Contrary to an uncommon yet amusing misconception, the term ‘free jazz’ is not to be taken literally. Perhaps someone should have told the massive crowd who turned up to an Ornette Coleman concert in 1969 with empty pockets. Something makes me think that they might regret their frugality, as Coleman was to become regarded as one of the most highly influential innovators and involuntary revolutionaries in the history of jazz music, and may have been worth a few spare pennies and a handful of lint.
In late 1959, Coleman released an album for Atlantic records called The Shape of Jazz to come, the first avant-garde jazz album in the music’s history. The music Coleman recorded was essentially the first shot taken in the revolution of jazz music. It dispensed with any kind of music or tonal formality and opened up a musical world outside of the generally accepted rules of play. Ornette wanted his musicians to play from the soul. They should listen to each other and play the instruments according to the feel of the music as opposed to some outdated notion of chordal structure. The time had come when the possibilities of a long-held structural principle had become too limiting a medium for expression. It would have to be abandoned.
In the same manner as many a ‘great artist’, Coleman’s influence was only appreciated in retrospect by the powers that be. The Shape of Jazz to come, while championed in contemporary culture as ‘a watershed in the genesis of avant garde jazz’, was met with confusion and unease by a community of jazz artists who hadn’t seen anything rock the boat since the creation of behop. No one- including Miles Davis himself who infamously described Coleman as ‘screwed up inside’- was sure how to respond to the new, more liberated, ways of jiving. Coleman reflects on his exile in conversation with Joachim Ernst Berendt, saying ‘most musicians didn’t take to me; they said I didn’t know the changes and was out of tune’. In reference to Pee Wee Crayton, one of his first leaders, he laments, ‘it got so he was paying
me not to play.’
The release of The Shape of Jazz was equally perturbing to an audience who had become extremely comfortable with the established composition of the jazz quartet, because of its essentially extramusical elements (trumpets could be played sans mouthpiece, instruments could be used in new and inventive ways), and can, till this day, sound somewhat sporadic to the untrained ear. Some even complained that they couldn’t differentiate between the music of Ornette Coleman and the noise on a busy street. The beat of Oscar Peterson was replaced with a pounding in your chest and the meter with a freer, more unpredictable sense of anarchic sound. When one’s listens to a tune like ‘Lonely Woman’ or ‘Focus on Sanity’, it is as though the body responds instinctively; this is music that appeals to the soul and speaks to us on a visceral level. Jazz had finally rediscovered its 20′s appeal-the listening becoming infused with an element of religious devotion- you must follow it wherever it leads you.
Ornette Coleman’s complete disregard for traditional structure- meter, rhythm and symmetry and generally established traditional modes of performance- continues triumphantly to this day and is described by Nate Chinen for the New York Times in reference to the performer’s recent Lincoln Centre debut. ‘There was no organized script, no resident orchestra, no Wynton Marsalis. The idea, instead, was that Mr. Coleman – the famously inscrutable alto saxophonist, composer and free-jazz pioneer – would’- as per usual- ‘make his…debut on his own bold terms’.