From Louis to Albert

Spiritual Unity

Ornette Coleman and Louis Armstrong

A very large portion of my writing here on Substack is about what happened and what happens in jazz and free jazz when musicians cross cross a hidden line between playing it safe and various levels of risk in pursuit of themselves. I had a percussion lesson with Ray Mantilla once and I asked him if he ever just wanted to play his congas with horn players playing free and he said “Well, there’s always what we want to do, and then what we have to do.” Ray felt that he had to maintain structure in his music and look for ways to push the envelope from the inside. We all need and seek different things as musicians but his answer stayed with me. I’ve always tried to look at it all from both sides, or maybe from Both Directions At Once. One place I’ve seen common ground in jazz is through playing Spirituals. Charles Gayle asked me to play trumpet on an album of spirituals he was thinking of doing, though it never got to happen. When Charles was asked who in jazz history he would play with if he could, he responded Louis Armstrong, citing that’s how it all started.