promo_shot_ornette_010_jimmy_katz

You can take the man out of Texas but Texas is still strong in Ornette Coleman’s musical voice as he speaks from Switzerland. An extraordinary warmth and youthfulness also come down the phone and his locutions are so very Coleman it takes the breath away. It is rather like meeting Brian Wilson and hearing him talk more like Wilson than you could have hoped.

Coleman is coming to Australia at last and the excitement has spread beyond the world of jazz, where he is sometimes seen as the last of the great innovators. Earlier plans had included his playing with Aborigines in the Northern Territory, as he had done, memorably, with the Master Musicians Of Joujouka in Africa.

Texas is still in Coleman’s music but as far back as the 1950s you could hear hints of something that would later be called world music. “In that matter,” he says, “I was always trying to perfect sound with no particular name or voice. Everyone uses sound for the same reason in relation to melody. But through modulation, harmony, different intelligences, different languages, people in different places have a different kind of sound colour.

“Sound itself is free. Sound has no tonic [the keynote of a scale]. Sound cannot be classified because of a name. That concept is more alive today than ever.”

It would be hard to imagine a sweeter triumph than Coleman’s, whose first professional jobs were in a circus and an anachronistic minstrel show. Jazz musicians would walk straight off the stand when he tried to sit in on a jam. Incensed by some weird modernistic stuff he had played in an R&B band, three men waited for him outside, beat him up and smashed his tenor saxophone. When he went to the police, “The cops said, ‘What you doing with that long hair?’ And they started calling me nigger.”

Read the full story on smh.com.au

SHARE
Hash Varsani is the owner of The Jazz Directory, a network of sites related to jazz, travel and everything else he loves. He also runs a selection of jazz related sites including Jazz Club Jury, a jazz club and festival review site. Check out his Google+ Profile, to see what else he's up to...probably setting up another website from one of his many passions.

LEAVE A REPLY