Ornette Coleman

The Never, Neverland....

Human society fascinates me and awes me and fills me with grief and joy; I just can’t find my place to plug into it.

- Connie Converse

I recently heard Connie Converse’s song Talkin' Like You (Two Tall Mountains). The first three lines read like this:

In between two tall mountains, there's a place they call lonesome.
Don't see why they call it lonesome.
I'm never lonesome when I go there.

This made me think of Ornette Coleman’s album Skies of America. Not the music, of course, but the idea of a place - an imaginary place created in our minds, like a kind of Neverland. It also made me realize Ornette Coleman and Sun Ra shared similar ideas of a “place” and created musical philosophies to express them. In Coleman’s world, that place was the sky, expressed through the prism of Harmolodics. In Sun Ra’s world, it was space, expressed through the prism of Astro-black mythology.

Matthew Rivera is the host of Hot Club of New York, a music appreciation group that preserves and presents classic jazz on 78rpm records. The Hot Club meets every Monday night at the Café Bohemia in Greenwich Village and, luckily for me, also via Zoom. He recently said:

Jazz is not an abstract music just like Pollock and Krasner were not abstract painters. Pollock painted about the censorship of the Cold War; he danced around the oppressors to say exactly what they were afraid art was capable of saying, which is what the jazz musicians he was listening to had already done. Jazz musicians danced around power to create something seemingly nonsensical to the unhip, but explicitly communicative to its righteous audience.

I think his idea that when facing a reality of power and oppression, musicians create “something seemingly nonsensical” is particularly subtle and astute. In this way, I contend that Coleman, and to a larger degree Sun Ra, created their seemingly nonsensical places or worlds to act as shields against the cruel and politically tense world they felt around them.

On this week's journey down that Big River called Jazz, we’ll try to understand a little about these strange and beautifully animated worlds.

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I asked a friend and jazz mentor of mine what he thought about Ornette Coleman’s music. He responded, “For me, Ornette is a genius, however one that I’m not always fond of.” I have to admit, I feel the same way; however, I have a deep appreciation for his artistic fervor.

My favorite Ornette Coleman album is the soundtrack to David Cronenberg’s 1991 film Naked Lunch.

Perhaps an odd choice, but I like Coleman’s playing within the orchestral environment. For example, I like Coleman’s alto sax over the orchestration on Howard Shore’s composition Centipede:

After hearing Naked Lunch I listened to Coleman’s Skies of America, recorded nearly twenty years earlier at Abbey Road Studio in London in April 1972. Skies of America may be strange and brooding, but it is formidable.

After a successful performance at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1971, George Wein brought the Ornette Coleman Quartet to Europe. The last concert of that tour was in Cascais, Portugal, after which bassist Charlie Haden was sent to prison for dedicating his Song for Che to “the black liberation movements in Mozambique, Angola, and Guinea-Bissau.” You can read more about that here:

Liberation Music Orchestra

Following this concert, arrangements were made back in London with conductor David Measham and the London Symphony Orchestra for Coleman to record his first orchestral symphonic work. Because of his troubles in Portugal, Haden was unable to join Coleman for the Skies of America session. But it didn’t matter anyway, the British musicians' union wouldn’t allow Coleman to use his quartet to play on the record. Regardless of the limitations the union and CBS Records placed on Coleman’s symphony, I find this compelling music a nice mix of beauty with the abstract. It is also patient music - Coleman’s first alto solo isn’t until halfway through the first side.

From Skies of America, here is the wonderful Coleman composition, All of My Life:

To my untrained musical ear, Skies of America sounds like Schoenberg’s twelve-tone music or something by Stockhausen. At the end of the day, is it all that different than Arnold Schoenberg’s first large ensemble twelve-tone composition Variations for Orchestra? Furthermore, Schoenberg’s twelve-tone system gave equal importance to every degree of the chromatic scale, meaning essentially it was about equality.

Equality was very dear to Coleman, who grew up in the 1930s in Fort Worth, Texas, which struggled with segregation and Jim Crow laws. Later, after he moved to Los Angeles to pursue his music career, the jazz fraternity put him down as harmonically incompetent - not surprising since he was developing the most radical innovation jazz had yet experienced, a revolution about to dethrone harmony. Interestingly, the first song on his 1958 debut album Something Else!!!! is called Invisible, clearly an indication of how Coleman was feeling in LA.

Fourteen years later and well after he had shaken up the jazz community, Coleman recorded Skies of America. When asked about the significance of his title Skies of America, he recalls:

Sometimes the sun is shining and beautiful on one side of the street, and across the street, just maybe three feet apart, there’d be big balls of hail and thunderstorms, and that reminded me of something that happened with people. In America you see them all enjoying themselves and the next moment they’re all fighting. They’re the same way as the elements. When I titled that piece, it was to let me see if I could describe the beauty, and not have it be radical or any territory. In other words, the sky has no territory; only the land has territory. I was trying to describe something that has no territory.

