At The Habit, York:-
Ron Elderly: -
Make You Feel My Love
Autumn Leaves
Wagon Wheel
Da Elderly: -
Romancing Tonight
Human Highway
Heart Of Gold
The Elderly Brothers: -
Bring It On Home To Me
Sounds Of Silence
No Reply
Yes I Will
Santa Clause Is Coming To Town
It was much busier in The Habit than last week, with several new performers and punters. The new performers included a folk trio of flute, fiddle and guitar and a couple of singer/songwriters. The Elderly Brothers finished off the night with a sixties-laden set, complete with a seasonal finale. The fun continued until closing time with us taking requests (most repeatable!) from the remaining revellers. There will be a short break in posts during the Christmas & New Year, although the Open Mic nights will continue if you fancy calling in. See you in 2017.
Showing posts with label Better late than never.... Show all posts
Showing posts with label Better late than never.... Show all posts
Saturday, 17 December 2016
Tuesday, 15 September 2015
Bob Johnston RIP
Normal service is resumed at last...
‘Is it rolling, Bob?’ Dylan asks Johnston at the start of To Be Alone With You
Johnston was about as far from the kind of record producer exemplified by Phil Spector – the producer as control freak, as auteur – as could be imagined. Chiefly associated with artists whose origins were in the folk and country idioms, he was a facilitator, an enabler, a creator of sympathetic ambience. His list of credits included six albums with Dylan, three with Leonard Cohen, seven with Johnny Cash and two with Simon and Garfunkel at a time when those artists were at the height of their fame and productivity. His other clients included Marty Robbins, the Byrds, Pete Seeger, Burl Ives, Loudon Wainwright III, Willie Nelson, John Mayall, Carl Perkins, Alvin Lee and New Riders of the Purple Sage.
According to Cohen, Johnston’s contribution, while not obviously assertive, was crucial to the success of a session. “It wasn’t just a matter of turning on the machines,” Cohen told a writer for the music magazine Goldmine. “He created an atmosphere in the studio that really encouraged you to do your best, stretch out, do another take, an atmosphere that was free from judgment, free from criticism, full of invitation, full of affirmation.”
Johnston’s own description of his modus operandi was more pragmatic. “If Dylan wanted to record under a palm tree in Hawaii with a ukulele,” he said, “I’d be there with the tape machine. I’m an artists’ producer. I give my artists lots of freedom, and if they fuck up – it’s their life.”
His methods were not universally admired. Al Kooper, a New York musician who played the Hammond organ on Dylan’s sessions, dismissed him as “the kind of guy who just pats you on the back and says you’re fantastic and just keeps you going”.
He was born Donald William Johnston in Hillsboro, a small town in central Texas, to Diane and Jay. His mother and grandmother were songwriters, and after serving in the US navy he began a career in the music business, recording several rockabilly singles under the name Don Johnston. By 1964 he had moved to New York, where he worked as a producer for Kapp Records and as a freelance arranger and songwriter. He married a fellow songwriter, Joy Byers, some of whose songs were recorded by Elvis Presley for the soundtracks of his Hollywood films; later Johnston claimed to have had a hand in writing several of them.
After joining the staff of Columbia Records, an early assignment with the pop singer Patti Page delivered a top 10 single called Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte and an album titled Patti Page Sings America’s Favorite Hymns. But his career took off in June 1965, shortly after Dylan had fallen out with the producer of his previous three albums, Tom Wilson, following the session at which Like a Rolling Stone was recorded. The nature of the dispute remains a mystery, but Johnston was invited to take over and his first day with Dylan delivered Positively 4th Street, which became the follow-up single to Like a Rolling Stone, and two other tracks, Tombstone Blues and It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry, for the album Highway 61 Revisited. The remainder of the album, including the epic Desolation Row, would be completed under his supervision.
With Dylan, Johnston went on to produce the albums John Wesley Harding, Nashville Skyline, New Morning and Self Portrait. His work with Cohen included Songs from a Room, Songs of Love and Hate, and a live album. With Cash he recorded the successful albums taped in Folsom and San Quentin prisons. He produced all but the lead track of Simon and Garfunkel’s album Sounds of Silence (the exception, their first hit single, had been supervised by Wilson) in 1966 and the entirety of the following year’s Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme. Most of his work was now done in Nashville, his success refocusing the spotlight on the city’s self-contained and somewhat neglected music industry, to its lasting benefit.
Brought to London by Tony Stratton-Smith, the boss of Charisma Records, he helped the Newcastle group Lindisfarne to their biggest success with the album Fog on the Tyne (1971). His output diminished in later years, but he helped Willie Nelson to record a solo acoustic album sarcastically titled The IRS Tapes (1992), whose royalties went towards paying the singer’s tax debt, which amounted to several million dollars.
