Ornette Coleman’s Sound Grammar
Dan Alford
2007-06-27
The story goes like this: the Pulitzer Prize committee had a list of nearly 150 nominees in the music category. In the past, “music” was defined as classical, and always as the score. But this time, someone raised the topic of Ornette Coleman’s 2006 release, his first new release in a decade, Sound Grammar, a live recording of a 2005 show in Ludwigshafen, Germany, featuring his son Denardo Coleman on drums and the double double-bass attack of Tony Falanga (bowed) and Greg Cohen (plucked). The 77 year old groundbreaker, father of free jazz and musical genius was not even on the list, but someone went out to get the album, and after listening, the committee nominated Coleman and awarded him the prize. It is the first time a jazz piece has won, the first time a recording has won, and certainly the first time an improvisation has won the award, which is admittedly quite a bit more prestigious in literary circles than musical ones. Nevertheless, it is an event worthy of notice, more notice than it initially garnered; the rules have changed.
What is so special about this album that is caused the award’s panelists to buck the system so completely and improvise a new set of guidelines? Probably just that mode of thinking: improvisation. It’s the one thing that ties the loose and varied world of jazz together, and there is no greater improviser than Ornette Coleman. His whole public identity is based on the very notion of improv. But there is something else about Sound Grammar; it feels a bit like a stirring speech, orated at just the right moment, in just the right context, to give a sense of where we’ve been and where music is going. In the same way that the stunning Thelonious Monk Quartet with John Coltrane at Carnegie Hall, that recently discovered gift from the past, seems to encapsulate and epitomize a whole era, Sound Grammar speaks of the past half century of jazz at a time when the second generation of jazz greats is becoming fewer and fewer, and the third generation is well into middle age. Which is not to say that the album is pensive, nostalgic or even retrospective. Far from it; Sound Grammar is nothing but fire.
The opening track, “Jordan”, just feels like Ornette, with blowing and calling over a speedy, almost harried rhythm. An incredible bass duet of bowing and plucking is tucked in the middle, and it’s like crossing the river to new territory when Ornette rises from nowhere with the theme, calling the song to a close with dramatic precision. It’s both a declaration of identity and character, and a setting of (high) standards- yes, they can go there, and yes, they can do it at a moment’s notice, so let’s get that out of the way and see where else the pathways can lead. It’s the kind of playing that another group might save for a set closer, but these gentlemen lay it right out there without any hesitation.
From this point on, the quartet covers a range a moods and tones, all marked with a distinctive character drawn partially from the instrumentation and partially from the group’s namesake. “Sleep Talking” moves at an odd time signature, with the drums and basses plod at different paces, the effect being a slow, awkward lurch. Ornette’s playing in this context is plaintive and echoes of the blues knock around inside his voice, especially early in the second half of the song. “Turnaround,” in turn, has a theme that glances toward NOLA and its marching saints, and “Matador” is festive and playful, with a little mariachi somewhere in the background. But like so much of the music on the album, the influences are diffuse and linger only at the back of the tongue- perceptible, but you couldn’t distill it or dissect it because you would destroy it in the process. Plus, this band is willing, even eager, to drop an idea and run down side streets and tangents, as it does here in the flourishes before the second, more percussive bass duel on the recording.
“Waiting For You” moves into darker territory. A weightiness underscores the delicate shadowing of saxophone and bowed bass, a featured element of the whole performance rendered particularly well here. As a compliment it’s not jovial or teasing as much as aching, strained, lonely, all of which is forgotten in the lively rise at the end of the song. “Call to Duty” takes the same heady approach but paints with flashier colors and thicker strokes. Quick references form in the midst of Ornette’s deluge of notes, rains falling on an already stormy sea. The sax man falls away, resurfacing with a trumpet for a bright, brief moment, and returns again on alto with a strength and direction that rockets through the center of wilder and wilder drumming.
The album finds an apex with the lyrical beauty of “Only Once” as it flutters and lifts and spreads, like a meditation on a place, or a person. It glows, entrancing, proud and strong. Capping off Sound Grammar is the set closing “Song X,” the studio recording from the mid-80s featuring Pat Metheny. This version is all fire at the outset, each player stabbing at higher and higher heights before the whole movement is swallowed in a surging cataract of bass. If anything, the music grows more protean, crashing and tumbling into the only true drums solo, and Ornette comes out of the madness sizzling on violin, leading Falanga into a disorienting swirl of sound, as weird and expressive of a frayed consciousness as any remnant of psychedelia. And just like that, it’s over. The crowd stomps and claps in that unified, fervent way you just don’t hear any more; the way the crowd cheers at the end of Neil Young’s recent archival release from 1971, Live at Massey Hall; like no one has ever heard anything like that before; like there is nothing else anyone can do with the pent up excitement and energy.
So where are left at the end of Sound Grammar? We’re left with that title of course; we’re left with an overview of the history of jazz, the various elements that have given voice what we inherently know as jazz, albeit seen through one man’s (and his partners’) unique vision. It’s sound grammar, the tools we use to speak the language of jazz, of music. It’s sound syntax, how the ideas actually express themselves, how we hear and understand them. It’s knowing some history, but that is too academic a term; it’s knowing some roots, having a sense of where they stretch, where they lead to, what they support, even if they’re mostly buried, hidden from sight. Sound Grammar pulls away a bit of the earth, takes some shavings to flavor the brew and makes its own concoction- a profound document really.
And yet, we are people of shows, and in the end, it’s just a show right? It’s concert recording of the progenitor of free jazz nearly fifty years after his career began, an image of a night when everything could have been incredibly different, an image of a gig that could never truly be duplicated. Just how much intentionality can you ascribe to such a thing anyway? Fans of Ornette Coleman will tell you that such ferocity and nimble natured playing are par for the course, and something as simple and unavoidable as years both allows and necessitates that a lifetime’s worth of sound and music and experience will filter through in a performance. But to take that image, just about sixty minutes of music, and understand all that lives behind it, as well the vibrancy of its present(ce), is to understand that it is more than just a show. It is a statement, the first statement in ten years, from one of the elder statesmen of America’s musical heritage, a statement to be uttered and heard, about music- what is and where comes from. When Hemingway sent off the manuscript for The Old Man and the Sea, he attached a note saying, “This is the prose that I have been working for all my life that should read easily and simply and seem short and yet have all the dimensions of the visible world and the world of man’s spirit.” To choose to release this album is to say this approach, this music, is what Ornette Coleman intended. To be awarded the Pulitzer Prize in such an abnormal and dramatic way is to hear back that even America’s ivory towers understand just how important that is.
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