The History of Jazz (70 page)

But each of these precursors of free jazz was white, and each was, to a greater or lesser extent, representative of the established order of things. The proponents of free jazz who came into prominence at the close of the 1950s were, in contrast, almost all outsiders: as African Americans they were outsiders from mainstream society; as musical renegades they were outsiders from mainstream jazz. For many years, they lacked access to concert halls, grants, prestigious commissions, and other time-honored measures of artistic achievement. During his formative years in Los Angeles, free jazz pioneer Ornette Coleman worked as an elevator operator in a department store. Pianist Cecil Taylor labored as a dishwasher, even after he achieved notoriety in the jazz world, rather than pursue more overtly commercial musical projects. The Third Stream movement had offered atonality with a smiling face, dressed up in top hat and tails. The major exponents of free jazz, in contrast, tended to represent an outgrowth of the bohemians and “angry young men” of the 1950s. They emerged
despite
the established order, and were all too aware of that fact.

The parallels with the rise of bebop are striking. In the late 1930s, as in the late 1950s, many established jazz stars were pushing the music forward and adopting new concepts in shaping the sound and style of their work. But in both instances, it was
not
the progressives of the older generation who succeeded in transforming the music: instead, it was a group of younger, largely unheralded musicians who rocked the foundations, tore down the existing structures, and built afresh with formidable new materials. In retrospect, we can trace the moves that made free jazz possible—in the 1950s works of Coltrane, Dolphy, Mingus, Tristano, Giuffre, Davis, and others. But it took Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Albert Ayler, and other new arrivals on the scene to make a musical revolution. In the process, they forced many of the older players to dance to
their
tune. Coltrane and Dolphy were still playing tonal music when Ornette arrived on the New York scene, but before long both were pushing the limits of their music. Sonny Rollins, the other iconic young tenor of the era, also showed his comprehension of the changes afoot in the jazz world—first by choosing to retire from the scene to study and practice, and later, after returning, by hiring several of Coleman’s former sidemen. Even Miles Davis, who had derided Coleman in the late 1950s (“Hell, just listen to what he writes and how he plays … the man is all screwed up inside”
²
), came to be influenced by the new sound in the mid-1960s, forging a two-horn sound with Wayne Shorter that bore an uncanny resemblance to the Don Cherry–Ornette Coleman collaborations.

Coltrane, Dolphy, Rollins, Miles: to see these masters of mainstream jazz not only acknowledge the new music but strive to emulate it—this marked an extraordinary change in the jazz world. This shift was all the more stunning when one considers how little respect Coleman had received just a short while before his rise to fame. When Ornette had attempted to sit in with name bands—Dexter Gordon’s, the Brown-Roach Quintet, and others—he had almost always been subjected to derision and ridicule, sometimes ordered to leave the stage; in other instances, the musicians simply began packing up their instruments while he was still playing. But this response was mild compared to the night in Baton Rouge, some years before, when a Coleman tenor solo had stopped the dancers in their tracks and roused an unruly gang. A half-dozen thugs cornered the saxophonist outside, beat him until he passed out, and threw his saxophone into the street. For almost a decade afterward, Coleman hesitated to play the tenor again—he sensed some potential for bad karma in the horn and decided to focus his energies on the alto instead. Years before, Charlie Parker had suffered a painful initiation into musical maturity, when he was laughed off the bandstand during a Kansas City session, but Coleman’s formative years were even more tainted by humiliation and rejection. Indeed, no major figure in the history of jazz has had a less propitious early career.