Johnston died in Nashville, his home for many years, where he is survived by Joy and his son Kevin; his sons Andy and Bobby predeceased him.
• Bob (Donald William) Johnston, record producer, born 14 May 1932; died 14 August 2015
http://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/aug/18/bob-johnston
Bob Johnston obituary
Record producer who played a significant role in the recording career of Bob Dylan
Richard Williams
Tuesday 18 August 2015
Bob Dylan’s curious decision to begin To Be Alone With You, a track on the album Nashville Skyline (1968), with a casual remark to his producer – “Is it rolling, Bob?” – ensured that Bob Johnston’s significant role in the singer’s recording career could not go unnoticed. Johnston, who has died at the age of 83, himself underplayed his contribution – “All I did was turn the tapes on,” he told an interviewer – but it was he who had helped redirect Dylan’s music two years earlier by taking him to Nashville, where the singer encountered a very different style of working from the one he had known in New York.
While recording tracks for the album Blonde on Blonde in that more relaxed environment, Dylan was able to keep a group of highly paid session musicians waiting most of a night in February 1966 while he finished the verses of Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands. At four o’clock in the morning, after 10 hours of inactivity, the players were finally summoned from the studio lounge to pick up their instruments and deliver an 11-minute performance whose air of stately exhaustion perfectly suited the song, which turned out to be one of Dylan’s masterpieces.
Record producer who played a significant role in the recording career of Bob Dylan
Richard Williams
Tuesday 18 August 2015
Bob Dylan’s curious decision to begin To Be Alone With You, a track on the album Nashville Skyline (1968), with a casual remark to his producer – “Is it rolling, Bob?” – ensured that Bob Johnston’s significant role in the singer’s recording career could not go unnoticed. Johnston, who has died at the age of 83, himself underplayed his contribution – “All I did was turn the tapes on,” he told an interviewer – but it was he who had helped redirect Dylan’s music two years earlier by taking him to Nashville, where the singer encountered a very different style of working from the one he had known in New York.
While recording tracks for the album Blonde on Blonde in that more relaxed environment, Dylan was able to keep a group of highly paid session musicians waiting most of a night in February 1966 while he finished the verses of Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands. At four o’clock in the morning, after 10 hours of inactivity, the players were finally summoned from the studio lounge to pick up their instruments and deliver an 11-minute performance whose air of stately exhaustion perfectly suited the song, which turned out to be one of Dylan’s masterpieces.
‘Is it rolling, Bob?’ Dylan asks Johnston at the start of To Be Alone With You
Johnston was about as far from the kind of record producer exemplified by Phil Spector – the producer as control freak, as auteur – as could be imagined. Chiefly associated with artists whose origins were in the folk and country idioms, he was a facilitator, an enabler, a creator of sympathetic ambience. His list of credits included six albums with Dylan, three with Leonard Cohen, seven with Johnny Cash and two with Simon and Garfunkel at a time when those artists were at the height of their fame and productivity. His other clients included Marty Robbins, the Byrds, Pete Seeger, Burl Ives, Loudon Wainwright III, Willie Nelson, John Mayall, Carl Perkins, Alvin Lee and New Riders of the Purple Sage.
According to Cohen, Johnston’s contribution, while not obviously assertive, was crucial to the success of a session. “It wasn’t just a matter of turning on the machines,” Cohen told a writer for the music magazine Goldmine. “He created an atmosphere in the studio that really encouraged you to do your best, stretch out, do another take, an atmosphere that was free from judgment, free from criticism, full of invitation, full of affirmation.”
Johnston’s own description of his modus operandi was more pragmatic. “If Dylan wanted to record under a palm tree in Hawaii with a ukulele,” he said, “I’d be there with the tape machine. I’m an artists’ producer. I give my artists lots of freedom, and if they fuck up – it’s their life.”
His methods were not universally admired. Al Kooper, a New York musician who played the Hammond organ on Dylan’s sessions, dismissed him as “the kind of guy who just pats you on the back and says you’re fantastic and just keeps you going”.
He was born Donald William Johnston in Hillsboro, a small town in central Texas, to Diane and Jay. His mother and grandmother were songwriters, and after serving in the US navy he began a career in the music business, recording several rockabilly singles under the name Don Johnston. By 1964 he had moved to New York, where he worked as a producer for Kapp Records and as a freelance arranger and songwriter. He married a fellow songwriter, Joy Byers, some of whose songs were recorded by Elvis Presley for the soundtracks of his Hollywood films; later Johnston claimed to have had a hand in writing several of them.
