFJazz Collective, and even by the starched collars over at Wynton Marsalis' Lincoln Center Jazz program.

But when it comes to playing the kind of music that Coleman introduced -- or maybe "allowed to occur" is a more apt way to put it -- he's still the pied piper. Coleman's bass player Cohen, 52, reflected on the music in a phone interview from New York. "I've played music without the constraints of bebop, and had a great time doing it. But those bands don't have what Ornette has," he said. "I don't know how to describe it, to be honest. ... It's like a fairy-tale feature with him. The music comes to life with honesty and humor that's lacking in other 'free' musicians."

What are the "constraints of bebop" to which Cohen referred? Why did he give "free" a quotation intonation? When Coleman's first album came out in 1958, bebop and its more soulful offspring, hard bop, had stretched the American song form about as much as it could be stretched while still respecting established keys and chord sequences. You could play "Autumn Leaves" at warp speed, pumping enough virtuosic gas into it to make yourself and everyone else dizzy, but the tune still had to hew to the chord structure that let everyone know it was "Autumn Leaves." The same went for any song.

Those chords are the constraints Cohen mentioned, and Coleman said they weren't necessary. He said you could create music out of anything, and it would swing hard as long as you listened closely to what your fellow players were doing and played fearlessly and with total conviction. And he's long since proved it, making some of the past half century's most beautiful, lyrical music.

But freeing music from those constraints doesn't mean the music is free per se, although some record executive slapped the title "Free Jazz" on one of Coleman's early records, and the phrase came to stand for an entire movement. Total freedom means chaos, and Coleman's music is as organized as any other; it just follows his own rules. And often enough the music is steeped in the raucous, sensuous honky-tonk blues Coleman grew up with in Fort Worth, Texas.

It wasn't easy. When, as a young player in R&B bands, Coleman tried to introduce his radical ideas, he was laughed at, ridiculed and sometimes punched out. Years later, when he arrived in New York for a now-legendary monthslong gig at the Five Spot in 1959, he caused a sensation, with the music hoi polloi divided on whether he was a phony (Miles Davis and Charles Mingus were in this camp) or the wave of the future (Leonard Bernstein, John Coltrane in this one). Later he composed music for symphony orchestras, formed electric bands and picked up a MacArthur "genius" grant.

Although Coleman's concerts are few and far between, he's constantly writing music. "Used to be we did a whole new concert at each concert," Denardo, 49, says. "Now every concert has about half new material. But the songs that we do that are not new may be only 2 or 3 months old." Coleman, Denardo says, "likes to keep things fresh. He just keeps pushing."

Understandably, rehearsals occur often and are intense. "It's really like a laboratory or a classroom," says Denardo, who also lives in New York. "We really go into the idea of sounds and how notes can be interpreted in different ways."

Despite the frequent rehearsals, Cohen -- a polyglot musician who has played with jazzers and popsters alike, ranging from Tom Waits to John Zorn to Lou Reed -- says he was terrified the first time he did a gig with Coleman. It was at Carnegie Hall, no less.

"Not only was I up onstage at Carnegie Hall, and onstage with Ornette Coleman, but I was in an untraditional band. There was no room to hide; everyone's right out there. I was very nervous. But somehow Ornette must have known that because he became like a shepherd. He figured out a way to bring me into the flock. ... What he's doing is so strong, it just kind of takes you along. You can't help but follow him."

Cohen says that Coleman possesses the same kind of creative spirit as jazz greats Charlie Parker and Duke Ellington. "Call it charisma. ... It's a thing that people can speak through. It lets them get in touch with their deeper selves. And when Ornette plays, you have a chance to tap into that world."


Weasel Walter in the San Francisco Bay Guardian, November 2, 2005:

FOR PROOF OF the theory that avant-garde culture can become accepted and assimilated into the mainstream, look no further than the career of 75-year-old Ornette Coleman. The native Texan first turned the music world on its collective ear in 1959, when he arrived in New York City, white plastic alto saxophone in hand, leading a classic quartet featuring Don Cherry, Billy Higgins, and Charlie Haden. This extremely controversial group revealed a then-radical concept that freed the jazz idiom from the straitjacket of preset chord progressions in order to spontaneously create a music incorporating intensely swinging polyrhythms and startling new tonal colors.

