ALL THAT JAZZ…

I have to say it – I love jazz. Of course, I may have a broader definition for what I label “jazz” than most folks do, but nevertheless I feel comfortable using the word “love” when referring to it. For me, jazz is music where I don’t know what is going to happen next. With most popular music, you can hear a few bars and basically know what’s coming for the next three to three and a half minutes, but with jazz anything goes. It is the element of surprise, music that sort of sneaks up on me, which I enjoy so much. A few examples of this would include Balinese gamelan, the Moroccan Jajouka musicians, Tibetan chanting and horns, the bells on the church behind my house, Robert Fripp when no one is singing, Phillip Glass when he’s feeling saucy, fire circle drumming, and all forms of hard bop, free jazz and the like.

However, don’t EVER put the word “smooth” in front of the word “jazz” in my presence. If it’s smooth, it ain’t jazz. Baby food is smooth, diarrhea is smooth, an elevator ride is smooth—Jazz is not.

I once postulated that all jazz could by put on a scale, ranging between “A blender full of Howler Monkeys” and “A bagpipe made out of live cats.” Though there are many who would disagree with my assertions, I just want to be clear what I mean when I use the word jazz. That being said…

Yesterday, my partner and I took a crazy spontaneous road trip to Chicago to see Ornette Coleman play at the Chicago Symphony Center. The twelve hour round-trip car ride not withstanding, it was more fantastic than I can possibly put into words. Ornette Coleman is one of my top five favorite jazz musicians of all time and the other four are already dead. Ornette is almost 75 years old and rarely tours, so we figured if we were going to see him we’d be wise to do so now.

My partner heard about the concert Wednesday night on one of the very few jazz shows offered on local public radio. (No, there is NOT a jazz station in this city. The other day when I contributed to the local classical public radio station, the attendant asked me why I was a listener – I told her, honestly, that it was because there were no jazz stations.) A jazz drummer we know had called in to ask the DJ to announce the show since most folks in our city probably hadn’t heard about it yet. My partner was fortunate enough to hear this announcement, and without mentioning it to me (to avoid disappointment if the show was sold out), he went on-line to see if tickets were still available.

There were exactly eight tickets left when he visited the web site for the Chicago Symphony, and all of them were in the upper balcony. It’s not as though there really is any such thing as a “bad seat” in a place like that, but he had a feeling that he could do better. The next morning, he called Chicago to see if there had been any cancellations, and to our great happiness, they had two tickets in the third row.

We were so close to the stage that we couldn’t see Ornette’s shoes. He played with two upright bassists and a fantastic drummer. One bassist, a graduate from Berklee College, played most of the time with a bow, while the other one played by plucking the bass. The drummer, Denardo Coleman (Ornette’s son), has been playing with his father for more than thirty years, recording their first album together when Denardo was only ten years old.

How do I describe it? Unless you’re familiar with free jazz, there perhaps just isn’t anything short of the experience of hearing it which would adequately paint an accurate aural picture of it. It is, on one hand, tight, rehearsed and perfectly timed between the musicians, while on the other hand it is free and spontaneous. Jazz is the only form of music in which one can hear the same song a hundred times and it never sounds the same twice.

I have also always thought of Ornette Coleman as a saxophone player, but last night he not only played the sax, but the trumpet and violin as well. I’m not certain yet if he has recorded albums playing the violin, but I intend to find out. It was amazing – I’ve never heard sounds like that come out of a violin but I would certainly like to again.

For two and a half hours, we experienced what my partner referred to as “wordless bliss.” Though the printed program stated the “program will be announced from stage,” it never was. Instead, the musicians quietly walked on stage and gave us a pure non-verbal stream of completely surprising music.

For my partner, it was a religious experience – we had to wait about a half an hour until we felt that we had “come down” enough from the show to begin the six hour drive back home. My partner was ready to sell all of our possessions and follow Ornette Coleman around the country, our own small rendition of the hoards of people who used to follow the Grateful Dead. Since Ornette rarely tours, I pointed out that that would probably amount to us spending a lot of time parked outside of his house bugging him to play out again, and that might be a little creepy.

Ornette Coleman was born in 1930 in Ft. Worth, Texas. He taught himself to play the sax and read music by the age of fourteen and moved to Los Angeles in the 1950’s. His completely different style of music was not at first widely accepted, but thankfully for all of the people who have come to love what he does, he persisted despite the lack of immediate audience and critical understanding.

It was a different kind of jazz, freed from traditional conventions of harmony, rhythm and melody. Often referred to as free jazz, Coleman followed his own philosophy of music (and ultimately of life) which he called Harmolodics. In the early 1970’s, he traveled to Morocco and Nigeria, playing with local musicians from these areas, and began to incorporate the rhythmic and melodic complexities of their music into his own style and theory. He also wrote the first Harmolodic ballet in the 1990’s (Architecture in Motion) and a symphonic work (Skies of America) which debuted in 1997 at the Lincoln Center Festival in New York. He has received many honorary degrees from several prestigious universities for his contributions to musical advancement, was the recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship Award, and was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1997.

Amidst his other projects in the 90’s, he recorded the soundtrack for Naked Lunch, for which I will be forever grateful. This was the first introduction that I had to Ornette Coleman’s music, and I probably listened to it more than five hundred times the first year that I owned it. I kept searching for music to listen to while writing, and for the most part was unsuccessful. I had a Charlie Parker album (an artist recommended to me by Jack Karouac in On the Road) and two Steroid Maximus albums. Naked Lunch was one of my favorite films, and while watching it one day I said that’s it! That’s the music I keep wanting to hear.

And so I did. Over and over and over. No, I never grew tired of it – I still listen to it often today. Fortunately, once I discovered the first album, I found that there was an entire musical library to choose from which incorporated the sounds I was so fond of hearing. At this point, I’m not even sure how many Ornette Coleman albums I have (most of them are on vinyl), but I am certain of my gratitude for his prodigious recording history. So far, I have yet to hear anything from Mr. Coleman that I don’t just love – if my life was a movie, I would want him to write the soundtrack.

Last night was fantastic. As much as I enjoy the recorded music that I can hear at my leisure whenever I choose, it is a different experience to hear that music played live, RIGHT THERE in front of me. Though the spontaneity of jazz comes through on a recording, it is not the same as being there when the spontaneity is actually happening.

For me, it comes back to the question I’ve asked myself several times in regards to the nature of art... Is art the product of creativity, or is it the act of creation itself? To me, the answer is “yes.” However, the product is shelf-stable, so to speak, where as the act of creation itself is a novel event which only occurs in a particular moment for a finite length of time. I am very glad to have had the experience of witnessing, and in some part participating in, the artistic act which makes music like that manifest in this reality. My metaphysical hat is off to Ornette Coleman – on some immaterial plane, I still toss roses and stand in ovation at the foot of the stage.

The church bells behind my house just now started ringing, and odd occurrence for a Saturday afternoon which isn’t a high holy Catholic holiday. I think I’ll choose to see this as a sign… perhaps it’s time to dust off my old clarinet, spend the fifty cents to buy a new reed and see what kind of interesting noise I can make come out of it. As much as I enjoy listening to jazz, how fun could it be to make my own? Music so spontaneous, even I don’t know what’s going to happen next…