Greg BurkWhat is reality? One ’60s sci-fi story speculated that long ago
the world actually was flat, and that the seat of human reason actually was
the heart, not the brain. The story wondered if pi at one time actually was
3.1, as some old texts say, not 3.14159 etc. You could come closer than that
with a piece of string, the theory went, yet the ancients used the ratio to
build large edifices with virtually no error.
It has to do with learning, with perception. If you’re conditioned
to see something, you see it, and it’s real to you whether or not it exists,
a word drawn from Greek roots meaning to “stand outside.”
Sometimes it seems that Ornette Coleman perceives the world differently
from the rest of us. Maybe he didn’t internalize some of his conditioning; maybe
he sees more accurately. Since the ’50s, his perceptions have led him to create
music different from anyone else’s, music without chord changes, without harmonic
rules, without hierarchies. When he talks about it, he uses terms more commonly
associated with human relationships than with musical styles, and he’s not being
metaphorical. He thinks of his instrument (alto sax, trumpet and violin) as
only one of the voices in his music’s conversation, and considers its role less
important than his role as a composer. And his definition of a composer isn’t
the usual one: he doesn’t make structures to set limits, he makes rooms where
people can meet.
Coleman calls his approach harmolodics: “a theory, not a
style.” But it’s not even a theory, really, it’s more of a philosophy,
emphasizing equality of voices, freedom, spontaneity and participation — not
just for the musicians, for the audience, too.
Though Coleman’s doors are always open, not everyone is inclined
to walk in. In the beginning, his music was called noise. The radical turn jazz
took in the ’60s, inspired largely by Coleman’s innovations, chafed beboppers
and swing devotees alike. Throughout his career, frequent changes in his sound,
from quasi-bop to total freedom to chamber music to symphony to electric double
quartet, have made it hard for him to build a wide following. His relations
with record labels have been brief and stormy, so there have been long spells
with no “product.”
Now is a period of high visibility. Late last year, Coleman and
his electric Prime Time band shattered a seven-year silence with Tone Dialing,
a chaotic, energized portrait of polyglot modern America. The new release is
Sound Museum, a collection of new and used Coleman tunes performed by
an acoustic quartet in two different versions on two separate albums. And in
the symphonic arena, it’s not hard to imagine why the French government commissioned
Coleman to write a piece for chamber orchestra celebrating the French Revolution;
it is slated to receive its first American performance at New York’s Lincoln
Center (without the agency of Wynton Marsalis) in December.
***
Speaking quietly, unassertively, with a slight lisp, Coleman doesn’t
sound like a revolutionary or a confrontational artist, and he doesn’t identify
with the dogmatism those labels imply. “I don’t want to monitor, or be
like the police,” he says on the phone from the New York office of his
own Harmolodic Records. “I’m only trying to say that whatever you like
about the things you care about, you can participate in it. I try to inspire
people to participate in sound, in many ways — mentally, emotionally, psychically,
physically.”
One way he does that is through multimedia spectacle, an angle
he first explored in the ’80s in collaboration with Houston’s Carnival of Dreams
arts facility. A 1993 San Francisco show, which went virtually unreported due
to a regional newspaper strike, found his two bands sharing the stage with a
poet, a light show and skin-piercing guru Fakir Mustafar. Mustafar pierced himself
with long needles through the nose, cheeks and chest, and presided over a ritual
in which he skewered three nearly naked young people (two women and a man) through
the skin of the upper breast, and presided over a dance in which they twirled
about in metal collars and heavy-duty chains. The audience was polarized: many
fled the arena in disgust; others thought the young people were being exploited;
others were riveted.
[
Coleman says he is fascinated with the idea of using body and
mind together to defeat pain. “I read a lot of books on mental physics.
And I read this book on a tribe of people that were somewhere between Thailand
and Cambodia. They had a religion where they would get in a state where they
could pray, and then feel so complete that they could pierce themselves and
walk on hot coals, and not one part of their body would be harmed, and their
spiritual consciousness would be in a high state. And I said to myself, Wouldn’t
this be fantastic if I could find such a person that could do this, and have
them on the same bill with us, and see if that consciousness would have the
same effect on his audience? And I tell you, it was really unbelievable.”
It’s not hard to understand why Coleman would be interested in
transcending pain, or why he would find dancing in irons an apt metaphor. Still,
the sensationalism got some swords pointed his way. People don’t expect this
kind of thing from a musician. But Coleman isn’t just a musician.
The San Francisco show was remarkable in another respect: it marked
a reconciliation of Coleman with keyboards. “I didn’t like the piano, because
it was in the way,” he says. “I just hadn’t found anybody that could
play harmolodically.” Coleman hadn’t recorded with a pianist since he used
Walter Norris on his first studio album in 1958. But this night he broke out
in a big way: Dave Bryant playing electric keyboards with Prime Time, and pianist
Geri Allen featured in his acoustic quartet with Charnett Moffett on bass and
his son and longtime collaborator, Denardo Coleman, on drums.
The appearance of Allen, who also plays on Sound Museum,
was a special charge. At 39, she is a superb jazz artist in her own right, blending
technical mastery, rhythmic acuity and intellectual fire. She had teamed for
a number of projects with Charlie Haden, Coleman’s perennial first choice of
bassists, and kept prodding Haden to boost her with Ornette.
When Coleman finally took the plunge, the match-up was obviously
correct. Allen is often the most involving facet of Sound Museum’s gestalt,
whether spreading out a delicate carpet, overlayering dense patterns or executing
perfect rapid unisons. And she never “gets in the way.”