In light of contemporary musical obsessions with noise, cacophony, and freedom of form, this elegantly simple premise may seem quaint close to a half-century on, but it's important to remember the roots of revolution when Coleman appears as part of the San Francisco Jazz Festival with drummer Denardo Coleman and contrabassists Tony Falanga and Greg Cohen. The gloriously liberating sonic disorder typified by the initial waves of so-called "free jazz" during the 1960s has spread through divergent streams in contemporary music, and credit is due to Coleman as one of the founding fathers.

Coleman's vision of music (which he terms harmolodic) demanded the freedom to intelligently improvise melody, harmony, and rhythm at will, regardless of conventions of form. In harmolodic music, all instruments are free to operate at equal levels of importance within the ensemble, thereby eliminating the necessity of the well-worn soloist-plus-accompaniment dichotomy and facilitating total group improvisation.

Some saw this approach as an outright threat to the carefully formalized order of music, while others recognized endless possibilities. The harmolodic concept is simple to hear as pure music, but as time has gone on, Coleman has hinted at a rather labyrinthine rhetoric behind the logic. Whether or not the concept will ever be clarified (most likely in a textbook he has been threatening to issue for decades) is inconsequential when facing the man's body of work.

Though the years Coleman's output has never failed to resonate with concrete emotion, and for someone responsible for such a major artistic paradigm shift, that's no small proof that his innovations stem from true progression rather than épater le bourgeois-style shock tactics. Regardless of context, Coleman has always retained his own distinct instrumental voice on the alto saxophone. At the core his vibrantly buoyant melodic phrasing seems irrevocably rooted in the R&B and jazz traditions: His saxophone playing has always evoked a subtly surrealistic take on the sort of fleet, knotty, forward-moving lines issued by Charlie Parker.

Coleman has garnered a solid reputation as an iconoclast. Preceding his late-'50s musical notoriety, he was known as an outlandish fashion plate, causing outrage in the repressed South with his unusually colorful garb. As early as 1962, Coleman began to push his vision beyond the scope of jazz by writing string quartet music that he presented during a self-financed concert at New York City's Town Hall. Around that time, the virtuosic saxophonist suddenly took up trumpet playing and began expressionistically sawing away at the violin.

When his first choice of drummers became scarce in the mid-'60s, Coleman took the unprecedented move of enlisting his 10-year-old son, Denardo, to fill the chair on a run of albums beginning with The Empty Foxhole (Blue Note, 1966). Denardo's technically uninformed but mischievously intuitive bashing created outrage even to those who thought they had finally caught up with the elder Coleman's advances.

In 1967 Forms and Sounds (RCA), an album of verdantly dissonant chamber music, emerged, and the epic suite "Skies of America" was recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra for Columbia in 1972. In 1973 Coleman spent time jamming with the Master Musicians of Morocco on their own turf in an effort to prove that harmolodics went beyond western music. Around 1975 Coleman had the revelation that, as desirable as the orchestral context was, one could make as voluminous a racket with a gaggle of electric guitars. The result of this brainstorm took form in Prime Time, which featured a sextet of drummers, guitarists, and bassists while the maestro darted and parried on various instruments through the melee.

Prime Time's recorded output is fairly slim, but the group managed to issue a bizarre punk-disco album with the distinction of being one of the earliest commercial, direct-to-disc digital recordings, Of Human Feelings (Antilles, 1982), as well as allow Grateful Dead guitar noodler Jerry Garcia to wade through the cheesy, reverb-drenched mire of the Virgin Beauty (Portrait, 1988). Ornette rebounded on record with energetic acoustic trio tracks on the 1992 Naked Lunch soundtrack, as well as the 1994 albums Sound Museum: Hidden Man and Sound Museum: Three Women (which feature different takes of the same material).

Since the 1960s Coleman seems to have decided that if circumstances aren't right, he'd just as soon continue working in private. For the last decade there has been mostly silence as far as legitimate releases go, but sporadic live appearances continue to prove that Coleman is still going strong. His musical concepts now sound downright fresh and vital: Coleman's collaborators execute harmolodics with a resolute energy that encourages extended statements to bound from the leader's horn with a joyful kineticism. It's hard to imagine what all of the uproar was about when Coleman emits one of his trademark fusillades of pure, swinging melodic invention, but we should give thanks that sometimes a musical maverick can manage to rise to the top of the heap and stay on top of the game.