After joining the staff of Columbia Records, an early assignment with the pop singer Patti Page delivered a top 10 single called Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte and an album titled Patti Page Sings America’s Favorite Hymns. But his career took off in June 1965, shortly after Dylan had fallen out with the producer of his previous three albums, Tom Wilson, following the session at which Like a Rolling Stone was recorded. The nature of the dispute remains a mystery, but Johnston was invited to take over and his first day with Dylan delivered Positively 4th Street, which became the follow-up single to Like a Rolling Stone, and two other tracks, Tombstone Blues and It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry, for the album Highway 61 Revisited. The remainder of the album, including the epic Desolation Row, would be completed under his supervision.
With Dylan, Johnston went on to produce the albums John Wesley Harding, Nashville Skyline, New Morning and Self Portrait. His work with Cohen included Songs from a Room, Songs of Love and Hate, and a live album. With Cash he recorded the successful albums taped in Folsom and San Quentin prisons. He produced all but the lead track of Simon and Garfunkel’s album Sounds of Silence (the exception, their first hit single, had been supervised by Wilson) in 1966 and the entirety of the following year’s Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme. Most of his work was now done in Nashville, his success refocusing the spotlight on the city’s self-contained and somewhat neglected music industry, to its lasting benefit.
Brought to London by Tony Stratton-Smith, the boss of Charisma Records, he helped the Newcastle group Lindisfarne to their biggest success with the album Fog on the Tyne (1971). His output diminished in later years, but he helped Willie Nelson to record a solo acoustic album sarcastically titled The IRS Tapes (1992), whose royalties went towards paying the singer’s tax debt, which amounted to several million dollars.
Johnston died in Nashville, his home for many years, where he is survived by Joy and his son Kevin; his sons Andy and Bobby predeceased him.
• Bob (Donald William) Johnston, record producer, born 14 May 1932; died 14 August 2015
Lindisfarne's Ray Laidlaw remembers producer Bob Johnstone after his death aged 83
The American producer worked with Bob Dylan, Simon and Garfunkel, Johnny Cash and Leonard Cohen as well as the North East music legends
Sam Wonfor
The American producer worked with Bob Dylan, Simon and Garfunkel, Johnny Cash and Leonard Cohen as well as the North East music legends
Sam Wonfor
23 August 2015
The man who helped Lindisfarne sing their way into the record of collections of people all over the world has died.
Bob Johnston, who produced the much-loved band’s platinum-selling breakthrough album, Fog On The Tyne in 1971, passed away aged 83 at his home in Nashville earlier this month.
With a back catalogue of production credits featuring the likes of Simon and Garfunkel, Leonard Cohen, Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan, Lindisfarne drummer, Ray Laidlaw remembers feeling pretty excited when he found out who would be producing the band’s second album, a follow up to their 1970 debut, Nicely Out Of Tune.
“I was gobsmacked,” he says, speaking from his home in Tynemouth. “His pedigree was incredible. He’d worked with all these great musicians and as far as I was concerned, at that time, had produced Dylan’s best record, Blonde on Blonde.”
After being a staff producer at Columbia Records for many years, Bob became unsatisfied with his salary arrangement, which included no royalty payments for the string of hit albums he’d produced. By the time he came over to work with Lindisfarne, he had become an independent producer.
“Of course we thought it was a big deal. I mean we were full of ourselves as you can imagine,” Ray said. “We were getting lots of nice press and all that, but we hadn’t sold a huge amount of records at that time. It wasn’t until Fog on the Tyne was a massive success that people started buying our back catalogue.”
Ray says he and the band, Alan Hull, Simon Cowe, Rod Clements and Ray Jackson, enjoyed working Bob, who had “a light touch” when it came to collaborating in the studio.
“He was enigmatic. None of us had really met a proper American, high flying music personality. We’d met the lawyers and that, but they were just bloody lawyers. We’d been to the States a couple of times, but for him to be working with us in England was a really big deal.”
Lindisfarne travelled down to Trident Studios in London to record what would become Fog On The Tyne in the summer of 1971.
“We’d been away and rehearsed - rehearsing what we thought was going to be the album, and the first day in the studio, we played it for him (Bob) and he said ‘Great. What else you got?’
“I remember thinking ‘bloody hell, he doesn’t like it’. But it wasn’t that, he wanted to hear every song we had.
“So we spent the whole first day playing him everything. Every song, every half song, every bit of a song. I think the final album ended up being half of what we had planned and half of the stuff Bob had picked out from what we played him.
