Before a major artistic event I have moments of trepidation. The butterflies suddenly whirl out of control and some come trembling and rustling up into my throat, constricting my air as if I am about to perform myself and wish I did not have to. The real fear is that the event will swamp the art. The artist is after all a man, with the weakness of all men. How can he be expected to shoulder this vast anticipation?
Ornette Coleman is not the last living jazz innovator, as some us have been happy to repeat. Sonny Rollins – also in his seventies – is still playing, and has just made a new record. Rollins in many ways led to Ornette Coleman. Virtuosic as his playing has been since the mid 1950s, it has also been shaken and hurled by impulse, to a degree where sound, shape and concept will sometimes override academic musical considerations. There had been other pianoless modern bands, but in 1957 and 1958 Sonny Rollins recorded two that suggested some of the feeling of an Ornette Coleman band before Ornette himself. I speak of Rollins’s Freedom Suite and A Night At The Village Vanguard (with Wilbur Ware, who was one of Charlie Haden’s inspirations). The great pianoless trio on Sonny Rollins Way Out West was quite different in feeling, but if you want freedom hear the way Rollins leaps out and back from unrelated keys on the coda to I’m An Old Cowhand.
But Ornette Coleman altered the sound world in such a comprehensive way that we have to think of him in some of the same terms as we think of Miles Davis or Duke Ellington. Nobody compares with Duke Ellington, but we can think of Ornette in some of the same ways. An utterly distinctive way of playing, and the fashioning of an utterly distinctive context. We will never see Sonny Rollins now. Many of us thought we would never see Ornette Coleman.
About half an hour before Ornette’s appearance I saw two gigantic ships pass each other on the harbour. The scale of this Passage Of Venus (one ship was far bigger than the other) and the deep, droning blare, like the world’s biggest didgeridu, satisfied expectations. They were mighty ships. Ornette Coleman is a tiny man of 77. Not so many had come to see him as had come to see the ships, but they filled the Opera House Concert Hall. I saw so many friends and strangers who shared this enthusiasm which was once the preserve of a defensive few. Yet I wanted to go home and listen to an Ornette Coleman record on my own. No chance of disappointment there. Of course there was the fear that the Concert Hall acoustics would garble the three basses which, I knew, would often sound simultaneously in Ornette’s band.
Bear with me. There is one other thing, more fearful than the rest.
Recently I had seen Brian Wilson, another hero, and was disappointed for a while, but ultimately inspired. I will not go into the differences and similarities between the two, except to say that they share an apparent naivety or eccentricity, and perhaps even something of the savant. I was reminded of a story told by Gunther Schuller in John Litweiler’s book Ornette Coleman: A Harmolodic Life (or Hamalotic Lie as one article hilariously called it). For a long time Schuller, an early champion of Coleman, tried to teach the young Ornette to write music properly. When Ornette finally began to see the light, so to speak, he went into shock and ran to the toilet to vomit. Then he came back and apologised: ‘Gee, Gunther, I’m sorry that happened, but I realised something I had never seen before and it hurt me.’
Schuller felt that, ‘he caught a glimpse of what I had been talking about in terms of accurate reading and notation and it was so disturbing because it meant that everything he had learned up to then was “wrong”. He had the whole transposing thing upside down. Further than that … he had for some reason begun to associate certain pitches with certain characters. In other words, certain notes were always upbeats and they could only be upbeat. Certain notes were always downbeats. I have always said that because he did not learn these things in the traditional way, he became the extraordinary original improviser that he is, it is his genius.’
This bespeaks such a personalised, impressionistic view of the world that it borders on a primal, superstitious or mystical orientation in respect to things. Take this to an extreme and there is no difference between things and feeling. You are the world and the world is you, as in childhood – at least at those moments when you slide back to a stage before you have fully differentiated yourself from your surroundings.
This is a fragile thing to put before a hard world. It is somewhat like Rousseau, who was truly childlike, and the knowingly childlike or primitive forms presented by the more sophisticated modern painters. Would hordes of sceptics walk out on him? Would it prove to them that he was “no good”? These concerns proved to be neurotic.
I don’t need to tell you now what a triumph Ornette Coleman’s performance was. One thing that occurred to me after the butterflies had settled, to be replaced by that deep-seated excitement and satisfaction that we all know, was just how very personal and specific are many of the associations that draw us to non-verbal art. No one else is likely to share those exact impressions, yet there is something there that resonates universally, however long it takes that resonance to grow – in Ornette’s case, rather like the swelling of those ship’s horns stretched over decades.
For instance, in the textures of the three basses and drum kit I heard things that were as dear and deep to me as anything in art or music. Sometimes they wove like whirling winds. When I first went under the water in Lurline Bay, a place of mystery and of associations with madness, I saw kelp, sun patterns and shadow rolling about like a confluence of ghosts, and that is what the music was like. Al McDowell’s piccolo bass, often played like a guitar with soft unaccented running lines limning Ornette’s alto, would sometimes sound an out of tune chord that clanged eerily like rusted tin clashing softly in a desert wind. You can hear that effect in Ornette’s Prime Time. Denardo’s drums washed over and smashed through it all at times, and gonged plangently. Sure, his time was kind of loose, but it was perfect.
Time moved on several levels. Pulses started up and disappeared, yet you felt them run on, and recurring hints showed they had not been forgotten by the players. Tony Falanga’s bowed double bass groaned and sang, with sudden dissonant bursts of pizzicato shrapnel, and the bottom seemed to rise and fall, as under a sea swell. This is the Ornette Coleman concept, and we heard a manifestation that combined elements of Prime Time and the classic acoustic quartets.
