Photo: John Rogers
My thesis Ornette Coleman and Harmolodics (2019) has been well received. It’s the only thing I’ve been able to take from getting a Masters in Jazz History and research thus far, though I’m still hopeful that one day my work at Rutgers will be something I can use to live, that was always my goal. Scribd charges people to read it now, but they certainly never asked me. My post here isn’t about the survival blues, it’s about the work itself. I was on a deadline to turn the thesis in, and I was so busy at the time working and in school full time, while playing music non-stop as always, that I missed a few things. I have wanted to make these corrections and additions for quite some time.
First, in regards to the chapter on the trumpet: Ornette’s symphonic work the Sun Suite of San Francisco featured Coleman, Dewey Redman, and Bobby Bradford, not just Bradford. I hope a recording surfaces one day of what must have been such an incredible and unique piece.
Second, I learned later that Wynton Marsalis did indeed visit Ornette privately at least once for a music session that lasted several hours. I would certainly love to have watched that exchange of ideas go down. Wynton has never been against OC and I recently saw a backstage video where he tells some young horn players he wants them to play some of Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry’s music. Don has also never gotten any shade. Why would he tell the kids this? My take is that playing ideas without worrying about the harmony can really help them find themselves musically, even early on. I’m basing this on an interview with Jackie McLean talking about his time in the Charles Mingus workshop.
A truly fascinating experience that Jackie had that shows Mingus himself was dealing with the idea of no chords as a pathway to self-discovery early on, and also that once again Charlie Parker looms large over everyone. What Ornette did to change everything was actually use devices present in the tradition of the music, but drill down on them to create another world of his own creation. I’ve done some playing with my friend Dave Hotep, guitarist in the Sun Ra orchestra in the Kevin Obatala led Airlift ensemble out here in Philly. Dave brought in a piece that Sun Ra wrote and as soon as I saw the melody in contrast to the chords I saw that it was harmolodic. Ra wrote the piece in the 50’s from his own universe.
Back to Wynton, he has always made sure to include Don Cherry in discussion of OC. Jon Faddis once grudgingly admitted that Don was part of the history, but seemed to not want to really sign on. I’m fascinated by this. Wynton is possibly the greatest trumpet technician to ever live, and Don’s brass chops were sometimes in flux, but Wynton is down with the humanity and blues in Don’s playing. Like Giuseppi Logan, Don knew exactly what he was doing when he played. Going further, I think Don is the historical validation for the harmonic risk that Wynton takes in his own playing. People don’t get that Wynton is actually more experimental than people realize, and he has the chops to try impossible things. There’s a Wynton Marsalis real book now of his solos and the author openly states that there are areas where he just doesn’t know what Wynton is doing. He’s improvising! As powerful as Jon Faddis is, I can see him not feeling a pocket trumpet, you can’t rain a triple high C down from the heavens with that joint, unless you were Roy Campbell jr.
Update: Just after I posted this Dave Bryant told me Ornette was also fond of cornet player Bobby Hackett! This must be because of the sound and melodic ideas, which is what Ornette felt the trumpet was all about. Louis Armstrong loved Hackett, this is very interesting. Hackett was a Bix man. I’ve got a whole thing about Bix and now I think I’ll pursue this in a future post here at NSLB.
All the way back to OC, I have it from a trusted source that when asked who he liked best on trumpet, Ornette said it was none other than the great Lew Soloff! I totally get that. Playing some of Ornette’s music for trumpet recently, I had to take it down an octave to really express myself with it. I kind of Miles Davised it, and it worked. Lew Soloff could just play a soft dynamic ballad above the staff, no problem. It reminds of my friend Ryan Sawyer taking a drum solo on a ballad and really making it work.
The next area I have long wanted to fix is the worst mistake I made in the thesis, in my chapter on Ornette and the piano. On page 69-70 I wrote about a pianist named Joel Locardi playing with Ornette. This is straight up incorrect. The correct name is Jose Locandro. It was Jose who in fact led me to the book by Francis Paudras, Dance of the Infidels, A portrait of Bud Powell: a book I really needed during my thesis.