“That was his job. He wasn’t a Phil Spector. He wasn’t a control freak. He’d encourage and prod you. He let us be ourselves... his role was more of an editing process.
“When you look back at our first album now, it’s a bit like a sampler with loads of different styles on. Bob realised that for people to get us - especially in America - we had to have more of a streamlined style.
“And him coming from the country and folk side of things, he took away all the extraneous stuff and stripped it down to the basics. That was his gift to us. He focused on what we were good at got us to play to our strengths.”
When it was released, Fog On The Tyne, which, as well as its eponymous anthem also included the hit single, Meet Me On The Corner, topped the charts in early 1972.
“That album made all the difference,” said Ray. “It was enormous. Everybody had it and Bob had a big influence on how it ended up being. I found out just recently that Fog On The Tyne was the most successful independent production that he ever did. He did lots of other successful stuff too, but nothing which had the same level of success as he had with us.”
After the massive impact of their second album, Lindisfarne teamed up with Bob again for their next long player, Dingly Dell, released in September 1972.
“By then we wanted to be a bit more ambitious. So the first three songs were all segued together,” says Ray. “There was some strings and stuff on too.
“We’d actually recorded Dingly Dell for Fog on the Tyne, but it didn’t fit, so we kept that one back and used it as the title track for the next album.”
Ray, who is gearing up to embark on the latest chapter of The Lindisfarne Story tour - a history of the band in words and music - which he performs with the band’s former lead singer (1995-2003) Billy Mitchell, says he has kept an eye on what Bob was up to over the years.
“He was hot to trot in the UK and Europe for a few years, in the seventies and then he went back to the States, working with Willie Nelson and people like that.
“I would always have a quick check up on whether he’d been up to anything, because we do a bit about him in the show. How could we not? He was a big part of the Lindisfarne story.”
http://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/whats-on/whats-on-news/lindisfarnes-ray-laidlaw-remembers-producer-9912708
The man who helped Lindisfarne sing their way into the record of collections of people all over the world has died.
Bob Johnston, who produced the much-loved band’s platinum-selling breakthrough album, Fog On The Tyne in 1971, passed away aged 83 at his home in Nashville earlier this month.
With a back catalogue of production credits featuring the likes of Simon and Garfunkel, Leonard Cohen, Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan, Lindisfarne drummer, Ray Laidlaw remembers feeling pretty excited when he found out who would be producing the band’s second album, a follow up to their 1970 debut, Nicely Out Of Tune.
“I was gobsmacked,” he says, speaking from his home in Tynemouth. “His pedigree was incredible. He’d worked with all these great musicians and as far as I was concerned, at that time, had produced Dylan’s best record, Blonde on Blonde.”
After being a staff producer at Columbia Records for many years, Bob became unsatisfied with his salary arrangement, which included no royalty payments for the string of hit albums he’d produced. By the time he came over to work with Lindisfarne, he had become an independent producer.
“Of course we thought it was a big deal. I mean we were full of ourselves as you can imagine,” Ray said. “We were getting lots of nice press and all that, but we hadn’t sold a huge amount of records at that time. It wasn’t until Fog on the Tyne was a massive success that people started buying our back catalogue.”
Ray says he and the band, Alan Hull, Simon Cowe, Rod Clements and Ray Jackson, enjoyed working Bob, who had “a light touch” when it came to collaborating in the studio.
“He was enigmatic. None of us had really met a proper American, high flying music personality. We’d met the lawyers and that, but they were just bloody lawyers. We’d been to the States a couple of times, but for him to be working with us in England was a really big deal.”
Lindisfarne travelled down to Trident Studios in London to record what would become Fog On The Tyne in the summer of 1971.
“We’d been away and rehearsed - rehearsing what we thought was going to be the album, and the first day in the studio, we played it for him (Bob) and he said ‘Great. What else you got?’
“I remember thinking ‘bloody hell, he doesn’t like it’. But it wasn’t that, he wanted to hear every song we had.
“So we spent the whole first day playing him everything. Every song, every half song, every bit of a song. I think the final album ended up being half of what we had planned and half of the stuff Bob had picked out from what we played him.
“That was his job. He wasn’t a Phil Spector. He wasn’t a control freak. He’d encourage and prod you. He let us be ourselves... his role was more of an editing process.
“When you look back at our first album now, it’s a bit like a sampler with loads of different styles on. Bob realised that for people to get us - especially in America - we had to have more of a streamlined style.
“And him coming from the country and folk side of things, he took away all the extraneous stuff and stripped it down to the basics. That was his gift to us. He focused on what we were good at got us to play to our strengths.”
When it was released, Fog On The Tyne, which, as well as its eponymous anthem also included the hit single, Meet Me On The Corner, topped the charts in early 1972.