It is here that Coleman shares with us how the sky represents his “place”. Coleman called the musical expression of this place Harmolodics, a philosophy he would go on to develop after Skies of America.

According to John Litweiler, Coleman first publicly refers to his Harmolodics in the liner notes of Skies of America:

Skies of America is a collection of compositions and the orchestration for a symphony orchestra based on a theory book called The Harmolodic Theory which uses melody, harmony, and the instrumentation of movement of forms…. The writing is applied to harmolodic modulation meaning to modulate in a range without changing keys.

I don’t think Coleman ever made Harmolodics entirely clear. Apparently, it involves supreme equality among all band members, where his music allows musicians a special kind of freedom to experience and project their feelings. Perhaps the best way to think about this philosophy is to listen to the same song played twice.

In July 1996 Coleman recorded two interesting albums: Sound Museum: Hidden Man and Sound Museum: Three Women. They were both quartet albums; however, the quartet now features Geri Allen’s piano rather than Don Cherry’s trumpet. The bassist is Charnett Moffett and on drums is Coleman’s son Denardo Coleman. Both albums were recorded during the same session at Coleman’s Harmolodic Studios in Harlem, New York City.

In the liner notes Coleman states: “Applied harmolodics will allow equal relationship to any information where an answer or a concept is an opinion.” I’m not sure what that means, but the freedom and equality of the musicians in this music is refreshing, especially in a small group setting like a quartet. For comparison, I find Coleman’s Prime Time recordings often had too many musicians playing at once, making the interaction between them difficult to appreciate.

Here is Mod Job from Sound Museum: Hidden Man (go to 45:18):

Now here’s the same song played again from Sound Museum: Three Women (go to 48:10):

The result of these two takes allows for examination of what harmolodics can offer. If this is Harmolodics, then I can start to understand the nature of Coleman's place and therefore step closer to his skies of America.

Finally, one of the songs in Skies of America is called Place in Space - perhaps a direct nod to the myth and music of Sun Ra, who I think highly influenced Coleman’s concept of the skies of America.

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In the fall of 1971, Sun Ra was invited to lecture at the University of California at Berkeley’s newly opened Department of Afro-American Studies. The name of the course was The Black Man and the Cosmos. You can listen to his surviving lectures here.

During Sun Ra’s time in California, film producer Jim Newman approached him to make the movie Space Is the Place, a vehicle for Sun Ra’s Astro-black mythology. This scene from the movie tells us a lot about Sun Ra’s “place” - his strange and animated Space world:

This clip ends with the uncomparable June Tyson singing, “We’re living in the Space Age.”

Sun Ra added Tyson to his Arkestra in 1969, she was the band’s first female member. Before long, Tyson became Sun Ra’s muse and mouthpiece. If you want to understand Sun Ra’s Astro-black mythology, just listen to Jun Tyson. For example, Somebody Else’s World is a great place to start:

Somebody else's idea of somebody else's world
Is not my idea of things as they are
Somebody else's idea of things to come
Need not be the only way
To vision the future

What seems to be, need not be
What need, had to be
For what was is only because of
An adopted source of things
Some chosen source as was
Need not be the only pattern
To build a world on

Also, in Outer Spaceways Incorporated she asks, “If you find earth boring - just the same old same thing. Come on and sign up with Outer Spaceways Incorporated”:

In all these lyrics, Sun Ra is inviting us to look for the lost horizon and find our Cosmo Shangri-La.

Here’s one more for the road. Neverland is a fictional island featured in the works of J. M. Barrie. It’s that imaginary faraway place where Peter Pan, Tinker Bell, Captain Hook, and the Lost Boys live. Walt Disney's 1953 Peter Pan suggests Neverland is located in outer space, adding a "star" to Peter's directions: "second star to the right, and straight on till morning.”

Mary Martin sang Betty Comden, Adolph Green, and Jule Styne’s Never Never Land in the 1954 Broadway production of Peter Pan, which was revived in 1979 with Sandy Duncan playing Peter Pan. It was most likely this revival that inspired Sun Ra to introduce the song to the Arkestra’s book in 1980:

The idea of Neverland fits right into Sun Ra's Astro-black mythology - where Space is the Place.

The last three lines of Converse’s song Talkin' Like You (Two Tall Mountains) read like this:

In between two tall mountains, there's a place they call lonesome.
Don't see why they call it lonesome.
I'm never lonesome now I live there.

At the end of the song, that place between the two tall mountains is no longer a destination. It is now home. It is the Skies of America. It is Space. It’s where life is eternal and evergreen - a place called Never, Neverland.

Next week on that Big River called Jazz we’ll dig our paddles into the waters of the late and great pianist Geri Allen.

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Until then, keep on walking….