***
It’s not an easy balance to strike, this harmolodic harmony. “The
most peaceful part of being complete in any environment,” says Coleman,
“is when you feel at ease without fear, loneliness, need and want, where
it has to do with your mentality and most of all the consciousness of your behavior.”
An ambitious goal, and highly democratic. Coleman disdains hierarchies,
and he has no use for categories. “The class style, which is the monarchy
system in sound — I haven’t wanted to feed that image. To me, all of those
different monarchs are anti-social, and I don’t want to add to that. I found
people that were interested in things that I could write, and they didn’t have
to worry about a category.”
Hamolodics makes everything personal; the musicians are allowed
to search for “their own hidden notes,” as Coleman calls them. While
most forms stick to a set 12 tones, he says, interpretation is up to the individual.
“The notes are the same, but your brain is constantly defining what these
notes are recalling to you.”
This notion of musical freedom plainly arises from a search for
personal freedom. “I was born in the South, and I learned long ago that
the black person has not yet been able to use the full potential of his brain
and of his inner being. I had been in an environment where a person who knew
what I knew didn’t even have an opportunity. I wasn’t angry or disappointed,
I was just like anyone else that’s exploited. And in some ways, that’s done
now with all races.”
Along with the freedom comes the necessity to listen, to be aware
of your environment. On the surface, Coleman’s music can seem random, but playing
it requires training and discipline. At its best, it reaches unexpected convergences
of dissimilar elements, becoming a model for an ideal alternate reality. It’s
so ambitious a concept that its most successful moments can seem metaphysical,
though Coleman sees the process as entirely natural — arriving at a natural
state just requires dumping some preconceived baggage, that’s all.
Still, Coleman is interested in magic. “I was in Paris last
year, and I saw where David Copperfield was doing a show, and I went there to
see what he was doing with magic, to see if I wanted to get involved with it,
with other musicians. And he was a very fantastic magician — I just thought
that his show was leaning more toward, ‘You sit here and you watch me,’ and
so I couldn’t figure out how someone could participate in his show without having
to take a direction from what he was doing. So I felt that it was just his way
of putting himself in a position of what they call a successful performer. But
I still believe that magic is really illusions. I guess it means to make something
unseen seen, or to make something seen disappear.” And Coleman’s main concern
is reality.
[
Maybe that’s why Coleman left Los Angeles back in 1960. “I
was in California 10 years before I made a record,” he says. After all
the punishment and neglect, he got a band and a record contract with Atlantic,
and got out. “It’s a city where millions of people make their living from
imitating words and images, and yet there’s no other creativity that has the
same status as that. L.A. is just a harsh city for creative music.”
Coleman had to get out in the world market to find an audience.
Los Angeles isn’t such an anomaly, though; people like what they know, and few
identify with a man who listens to John Cage and LaMonte Young. Regardless of
his music’s originality and scope, he’ll never sell like Mariah Carey.
“That’s what’s amazing about styles,” he says. “Sometimes
styles are just like if you have a pair of shoes you like, you keep wearin’
’em because they feel good.”
Gentle as he is, Coleman really may be a threat to the established
order. It’s hard to know how serious he is about the benefits of the silicon
age.
“With all of the advanced technologies, the level of human
consciousness is being raised to the point that what is called a job is no longer
a job,” he says. “It’s just information.”
That makes a lot of us jobless, doesn’t it?
REVIEW:
ORNETTE COLEMAN
SOUND MUSEUM: HIDDEN MAN; THREE WOMEN
Harmolodic/Verve
Several titles are familiar from ’70s and ’80s Coleman albums,
but the treatments aren’t. Geri Allen’s piano defines a new acoustic-quartet
sound: gauzy and moody or taut and light. She whirls Halloween dust through
the empty, oxygen-deficient rooms of “Sound Museum,” punches fist
clusters through the busybusy traffic of “City Living,” draws amazing
implications from the stereotypical Mexican village of “P.P. (Picolo Pesos).”
Her approach is complex without narrowing the other musicians’ playing field.
Bassist Charnett Moffett (whose given name combines that of his
father, Charles Moffett, one of Coleman’s ’60s drummers, and O.C.’s) is overrevved
at times, but whips out a terrific pluckety-bang introduction to “Biosphere,”
one of the best tunes on both albums, with its all-for-one common effort driven
along by Denardo Coleman’s turbulent, headlong drumming. Denardo, in addition
to being one of the best underacknowledged skinsmen on the planet, continues
brilliantly in his role as producer: the sound is crisp, almost rocklike, augmented
by inventive and appropriate use of reverb.
Ornette Coleman, whose wheedling, flexible alto style is unmistakable
and by now almost too familiar, takes a few refreshing spins on his alternate
instruments. His trumpet on “Women of the Veil” generates powerful
impetus within a sloshing rhythm/antirhythm Arabic framework. And his spidery
violin work on the Three Women version of “Sound Museum” displays
three distinct tonal colorations in a brief space.
Coleman has long shown a fixation with symmetry: double quartets,
two instruments doubling a complicated riff, two bands doing the same songs,
now one band doing the same songs in two different versions. Sound Museum’s
double-take is supposed to illustrate the variety generated by harmolodics,
and indeed it does — the twins are far from identical, and the highlights of
Hidden Man and Two Women rarely fall in the same places. The split
may be instructive, but it doesn’t help you decide which album to buy, since
the quality of the two is exactly equal (and extremely high). You know what?
It doesn’t matter. Flip a coin or get both.
–G.B.
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