“That album made all the difference,” said Ray. “It was enormous. Everybody had it and Bob had a big influence on how it ended up being. I found out just recently that Fog On The Tyne was the most successful independent production that he ever did. He did lots of other successful stuff too, but nothing which had the same level of success as he had with us.”
After the massive impact of their second album, Lindisfarne teamed up with Bob again for their next long player, Dingly Dell, released in September 1972.
“By then we wanted to be a bit more ambitious. So the first three songs were all segued together,” says Ray. “There was some strings and stuff on too.
“We’d actually recorded Dingly Dell for Fog on the Tyne, but it didn’t fit, so we kept that one back and used it as the title track for the next album.”
Ray, who is gearing up to embark on the latest chapter of The Lindisfarne Story tour - a history of the band in words and music - which he performs with the band’s former lead singer (1995-2003) Billy Mitchell, says he has kept an eye on what Bob was up to over the years.
“He was hot to trot in the UK and Europe for a few years, in the seventies and then he went back to the States, working with Willie Nelson and people like that.
“I would always have a quick check up on whether he’d been up to anything, because we do a bit about him in the show. How could we not? He was a big part of the Lindisfarne story.”
http://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/whats-on/whats-on-news/lindisfarnes-ray-laidlaw-remembers-producer-9912708
Wednesday, 24 June 2015
Ornette Coleman RIP
Ornette Coleman's Revolution
http://bigozine2.com/feature/?p=1217
John Pietaro
CounterPunch
21 June 2015
For many at the time, This Is Our Music (1961) and Free Jazz (1961) was as far as the music could go. The latter album title soon stood as the banner of the genre itself. For the next generation of social justice activists, the eponymous freedom in a free jazz was a grand symbol of, a soundtrack to, movements of liberation. This unleashing of the instrumentalist created an art form as radical as the days demanded. By John Pietaro.
Ornette Coleman, the composer and multi-instrumentalist, died on June 11, 2015 in Manhattan. He was 85. Though health challenges in recent years had been a constant struggle, Coleman’s relevance as a visionary artist kept him at the helm of the “Change of the Century”; this jazz revolution began some 60 years ago but lives far beyond his mortal years.
The challenge Ornette posed to listeners, to musicians and to the public in a period of anxious social upheaval matched the tenor of the times. With roots in Texas blues and then years spent on the road before endeavoring deeply in the Los Angeles jazz scene, Ornette’s concepts were stirring, indeed, radical on every level.
His vision of a liberated melody, harmony and rhythm, aka Harmolodics, reflected the abstract expressionist movement in visual art and yet held such a visceral connection to the blues, to African American folk forms, that it was anything but abstract. A closer listen revealed the entire spectrum of the Black experience as it pushed outward.
Born in Fort Worth, Texas in 1930, Coleman was raised in a poor household after his father died in a tragic accident. Searching for the means to grow beyond the cramped rural home by the railroad tracks, the young Ornette became enamored with the arts. His initial foray into music grew out of self-taught experimentation and high school band, and was heralded by the sounds on the radio and what he could pick up on the circuit.
Hearing Charlie Parker affected Coleman deeply and many of the musicians who knew him back in Texas have said that he had an uncanny ability to imitate the legendary Parker’s approach to the alto saxophone. Among his cohorts on the Fort Worth music scene were drummer Charles Moffet, whom he’d perform with again in the mid-’60s, clarinetist John Carter, drummer Ronald Shannon Jackson and flutist and multi-reeds player Prince Lasha, all of whom would go on to careers as expansive jazz artists.
Coleman performed in a disparate range of arenas, from minstrel shows to bars, parties to pick-up gigs, but was wont to make enemies on many a bandstand due to his burning need for invention. Not content to perform the be-bop, jump blues or R&B he was hired for, Coleman forged new ground in this unlikeliest of places - until finally finding his way to the West Coast.
Once in LA, Coleman sought out sympathetic co-voyagers in after-hours clubs until finding cornetist Don Cherry. With the saxophonist acting in the role of guide-star, Cherry’s unique voice came to fruition, offering an indelible counter-part to Coleman’s own searching, achingly blue and yet joyous tone. Both had a penchant for brief, simple folk-like melodies that, upon repetition, reconfigured into bold new layered pathways which overtook the rules of music theory. Just long enough to explode into seemingly unfettered forays.
In remembering some of the Ornette Coleman theories on race relations, the trumpeter Matt Lavelle, a student of Ornette for years and a current Harmolodic protagonist, recalled the master stating: “The major chord is white; the minor chord is black. Do you agree?” But the question was defiantly rhetorical.
