September 16-22, 2004

music

Flight Patterns

Ornette Coleman's inventions sound as fresh as ever.

by Nate Chinen

Early in his set at the Newport Jazz Festival last month, Ornette Coleman played a burst of keening alto saxophone cries that sent seagulls squawking in circles overhead. It wasn't their first such display of the weekend, but something about it rang wondrously strange. Coleman, a wiry figure on a windswept stage, then spent a few minutes in what seemed like dialogue with the gulls, while his band churned feverishly behind him. It was as pure a jazz moment as any at the festival — and in its playful, inscrutable quality, it was quintessential Ornette.

At 74, Coleman is easily an elder statesman of jazz, and he wears the distinction with perverse pride. Since his galvanizing arrival at the dawn of the '60s, the saxophonist has made an art out of defying expectations. His early albums bore titles redolent of the wonder-fueled space age: The Shape of Jazz to Come, Change of the Century, Tomorrow is the Question! What's remarkable is just how right he was. To listen to Coleman's tight-swinging '60s quartet today is to hear ancestral echoes no less profound than those of Coltrane or Miles. No Tomorrow Land, Coleman's future really came to pass, and it still sounds a lot like the jazz of our time.

Accordingly, jazz's conservative branch has made peace with Coleman's early music, although grudgingly and with much ado. Ken Burns' Jazz presented the saxophonist almost as an idiot savant; it was only the clarifying commentary of bassist Charlie Haden that suggested a thought process behind the "beard and uncut hair." Jazz at Lincoln Center recently feted Coleman's music in noble but prettified form; by all accounts, Wynton Marsalis hit closer to home on "Dixieland Digs Ornette," an evening connecting the dots between Coleman's frontline polyphony and that of the pre-swing brass bands. (It helped, of course, that trombonist Roswell Rudd was in the band.)

Writing in this publication, I once suggested that Coleman should be considered the James Joyce of jazz — for "while his genius is incontestable and his influence nearly universal, few understand his contribution in concrete terms." I wouldn't modify the claim today, despite several more years of quizzical examination by the mainstream. The legacy of harmolodic theory, Coleman's improvisational Rosetta stone, has mostly fallen to musicians less inclined to explain it than the man himself. Among them are the Philadelphia-based rhythm team Jamaaladeen Tacuma and G. Calvin Weston, partners both in Coleman's funk-fusion Prime Time ensemble and in the bands of harmolodic torchbearer James "Blood" Ulmer. Another inheritor is saxophonist Odean Pope, whose Saxophone Choir will immediately precede Coleman's performance at the Kimmel Friday.

The most lucid demonstration of harmolodic theory is still Skies of America, the sprawling symphonic work Coleman premiered and recorded in 1972. Reissued a few years ago, the album continues to transcend its significant flaws by carving a unique and vivid space. One doesn't have to understand a thing about transposition within key signatures to appreciate the suite's expansive polytonal canvas. And while its debt to European avant-gardes is palpable, Skies is an explicitly American piece of work. That much is evident by the time Coleman makes his first instrumental incursion, nearly 20 minutes in, on a movement titled The Artists in America.

In 2000, Coleman introduced another quasi-classical work, La Statue, at the Bell Atlantic Jazz Festival. The composition was smaller in scale and scope than Skies, a suite of miniatures rather than a grandiose scrawl. But the performance's setting and subject — Coleman's piece paid tribute to the Statue of Liberty, which was visible from the folding chairs at Battery Park — lent more than a touch of grandeur to the occasion. One year later and just a few blocks away, events would transpire that, in retrospect, now bathe La Statue in yet more portentous hues.

Coleman's most recent performances have underscored his most introspective qualities, owing perhaps to the advancing years. At Carnegie Hall in 2003, he unveiled a new quartet featuring dual bassists Tony Falanga and Greg Cohen, along with son Denardo Coleman on drums. They played an hour and a half's worth of collective improvisation, blistering at times but always deeply empathetic and imbued with internal logic. The same group returned to the same hall this year, but this time they played discrete songs — with beginnings, endings and titles, the latter of which were even printed in a corresponding (but poorly calibrated) program insert. The resulting performance was less revelatory, but the band was leaner, sharper and more granular with the details. They ended more than one song with a coordinated snap, as if the four musicians were in a car that had come abruptly to a halt.

At Newport, the quartet covered the same ground again, although its set was simultaneously more inward-searching and freer than at Carnegie Hall. They revisited "Air Raid," one of Coleman's stronger new pieces, and delighted the faithful again by encoring with the plaintive classic "Lonely Woman." A few times during the set, Coleman shed his saxophone to issue brief, bracing statements on violin and trumpet. At other times his alto lines brushed up against the arco lines played high up on the bridge of Falanga's upright bass. But it was while the gulls wheeled above that I recalled a line of Cohen's, during a brief phone conversation last year. At the time, the band was in Coleman's uptown studio taping new material, but there were no tangible plans for a record release. "And I don't ask," mused the bassist. "Ornette works in mysterious ways."

Fri., Sept. 17, 8 p.m., $29-$70, Kimmel Center, 300 S. Broad St., 215-893-1999.