Ornette Coleman Quartet in Paris
Jazz a La Villette, August 30th
The last time I heard Ornette play was 28 years ago at The Bracknell Jazz Festival in England. That year the programme also included the Pat Metheny Trio and David Murray, both making their first visits to Britain.
It was Ornette though whom we travelled to see, first because he toured very rarely and second, because this was the “new” Ornette band, Prime Time, the original or may be nearly original line up.
They came on late, very late. Scheduled for 11.30pm, it was close to an hour later that Prime Time, followed by Ornette finally appeared on stage. Most people who stayed to hear the band (about three quarters had been holding down their seats in the large tent since 11am the previous morning. No wonder they were edgy and snappy. Then the band hit. The volume was loud and there were major sound problems. There was a thick loud bass sound, penetrating, distorted treble and that was all. No mid-tones at all. After two numbers things hadn’t changed despite what appeared to be some form of activity at the sound desk.
At times, especially when Ornette played violin, the treble sound was so hard and so thin that listening was unpleasant. Yet the abiding memories are of huge energy surges underwritten by the drummers, the dynamic playing of Bern Nix and Charlie Ellerbee with Ornette piercing his way through it all. Sometimes riding the surge, sometimes developing a smaller whirlpool of ideas with explicit reference to one of the guitarists or one of the drummers. Whatever the shortcomings of the front of house, to watch it was spellbinding.
Jazz a La Villette is an important annual jazz festival in a country awash with festivals for every art form. It takes place at the Parc La Villette, a complex of performance spaces for music in north Paris, and it’s programmed thematically with the 2006 programme developed around the theme ‘Black Rebels’.
Together with Ornette’s band the programme also included the Mingus Dynasty, Steve Coleman and Five Elements, World Saxophone Quartet ‘Tribute to Jimi Hendrix’,Charlie Haden Liberation Orchestra featuring Carla Bley, Abbey Lincoln Quartet, John Surman/Jack DeJohnstte, William Parker “The Inside Songs of Curtis Mayfield with Amiri Baraka in the septet, and Archie Shepp’s Born Free. There was a strong contingent of French groups, some British bands, hip hop and soul artists, DJs, Guru and Jazzamatazz, film screenings and discussion sessions.
Ornette opened the festival in a medium sized theatre that had been sold out some weeks in advance and, as this was his first Paris appearance in over two decades, the event made the front page of Le Monde. The line-up included Denardo on drums, Al McDowell on electric bass and Tony Falanga on acoustic bass.
The band appeared on stage dead on time and began with a piece from the Prime Time song book. The sound was brilliantly balanced so that whatever the tempo, whatever the volume every thing was clear and distinct.
The line-up linked to both Prime Time – Denardo and McDowell – and the acoustic quartets through Falanga who most closely interacted with Ornette. McDowell linked mostly with Denardo who shadowed his father so that Ornette was at once the centre of everything yet imposed no control over the direction anyone took with tempo or over the density of the group sound. It gave the impression that the variety of textures the quartet could develop was endless. The approach was orchestral yet maintained the intimacy of interaction that is the hallmark of a small chamber group.
Denardo has received his share of criticism but here his drumming is pivotal. He responds to the music around him with a sense of adventure and excitement. After a theme statement in which he played pizzicato Falanga would switch to the bow and McDowell would then gently strum his bass guitar while Ornette began a solo with a simple motif which, with a sudden surge cued by Denardo doubling the time, would lead to a sequence of notes that surged upward, into the roof of the hall before cascading down and suddenly ending. At other times he would hold back and give Falanga and Ornette space to develop the momentum.
Ornette’s playing still has the old fire and intensity even if the solos are quite short his sound is so open and honest and so utterly human. That nothing can stand between him and the listener and a single note can pierce the heart and elicit tears. His music, at once so free and elusive, is rooted in human experience. It is, to quote Ezra Pound ‘the colour of stars’ but very much of our world.
They finished with Song X on the hour and came back for an encore of Lonely Woman. There was a long standing ovation but at 76 Ornette had already given us so much that night that it seemed selfish to expect more. If the rumours are correct and the Sydney Festival does bring him to Australia next January he will be the star of its programme. Let’s hope.