Coleman’s higher form of improvisatory performance-practice, upon examination, offers clear resolutions connecting passages or movements - not the standard chordal dominant-to-tonic resolution but logical cadences summoning the return of the piece’s melody or its ending. Concurrently, Ornette Coleman’s abilities as a composer came to the forefront and he was able to draw out some of the most painfully captivating melodies from his and Cherry’s horns. Early examples such as “Lonely Woman” and “Beauty is a Rare Thing” continue to dictate the apex of jazz balladry.
To the uninitiated, the music in its formative years was akin to wild confusion. Coleman and Cherry were laughed out of performance spaces, physically threatened. Jazz critics fought over who would get their hatchet pieces to press first. Yet, Coleman’s supporters found in his music a new way, a liberation that shunned pre-conceived notions and tore off the shackles that confined.
Pianists John Lewis (of the Modern Jazz Quartet) and Paul Bley, as well as Leonard Bernstein, celebrated the daring sounds and concepts. Even Coleman’s instrument spoke of a new dawn in the music: he played an alto saxophone made of plastic which produced a throaty wail in long-held tones. This coupled with musical memories of the Southwest begat soaring, compelling phrases that dipped and contoured, offering a cry that stirred one’s soul. This was something drastically new, yet simply timeless.
The young progressive bassist Charlie Haden joined the cause, and with the addition of the driving post-bop drummer Billy Higgins or, alternately, the New Orleans-raised Ed Blackwell (who’d define free drumming), the Ornette Coleman Quartet came to be. The four-way instrumental conversations that floated over 20th century jazz constructions advanced the legend, albeit often in negative terms. Los Angeles in the mid-later 1950s was a bitter place for an African American musical revolutionary drenched in the avant garde. Yet, Coleman, brandishing the stealth symbolism of Black liberation, persisted.
The Quartet relocated to New York and held residency at the Five Spot club on the Lower East Side for months. Through the derision of negative reviewers as well as the championing of others, Coleman was elevated to celebrity status. The Quartet’s groundbreaking recordings led the way of this musical genre, this new thing, that had no title as of yet.
Following releases such as “Something Else!” and “Change of the Century”, Coleman’s next albums continued the trend of claiming ground. The self-defining “This is Our Music” led to the breathtaking “Free Jazz” which featured a double quartet–in stereo!–that included the likes of Eric Dolphy, performing freeform works.
For many at the time, this was as far as the music could go. The latter album title soon stood as the banner of the genre itself. For the next generation of social justice activists, the eponymous freedom in a free jazz was a grand symbol of, a soundtrack to, movements of liberation. This unleashing of the instrumentalist created an art form as radical as the days demanded.
The musicians of the Coleman ensembles included the aforementioned giants Cherry, Haden, Blackwell, Higgins and Moffet as well as bassists Scott LaFaro and David Izenson, saxophonist Dewey Redman and drummer Denardo Coleman, Ornette’s young son, among others. Ornette Coleman’s chameleon-like tendency toward change saw him through a variety of musical settings, testing his limits (and the audience’s) at each turn. The quartets and trios brought the leader to still wider experimentation including an expansion of his own musical arsenal, adding trumpet and violin.
Later, Coleman played in Morocco with the Master Musicians of Jajouka, he composed the epic orchestral work ‘Skies of America’, founded the space Artists House, won the Pulitzer Prize and multiple fellowships, and then realized the transformation of his Harmolodic theory as Prime Time, a band built on funk and dance grooves. Electric instruments became central and guitarist Bern Nix and bassist Jamaaladeen Tacuma were among the stalwarts Coleman called upon to realize this concept.
Prime Time became Coleman’s vehicle for performance through the final decades of his performing life but he also collaborated with older bandmates at various junctures, helped to found Karl Berger’s Creative Music Studio in Woodstock NY and presented his music at Lincoln Center in a performance with the New York Philharmonic, Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson. He created the performance hall Caravan of Dreams in Texas, performed around the world and recorded an award-winning album with guitarist Pat Metheny. Coleman’s rather legendary battle with major labels saw him refusing huge sums of money as he sought out, as usual, his own way.
There was no one like Ornette, this brilliant musical philosopher and singular voice who forged a path of revolt in a time when racism and inequity coursed through the nation unashamed. His musical journey inspired new generations of free improvisers and experimental composers and demonstrated that undeterred vision can conquer the status quo.
The implications for the wider battle for revolutionary change should have been apparent in all Coleman did. The themes in his epic work ‘Skies of America’ speak volumes: “Foreigner in a Free Land”, “The Men Who Live in the White House”, “Native Americans”, “Soul Within Woman”, “The Military” and “The Artist in America” offer insight into the quiet man’s concerns for his nation and his people.
