Fire Music: The Story of Free Jazz

When Ornette Coleman introduced his adventurous approach to music, it was the jazz equivalent of the controversial premiere of Stravinsky’s The Rites of Spring. Yet, in retrospect, the emergence of the “Free Jazz” movement seems inevitable, in light of the concurrent rise of post-modernism. Soloists were liberated from strict allegiance to chords, rhythm, and melody, but the jazz audience did not necessarily follow. Tom Surgal chronicles the defining artists and music of the classic 1960s and 1970s Free Jazz era in Fire Music: The Story of Free Jazz, which opens Friday at Film Forum.

Fire Music starts with Ornette Coleman, which makes sense, even though Cecil Taylor’s first free recording predated his by two years. However, moderately adventurous contemporary listeners might find it hard to understand how Coleman’s now classic “Lonely Woman” could inspire such outrage. It is definitely plaintive, but there is a clear sense of composition and an inherent bluesiness to it.

From there, Surgal largely proceeds chronologically, covering Cecil Taylor, Eric Dolphy, Charles Mingus’s more avant-garde experiments, the founding of the Art Ensemble of Chicago and the Black Artists Group, Sam Rivers’ leadership of the loft scene, and John Coltrane’s conversion to the movement, before his untimely death. The film concludes with Sun Ra, who was leading his Arkestra long before many of the free artists came on the scene, but it is hard to follow a man who (convincingly) claimed to hail from the planet Saturn.

As a step-by-step history of free jazz (or whatever else you might prefer to call it), Fire Music covers just about all the important touchstones. Outwardly-inclined artists, like Archie Shepp, Sonny Simmons, Prince Lasha, Carla Bley, Evan Parker, and Arkestra members like Marshall Allen get to have their say in talking head segments. Of course, we would have liked to hear a little bit from dearly departed Eddie Gale, who played with Taylor and Sun Ra, before recording his radical “Ghetto Music” records for Francis Wolff at Blue Note. Figures like Andrew Hill, who played with one foot outside and one foot (or sometimes just a few toes) inside go unmentioned, but you can’t cover everyone.

However, Surgal uncritically incorporates all the rhetoric that argues free jazz is the true sound of the future that was unfairly suppressed by the Young Lions of the 1980s. Yet, the truth is free jazz now sounds just as much an expression of an era past as swing or the Hot Chicago-Style. Likewise, Marsalis and his proteges perfectly represented the tenor of their 80s heyday. The real question is defining what came next. Some remarkably gifted artists like Greg Osby and Jason Moran have tried to build on the avant-garde’s legacy, in a constructive and progressive way, but their music has yet to be codified into a school of its own. For over fifty years, free jazz exponents have proclaimed it the sound of the future, but it is older today than big band swing was when Coleman released Fee Jazz: A Collective Improvisation.

Who’s Crazy? The Ornette Coleman Trio Plays for Escaped Lunatics

As you might expect, the Living Theatre’s regular players had no trouble playing crazy. The company that premiered The Connection was no stranger to jazz soundtracks either. However, this bit of counter-cultural madness had been presumed lost for decades, only to have a copy turn up in the director’s garage. As a result, far more people have heard Ornette Coleman’s soundtrack than have seen the images he scored it to—and that is not exactly a huge subset of jazz fans. Fifty years later, a repaired print of Tom White’s Who’s Crazy (trailer here) finally screens again in New York this weekend at Anthology Film Archives.

Somewhere in Belgium (naturally enough), a busload of insane asylum inmates has escaped and taken refuge in a well-stocked farm house. If you need more narrative than that, Who’s Crazy is probably not your cup of tea. Just as the junkies in The Connection spend their time doing junkie things, the lunatics in Crazy while away the hours with acts of insanity. At one point, they resolve to put one of their less social comrades on trial, but they seem to quickly forget the idea. Eventually, the Keystone Cops will show up, giving additional meaning to the title. It is all trippy and slapsticky, but the real reason to see Who’s Crazy is Ornette Coleman’s richly distinctive soundtrack, recorded with David Izenson on bass and Charles Moffett on drums (his classic Golden Circle trio).

Frankly, some of the music improvised by Coleman’s trio swings surprisingly (and pleasantly) hard. Coleman always was on the more accessible end of the free jazz spectrum, but most of the Who’s Crazy soundtrack is especially easy to relate to. Nonetheless, his power and adventurousness remain unmistakable and readily identifiable. This is just a great Coleman session, like the soundtrack to Louis Malle’s Elevator to the Gallows was a great Miles Davis album. In fact, the Who’s Crazy recording session was documented in Dick Fontaine’s short documentary, David, Moffett, and Ornette: the Ornette Coleman Trio, adding further mystique to White’s rarely seen film with its tantalizing clips.