Coleman was born and raised in Fort Worth, Texas, during the heart of the Great Depression. These were difficult years—Coleman’s father scuffled, finding what work he could as a cook, mechanic, and construction worker, among other pursuits; Ornette’s mother worked as a clerk in a funeral home and sold Avon-type products on the side. But these were also fecund years for African American music in the Lone Star State: dozens of top-notch bands worked the territory, firing the ambitions and nurturing the talents of numerous future jazz stars; boogie-woogie piano flourished—during this period, some simply called it “Texas piano” or “fast Texas piano.” Similarly, a blues-drenched tenor sax style was an ever-present ingredient in the jazz and popular music of the day, in time coming to be known as “Texas tenor.” A host of saxophonists either born or raised in Texas—such as Arnett Cobb (1918–1989), Illinois Jacquet (1922–2004), David “Fathead” Newman (1933–2009), and Buddy Tate (1913–2001)—exemplified this sound in their gritty, soulful playing, defining an approach that permeated the local jazz scene during Coleman’s formative years. It is unclear how much of this music was heard by Coleman at the time. By his own admission, church songs and big band recordings made a stronger impression on him, at least at first. But the pronounced blues sensibility that recurs in his later work, rooting it in the black tradition even as it broke new ground, suggests that the various indigenous styles eventually found a place in his personal aesthetic vision. Honkin’, shoutin’, riffin’, riding high on a single note or barking out a guttural howl: this Texas saxophone heritage lingers in the background, like the Jungian archetype of a primal jazz style, sometimes rising to the surface at the least expected moments in Coleman’s mature oeuvre.

During his early teens, Coleman acquired an alto saxophone but struggled in his attempts to learn the rudiments of the horn. Confusing the alphabet and musical scale, he determined incorrectly that the concert scale began with A, rather than (as it does) with C. Coleman slowly, painstakingly gained a basic education in music, but with many setbacks along the way. Joining a church band, Coleman was ridiculed for his lack of training. A much-anticipated lesson with Walter “Foots” Thomas, a journeyman jazz player, provided little guidance or encouragement: the veteran simply had Coleman play for an hour while looking in the mirror—so that Ornette would quit making “faces” while he blew the horn. A short while later, Coleman was thrown out of his high school marching band, ostensibly for mixing swing and Sousa, an unacceptable combination in the minds of the powers that be. His early professional career was equally marked by ups and downs. One bandleader, Coleman claimed, even got to the point of paying him
not
to play.

In the face of these obstacles, Coleman persevered and continued to develop and grow as a musician. The miracle was that he did this without abandoning his own personal approach to improvisation, despite the constant negative feedback. “He could play the blues,” an early employer recalls, “but he didn’t want to.”
³
In time, Coleman developed an equally complex relationship to the bebop idiom. He listened to bebop, studied it, learned the tunes, performed them: yet the end result retained a certain foreignness, just as his blues work had done during his Texas years. Amateur recordings made of Coleman at the Hillcrest Club in Los Angeles shortly before his rise to fame fortuitously captured this odd hybrid on tape. Playing Charlie Parker’s “Klactoveedsedstene,” Coleman echoes the composer’s astringent sound and phrasing, yet his choice of notes and cadences veers far from the expected path. It almost seems as if Coleman has taken the modern jazz vocabulary and translated into a new tongue, some private Esperanto of his own creation. Certainly the animating force in this music comes not from Parker, but from Coleman’s singular take on it.

The Hillcrest engagement also represented a rare occasion for Coleman to work with a group of like-minded musicians. Trumpeter Don Cherry, unlike Coleman, had earned the respect of local Southern California players for his bop prowess. Along with Billy Higgins, the drummer on the Hillcrest gig, Cherry had played in the Jazz Messiahs, an up-and-coming local modern jazz band, and had graced the stage at high-profile clubs such as the Haig and the Lighthouse. Like many others, Cherry was originally put off by the eccentric Coleman—of his first meeting, he recalled: “He had long hair and a beard. It was about 90 degrees, and he had on an overcoat. I was scared of him”
⁴
—but soon grew fascinated with Coleman’s unconventional compositions and improvisations. Cherry would later share Coleman’s rise to fame, developing his own range of odd behavior patterns in the process. For a time, he favored performing on a pocket cornet (called a pocket trumpet by Cherry) to complement Coleman’s plastic alto—quasi-toy instruments used to fight a musical revolution. Bassist Charlie Haden was an anchor both musically and personally to the horns. Bespectacled, owlish, Haden looked the part of an apprentice clerk in a bank. But his bass lines subverted the image: they captured a piquant meeting ground between consonance and dissonance, powered the band with a rock-solid beat, and softened the hard edge of this freedom music with a sweet, warm tone. Paul Bley, the pianist and nominal leader of the Hillcrest band, would stay with Coleman for only a short while but would make his own mark on free jazz in later years. In a series of seminal recordings—
Footloose
,
Mr. Joy
,
The Floater Syndrome, Open, to Love
—Bley demonstrated a masterful conception of solo and combo playing, distinguished by a rare sensitivity to space and time, tone and texture.