But Coleman’s commentary on the struggle could best be heard through his revolution of sound. Screaming and then subtle, devoid of the obvious, all was left to the listener to define the meaning for himself.
In remembering some of the Coleman theories on race relations, the trumpeter Matt Lavelle, a student of Ornette for years and a current Harmolodic protagonist, recalled the master stating: “The major chord is white; the minor chord is black. Do you agree?” But the question was defiantly rhetorical.
“OC just dropped in this sort of subversive, almost subliminal way to bring you to a higher perspective,” Lavelle explained. “To your own reality in that higher perspective”.
And then the profound silence which followed became enveloped in a mournful song of colossal heights.
For many at the time, This Is Our Music (1961) and Free Jazz (1961) was as far as the music could go. The latter album title soon stood as the banner of the genre itself. For the next generation of social justice activists, the eponymous freedom in a free jazz was a grand symbol of, a soundtrack to, movements of liberation. This unleashing of the instrumentalist created an art form as radical as the days demanded. By John Pietaro.
Ornette Coleman, the composer and multi-instrumentalist, died on June 11, 2015 in Manhattan. He was 85. Though health challenges in recent years had been a constant struggle, Coleman’s relevance as a visionary artist kept him at the helm of the “Change of the Century”; this jazz revolution began some 60 years ago but lives far beyond his mortal years.
The challenge Ornette posed to listeners, to musicians and to the public in a period of anxious social upheaval matched the tenor of the times. With roots in Texas blues and then years spent on the road before endeavoring deeply in the Los Angeles jazz scene, Ornette’s concepts were stirring, indeed, radical on every level.
His vision of a liberated melody, harmony and rhythm, aka Harmolodics, reflected the abstract expressionist movement in visual art and yet held such a visceral connection to the blues, to African American folk forms, that it was anything but abstract. A closer listen revealed the entire spectrum of the Black experience as it pushed outward.
Born in Fort Worth, Texas in 1930, Coleman was raised in a poor household after his father died in a tragic accident. Searching for the means to grow beyond the cramped rural home by the railroad tracks, the young Ornette became enamored with the arts. His initial foray into music grew out of self-taught experimentation and high school band, and was heralded by the sounds on the radio and what he could pick up on the circuit.
Hearing Charlie Parker affected Coleman deeply and many of the musicians who knew him back in Texas have said that he had an uncanny ability to imitate the legendary Parker’s approach to the alto saxophone. Among his cohorts on the Fort Worth music scene were drummer Charles Moffet, whom he’d perform with again in the mid-’60s, clarinetist John Carter, drummer Ronald Shannon Jackson and flutist and multi-reeds player Prince Lasha, all of whom would go on to careers as expansive jazz artists.
Coleman performed in a disparate range of arenas, from minstrel shows to bars, parties to pick-up gigs, but was wont to make enemies on many a bandstand due to his burning need for invention. Not content to perform the be-bop, jump blues or R&B he was hired for, Coleman forged new ground in this unlikeliest of places - until finally finding his way to the West Coast.
Once in LA, Coleman sought out sympathetic co-voyagers in after-hours clubs until finding cornetist Don Cherry. With the saxophonist acting in the role of guide-star, Cherry’s unique voice came to fruition, offering an indelible counter-part to Coleman’s own searching, achingly blue and yet joyous tone. Both had a penchant for brief, simple folk-like melodies that, upon repetition, reconfigured into bold new layered pathways which overtook the rules of music theory. Just long enough to explode into seemingly unfettered forays.
In remembering some of the Ornette Coleman theories on race relations, the trumpeter Matt Lavelle, a student of Ornette for years and a current Harmolodic protagonist, recalled the master stating: “The major chord is white; the minor chord is black. Do you agree?” But the question was defiantly rhetorical.
Coleman’s higher form of improvisatory performance-practice, upon examination, offers clear resolutions connecting passages or movements - not the standard chordal dominant-to-tonic resolution but logical cadences summoning the return of the piece’s melody or its ending. Concurrently, Ornette Coleman’s abilities as a composer came to the forefront and he was able to draw out some of the most painfully captivating melodies from his and Cherry’s horns. Early examples such as “Lonely Woman” and “Beauty is a Rare Thing” continue to dictate the apex of jazz balladry.
To the uninitiated, the music in its formative years was akin to wild confusion. Coleman and Cherry were laughed out of performance spaces, physically threatened. Jazz critics fought over who would get their hatchet pieces to press first. Yet, Coleman’s supporters found in his music a new way, a liberation that shunned pre-conceived notions and tore off the shackles that confined.