Francis Paudras was close with and a real supporter of Bud Powell, and as part of that experience, he wrote about crossing paths with Ornette in extraordinary fashion. What I gather from this is just how much of a different time they were living in, and more.
On page 272 we find confirmation that Ornette knocked on a door where Francis and Bud were staying and said “I’m a saxophonist and all my music is based on the intervals and changes of the sevenths in your left hand.”
On page 285 Francis wrote “Ornette at the time was rooming in the village with a woman who was a sound technician. Their basement apartment was tastefully furnished with fine modern paintings on the wall. We (Francis and Bud) started spending our afternoons there and the place soon became the headquarters of Thelonious Monk and Charlie Rouse.”
Imagine if you will Monk and Bud listening to a tape of Bud playing Ruby My Dear at Ornette’s place.
On page 317 Francis speaks of him and Bud falling on hard times and Ornette taking them in, in a basement apartment once gain. “A real cellar with bare stone walls. There were beautiful paintings, a big iron bed, a few benches, with a lot of sheet music and a vast number of books on architecture. He was studying architecture and had a consuming passion for geometry. His violin, plastic alto, brass alto and tenor were on the stand.”
“We were awakened every morning by Ornette’s practice sessions on alto. He would play Bird tunes at twice the normal speed without a hitch.” (I saw Ornette do this myself with Donna Lee)
The three of them lived and survived together.
So Ornette wasn’t just influenced by Bud, they were friends and he helped take care of him. Ornette was straight hanging out with Bud and Monk. He was also friends with Bill Evans as revealed in this book. Ornette was personally spending time with these great piano masters. All of the in vs out conflict is manufactured. Miles told us this in his autobiography, but here’s some evidence with a book instead of a time machine.
In Cisco Bradley’s book Universal Tonality on William Parker, we have an eyewitness account of William meeting up with Cecil Taylor in 1980 after Ornette and Cecil were finished playing duo. It was a fairly regular session. Universes colliding in the best of ways. Oh, to be in that room to hear that exchange! There’s more to the story I believe.
Finally, in my own playing since my thesis I’ve played twice with Dave Bryant up in Cambridge. Dave has so much of Ornette’s manuscripts, both copies and originals. These are the holy grail of harmolodics. Here’s an example:
I’ve played with Jamaaladeen Tacuma in Philly and just met G Calvin Weston. I heard Calvin recently in Philly with Bobby Zankel, another close friend of Ornette, and talk about a bandstand being lifted!
Bassist Fred Williams told me that Ornette told Fred that he was his other horn player in the band.
James Blood Ulmer said that Ornette would stay up all night trying to figure out what he played, but that he could let it go.
Ornette told my friend James Kamal Jones on drums “Don’t play mathematical, play pulse. Let the rhythm be your time.”
Finally, Jack Walrath recently posted on Facebook that when he would show up at a session they would say “Here comes that Ornette Coleman guy” meant as a cut. I think OC had the final word on that.
It cannot be stated more strongly that Ornette developed something that was part of the DNA of the music, yet faced open hostility. Even Trane’s sanction wasn’t enough back then.
The deeper I have gone into harmolodics, the more my own music has become increasingly clear. With the release of The Crop Circle Suite I have established that I have my own music universe. It only took 30 years of grind.
Now I have about 20-30 years to go to build my universe and deliver it to the world.
God/nature willing.
All I’ve ever wanted is to become the wind.
Continued thanks to the great Ornette Coleman and extra special thanks to his music family on Earth. Ornette’s music family still keeps the flame burning bright. That light remains a signpost for anyone out there who wants to be themselves no matter what.
It’s OK to be who you really are, no matter what the world thinks. In fact it’s essential that you do just that, musically or otherwise.
Bright Moments,
ML