As a film itself, Who’s Crazy? is very much a product of its time. However, in retrospect, it seems almost like a perfect allegorical microcosm of the 1960s counter-culture. The lunatics clearly look and act unambiguously hippy-like. If White is holding a mirror up to nature, whose reflection do we think we see in the bedlam?

It is a shame Who’s Crazy disappeared for five decades, because it could have easily been programmed for revival runs alongside The Connection and Pull My Daisy. As cinema, it is deliberately ragged and a little silly, but it incorporates Coleman, Izenzon, and Moffett playing with seamless rapport, breathtaking flexibility, and dynamic virtuosity. As if that were not enough, Marianne Faithful performs Coleman’s edgy “Sadness.” Anyone who is fascinated by the relationship between jazz and cinema has to see Who’s Crazy? now that it has finally returned from the land of the lost films. Highly recommended for Ornette fans and patrons of the avant-garde, Who’s Crazy? screens this Friday, Saturday, and Sunday (3/25-3/27) at Anthology Film Archives.

Shirley Clarke’s Ornette

Ornette Coleman won the Pulitzer Prize for musical composition and performed live on Saturday Night Live.  Although neither event is covered in Shirley Clarke’s classically idiosyncratic documentary-profile, viewers still get a memorable sense of the artist and his music Ornette: Made in America (trailer here), which opens in New York this Friday at the IFC Center, as part of Milestone Films’ Project Shirley restoration and rerelease program.

Explaining Coleman’s place in the jazz world would take some doing, especially in 1985, before his late career Grammy and Pulitzer accolades finally came cascading in.  Coleman was one of the pioneers of the Free Jazz movement, whose legendary engagement at New York’s Five Spot club sharply divided the jazz world.  However, you will not find his creation story here.  Instead, Clarke’s approach to Coleman the man and the musician is deeply rooted in the then current moment, yet also rather timeless.

In the mid 80’s, the establishment (broadly defined) was just starting to understand Coleman was a force to be reckoned with.  As the film opens, the mayor of Fort Worth presents Coleman with a copy of the key to the city (the original he explains had been sent up into space or something), in the hours before the alto saxophonist-multi-instrumentalist will debut Skies of America, a major new composition integrating a symphony orchestra with his avant-garde electric combo Prime Time.  Hizzoner’s speech might strike New York hipsters as a bit corny, but his drummer-manager-son Denardo is quite pleased his father is finally being recognized. 

In fact, there is something all-encompassing and Whitmanesque about Coleman’s deeply blues-influenced music that is perfectly represented by a title like Skies of America, as well as the mayor’s patriotically Texan remarks.  Shrewdly, Clarke uses this fairly accessible work as the musical centerpiece for the film, much like Sonny Rollins’ concert premiere of Concerto for Tenor Saxophone and Orchestra dominates Robert Mugge’s Saxophone Colossus.

There was probably no documentarian better suited to Coleman’s personality and aesthetic than Shirley Clarke.  Her style of filmmaking perfectly reflects his music—fragmentary and baffling to the willfully uninitiated, but there strong compositional conception underlying it all.  Her visual sensibility might be far from infallible (a kid with an iPad could put her space age special effects to shame these days), but she demonstrates a rock solid command of Coleman’s acutely syncopated rhythms and had a keen insight into his creative milieu.

Indeed, except for perhaps Clint Eastwood, no filmmaker can equal Clarke’s position as a filmmaker whose work promotes and is informed by America’s great original art form.  The Connection, which launched Project Shirley, is a milestone (if you will) of independent filmmaking, in large measure due to Freddie Redd’s absolutely classic tunes.  Likewise, her viscerally naturalistic social issue drama, The Cool World, derives considerable power from Mal Waldron’s soundtrack (which in turn was rerecorded by Dizzy Gillespie’s combo for the official OST LP version).  There was even the non-narrative short, Bridges-Go-Round, featuring the music of Teo Macero.  Ornette is sort of a summing up of her jazz evangelism, shining a spotlight on one of the most controversial yet at the time underappreciated artists to ever set foot on the bandstand.

Time and again, Clarke alternately emphasizes Coleman’s blues roots and hardscrabble early life (even filming young actors portraying the alto saxophonist in dramatized vignettes of his formative years) and his compulsively forward looking (almost futuristic) orientation.  The fact that most of Coleman’s philosophizing makes little to no sense is hardly important.  No, he never really explains his theory of harmolodics in Ornette and she wisely never pushes him. 

The Coleman seen in Ornette matches the accounts I have personally heard from musician-friends who have had conversations with him and say it was the coolest thing ever, even though they have no idea what he said.  Any film conveying that experience is worth seeing, but Ornette has considerably more to offer.  A highly entertaining time-capsule of a jazz documentary, Ornette: Made in America is recommended for anyone who wants their ears stretched a bit when it opens this Friday (8/31) at the IFC Center.