Pianists John Lewis (of the Modern Jazz Quartet) and Paul Bley, as well as Leonard Bernstein, celebrated the daring sounds and concepts. Even Coleman’s instrument spoke of a new dawn in the music: he played an alto saxophone made of plastic which produced a throaty wail in long-held tones. This coupled with musical memories of the Southwest begat soaring, compelling phrases that dipped and contoured, offering a cry that stirred one’s soul. This was something drastically new, yet simply timeless.
The young progressive bassist Charlie Haden joined the cause, and with the addition of the driving post-bop drummer Billy Higgins or, alternately, the New Orleans-raised Ed Blackwell (who’d define free drumming), the Ornette Coleman Quartet came to be. The four-way instrumental conversations that floated over 20th century jazz constructions advanced the legend, albeit often in negative terms. Los Angeles in the mid-later 1950s was a bitter place for an African American musical revolutionary drenched in the avant garde. Yet, Coleman, brandishing the stealth symbolism of Black liberation, persisted.
The Quartet relocated to New York and held residency at the Five Spot club on the Lower East Side for months. Through the derision of negative reviewers as well as the championing of others, Coleman was elevated to celebrity status. The Quartet’s groundbreaking recordings led the way of this musical genre, this new thing, that had no title as of yet.
Following releases such as “Something Else!” and “Change of the Century”, Coleman’s next albums continued the trend of claiming ground. The self-defining “This is Our Music” led to the breathtaking “Free Jazz” which featured a double quartet–in stereo!–that included the likes of Eric Dolphy, performing freeform works.
For many at the time, this was as far as the music could go. The latter album title soon stood as the banner of the genre itself. For the next generation of social justice activists, the eponymous freedom in a free jazz was a grand symbol of, a soundtrack to, movements of liberation. This unleashing of the instrumentalist created an art form as radical as the days demanded.
The musicians of the Coleman ensembles included the aforementioned giants Cherry, Haden, Blackwell, Higgins and Moffet as well as bassists Scott LaFaro and David Izenson, saxophonist Dewey Redman and drummer Denardo Coleman, Ornette’s young son, among others. Ornette Coleman’s chameleon-like tendency toward change saw him through a variety of musical settings, testing his limits (and the audience’s) at each turn. The quartets and trios brought the leader to still wider experimentation including an expansion of his own musical arsenal, adding trumpet and violin.
Later, Coleman played in Morocco with the Master Musicians of Jajouka, he composed the epic orchestral work ‘Skies of America’, founded the space Artists House, won the Pulitzer Prize and multiple fellowships, and then realized the transformation of his Harmolodic theory as Prime Time, a band built on funk and dance grooves. Electric instruments became central and guitarist Bern Nix and bassist Jamaaladeen Tacuma were among the stalwarts Coleman called upon to realize this concept.
Prime Time became Coleman’s vehicle for performance through the final decades of his performing life but he also collaborated with older bandmates at various junctures, helped to found Karl Berger’s Creative Music Studio in Woodstock NY and presented his music at Lincoln Center in a performance with the New York Philharmonic, Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson. He created the performance hall Caravan of Dreams in Texas, performed around the world and recorded an award-winning album with guitarist Pat Metheny. Coleman’s rather legendary battle with major labels saw him refusing huge sums of money as he sought out, as usual, his own way.
There was no one like Ornette, this brilliant musical philosopher and singular voice who forged a path of revolt in a time when racism and inequity coursed through the nation unashamed. His musical journey inspired new generations of free improvisers and experimental composers and demonstrated that undeterred vision can conquer the status quo.
The implications for the wider battle for revolutionary change should have been apparent in all Coleman did. The themes in his epic work ‘Skies of America’ speak volumes: “Foreigner in a Free Land”, “The Men Who Live in the White House”, “Native Americans”, “Soul Within Woman”, “The Military” and “The Artist in America” offer insight into the quiet man’s concerns for his nation and his people.
But Coleman’s commentary on the struggle could best be heard through his revolution of sound. Screaming and then subtle, devoid of the obvious, all was left to the listener to define the meaning for himself.
In remembering some of the Coleman theories on race relations, the trumpeter Matt Lavelle, a student of Ornette for years and a current Harmolodic protagonist, recalled the master stating: “The major chord is white; the minor chord is black. Do you agree?” But the question was defiantly rhetorical.
“OC just dropped in this sort of subversive, almost subliminal way to bring you to a higher perspective,” Lavelle explained. “To your own reality in that higher perspective”.
And then the profound silence which followed became enveloped in a mournful song of colossal heights.
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