Coleman’s persistence, aided by a referral from bassist Red Mitchell, led to an audition with Les Koenig of Contemporary Records. Koenig had been alerted that Coleman’s compositions, for all their oddities, might be suitable material for other players to record. At first the audition faltered—Coleman was unable to perform his pieces on the piano—and, in desperation, he resorted to playing them on alto, backed by Cherry’s pocket cornet. Koenig was fascinated by the music and set up a trial session with a full band, which in turn led to Coleman’s first record date,
Something Else! The Music of Ornette Coleman
. Pianist Walter Norris described to me, in a 1990 interview, the peculiar preparations for the unconventional session: “We rehearsed two or three times a week for about six months leading up to the recording. A number of times we rehearsed at my house. I would take a paper and pen and make notes about the compositions and about what we were supposed to be doing. But the funny thing was that at every rehearsal Ornette would change what we had done the last time. He would change the structure of the song or where the rubato was. And then when we finally showed up for the record date, he changed everything again.”
⁵

Even before it was released, the jazz grapevine picked up on the coming event, with
Downbeat
promising that it would be “very, very
Avant Garde
.” In retrospect, we can see that
Something Else!
represents a less radical departure from the jazz tradition than both its critics and supporters claimed at the time. Conventional thirty-twobar and twelve-bar structures are evident, and familiar chord changes, borrowed from standards such as “I Got Rhythm” and “Out of Nowhere,” underpin the solos. Moreover, Coleman’s improvisations capture a modal flavor and only hint at the atonality of his later work. Yet the freshness of Coleman and Cherry’s melodic lines stood out despite these remembrances of jazz past. It was as though the music had undergone an exemplary unburdening; as if all of the clichés and hoary riffs accumulated over a half-century of jazz music were thrown overboard, lightening the load and opening up the horizon.

Coleman’s star was clearly in the ascendancy. Influential patrons, including Gunther Schuller and John Lewis, befriended him and helped open doors. Coleman and Cherry were invited to attend the Lenox School of Jazz, ostensibly as students but in fact serving as unacknowledged faculty members. Coleman got a regal welcome at the 1959 Monterey Jazz Festival where, in a program billed as “The Three Saxes,” he shared the stage with Coleman Hawkins and Ben Webster. Earlier that same year, two follow-up recordings had been taped by different labels within a few weeks of each other:
Tomorrow Is the Question
(on Contemporary) and
The Shape of Jazz to Come
(on Atlantic). The Atlantic release stood out as an especially important statement of the new music. For the first time, Coleman was able to record using his working quartet of Cherry, Haden, and Higgins. The breadth of their music was striking, ranging from the almost unbearably poignant “Lonely Woman” to the forceful “Congeniality” and the moody “Peace.”

But the notoriety of these achievements paled beside the fierce debates ignited by the New York debut of the Ornette Coleman Quartet on the heels of the release of these two records. The band opened at the Five Spot on November 17, 1959, with interest running so high that the club took the rare step of offering a preview for the press and select members of the local jazz establishment. Some listeners walked out, others sat transfixed, and though there was no consensus among the audience, almost every opinion was adamant. Controversy proved good for business and for Coleman’s career. His two-week gig was extended by two months. Visiting players clamored to sit in, with everybody from Leonard Bernstein to Lionel Hampton taking the plunge. Mainstream periodicals, including
Newsweek
and
Harper’s Bazaar
, covered Coleman’s arrival on the scene as a major cultural event, and jazz magazines seethed with heated exchanges. Anxious to capitalize on the Coleman phenomenon, Atlantic released
Change of the Century
the following June, drawing on tracks recorded shortly before the quartet left California. This was another intriguing project by the altoist, showing his skill in slyly referencing other idioms: the blues in “Ramblin’,” bebop in “Bird Food,” and Latin music in “Una Muy Bonita.” The subtlety of these allusions was striking, and in each instance Coleman forced the other style into subservience to his freer approach.