Jazz Mavericks of the Lone Star State

Jazz Mavericks of the Lone Star State
By Dave Oliphant
University of Texas Press
978-0-292-71496-0

Clint Eastwood is fond of crediting jazz and westerns as America’s two original contributions to world culture. The place of Texas in the history of the western is undeniable. In his latest book, Jazz Mavericks of the Lone Star State, Dave Oliphant makes a case for Texas’ pride of place in jazz history as well.

When jazz listeners think Texas, they think tenor sax, specifically the lusty, honking Texas Tenor tradition, including musicians like Arnett Cobb and Illinois Jacquet. They are mentioned here, but not in great depth, because Mavericks is actually a collection of writings, many of which were written to fill in gaps in Oliphant’s previous Texan Jazz. As a result, some of the pieces, particularly the first two, can be a tad repetitive in listing names of Texan jazz musicians.

One Texas titan covered well here is Ornette Coleman, through reviews of John Litweiler’s biography and a 2004 concert, which was his first in Texas in twenty years. Oliphant recounts many of the struggles of the jazz innovators career, both celebrated and lesser known, including his tangles with the labor regulations of 1960’s Great Britain. Oliphant writes:

“the same British musicians union and the Labour Ministry that had frustrated and inspired him three years earlier declared Coleman’s achievements irrelevant, and so he had to compose Emotion Modulation in order to qualify again as a ‘concert artist.’” (p. 126)

Oliphant discusses many Texas jazz artists, but stops short of identifying a specific Texas style (apart from that of the Texas Tenor tradition). At times though, he does speculate on the effect of a Texas upbringing on an artist’s music. He describes trailblazing electric guitarist and trombonist Eddie Durham (of San Marcos) as someone who:

“grew up making his own instruments, who was a crack shot with a rifle, who, when he hunted rattlesnakes, wore his boots and looked where he was going, and who shared with his musicians all that he had learned, having grown up in a family that worked and played together.” (p. 185)

While much of Mavericks is good spirited Texan jazz boosterism, Oliphant is not afraid to mix it up a little, taking aim at Howard Reich and William Gaines, co-authors of a 2003 biography of Jelly Roll Morton. Oliphant takes particular exception to their treatment of folklorist Alan Lomax, whose Library of Congress oral history tapes of Morton formed the basis of his biography Mister Jelly Roll. Oliphant writes:

“The accusation that Lomax ‘grilled Morton about sex, mayhem, and murders’ when ‘Morton wanted to talk about music’ distorts the contents of Lomax’s book. Moreover, the authors spend a good part of their own first chapter describing the New Orleans red-light district in raunchier detail than anything offered by Mister Jelly Roll. Most of what we know about Jelly’s views on his and others’ music is to be found in Lomax’s writings, and much of this information has been silently plowed back into the prose of Reich and Gaines.” p. 165)

Of course, Lomax was from Austin. (As they say, don’t mess with Texas.) Throughout Mavericks, Oliphant shows a loyalty to Texas musicians, and indeed, the state can claim many worthy trailblazers, like Durham and Coleman. As with most collections, Mavericks is a little uneven, but it is a quick read and often quite informative.

Prized Pulitzers

It was cool to be the first to tell some Ornette Coleman fans yesterday that the alto legend had won the Pulitzer Prize for music. Despite their pleasure to see Coleman recognized for his work, they had mixed feelings that he would now be considered part of the establishment.

Frankly, Coleman will always be his own man, but it does help the Pulitzer’s reputation. The Pulitzer board’s snubbing of Duke Ellington in 1965 is a well known blot on their record. It was not until 1997 that a jazz piece was finally awarded a Pulitzer: Wynton Marsalis’ Blood on the Fields. Some press accounts of Coleman’s prize for the album Sound Grammar are calling it the first prize for jazz, categorizing Fields, as classical, which would likely draw an argument from those who performed and recorded it, including Jon Hendricks, Cassandra Wilson, Russell Gunn, and James Carter.

Regardless of what it means to the establishment, jazz fans should be happy to see the ranks of jazz Pulitzer winners double. Nekessa Mumbi Moody at the AP should get credit for writing: “Classical’s Grip Loosening on Pulitzers?” on Friday, looking fairly prescient a few days later. The Pulitzers should get credit too, for making their rules friendlier to jazz and theater composers.

The Pulitzers have also given special citations the jazz greats the last two years, as sort of make-ups for having missed the boat while they were still alive. Last year it was Monk, this year Coltrane. Ellington was belatedly acknowledged in 1999 (a year after finally recognizing George Gershwin’s music might have some staying power after all). Next year, someone should tell the Pulitzer board there was also this man named Mingus.