Let us move away from the personal and move as near as we can to objective reality. It was only when I went to 505 the next night to hear Zac Hurren playing with Phil Stack and Evan Mannell that I realised that not everybody sat in such a good seat as mine. Saxophonist Martin Kay, who was much further back, said that the basses from back there were like a mysterious moving curtain over which Ornette soared. He was not complaining: far from it. Dave Jackson from Trio Apoplectic said that the ultra groovy Charnett Moffett wasted too many opportunities to interact with Ornette and did not take care of some basic things
On one thing everyone was unanimous. Ornette was sublime. The sound, the lines. He sang like an angel. Bassist Johnno Brown had not heard much Ornette, and he was enchanted. ‘His harmonic sense was uncanny. He ended a tune with an interval, maybe a sharp four, that I could not identify. I am usually good at hearing intervals, but this was such a surprise, and so right.’
Reactions at the Opera Bar after the concert had been much more unanimous. Melbourne drummer Allan Browne said that he would remember the night and think about it for a long time to come. Denardo’s drums had already affected his own playing, though he himself had not yet been near a kit. Mark Simmonds said that it was the purest music; John Pochee that it went straight to the heart.
There are strange pockets of sound in the Concert Hall. One critic baldly stated that the basses for the most part created a dense rumble that did the music no favours. Not that he could not understand it, nor that the acoustics where he sat had anything to do with it. I remember his instant dismissal of the Prime Time tracks on In All Languages years ago and how uninterested he was in my view. What would I know? I was not part of the rock writer clique.
Enough of that. For part of the first tune, the swift angular Jordan, the bass interplay was not entirely articulate for me. I did not mind. Half heard intrigue is not something I am averse to, but it all suddenly cleared up and I could hear every point of sound. Indeed it was like a pointillist painting in its glittering accumulations, and like a Jackson Pollock in its whirling tangles, its constant interchange of foreground and background.
The next piece began with Falanga bowing (on Steve Elphick’s bass, incidentally) the bassoon melody from the beginning of The Rite Of Spring. This was gloriously songful and passionate. When the alto took it up everyone around me seemed to levitate. Who plays a melody so beautifully? Miles Davis, Johnny Hodges, Coltrane, Pablo Casals, Harold Baker, Bernie McGann. And a few others. None more beautifully. Ornette’s sound is perhaps sweeter than it once was. Though his white saxophone looks like the creamy yellow plastic horn of old, a glance into the bell indicates that it is now a brass instrument. This exotic tune was extended seamlessly into Ornette’s Sleep Talking. Another tune was introduced by Falanga playing part of the Bach cello suite that might possibly have been written by Mrs Bach (you can hear it in the film Master and Commander as they sail into the Galapagos Islands). This also segued, if that is an adequate term, into another glorious Coleman tune, and it all seemed of a piece, emphasising the timeless universality of Ornette’s melodies – so often like some ancient folk tune you cannot identify. No one ever has. It’s Ornette.
Ornette’s fast solos were equally inspiring. Many phrases still begin with that rising, ecstatic cry, which sets the rhythm instruments buzzing and flying, then he flies himself, running irresistibly with the rhythm, floating across it, jabbing and jumping and spilling bright ingenious high-speed catches and tangles. Characteristically he plays a quarter tone sharp, giving the odd impression that the whole band is tuned in quarter tones. It was exhilarating to hear those whizzing upward runs and glissandi played with an even brighter and broader sound than of yore. Sound shapes, with a grain through them like the spreading bristles of a brush full of yellow paint.
As pianist Stewart Hunter put it, the trumpet was played briefly like a palate cleanser. But these brief interjections were brilliant in themselves, burbling and chiming like bells, all clear and ringing, with beautiful in-between notes. The violin was heard only once in a brief pizzicato exchange with Falanga: a hundred notes it seemed, there and gone on the instant.
At the end I thought I had heard enough but remained for the encore. Stewart Hunter once more: ‘You know I kept hoping he’d play Lonely Woman, but I knew he wouldn’t…’ And of course he did. It seems I had not heard enough after all. Some people told me they were near tears. In fact I was too.
Appropriately, I was surrounded by artists: Michael Fitzjames, Nick Zaharias, and Terence Maloon, who is the Senior Curator Of Special Special Exhibitions at the Art Gallery of NSW, and to my mind the finest art critic currently writing in Australia. When the hall stood to applaud, Michael said, ‘It would be churlish not to stand too.’ We did. I was still in my seat purely because I was overwhelmed. Terrence said, ‘I am sure he has played Lonely Woman as beautifully as that, and just as sure that he has never played it more beautifully.’ He also said, ‘It was easy to think sometimes that the players were doing their own thing, but it soon became apparent that everyone was tuned in to the whole.’
I should say that I was pleased to hear the electric basses. They gave point and contrast. I had heard the breathtaking interplay of two double basses on the new disc Sound Grammar, so here was something else again. If Moffett’s gobbling, panging funky figures (sometimes he sounded like the bass that plays at the beginning and throughout Seinfeld) seemed at times more in empathy with Denardo’s drums than anything else, his textures created another level.
I told Steve Elphick how beautiful his bass had sounded, and he said, ‘It was a triumph of doing your own thing. A standing ovation for Ornette Coleman here in Australia!’