Jazz Workshop: For Ornette Coleman on his 78th Birthday - Page 2

I’ve said it before, Ornette, and I’ll gladly say it again: you are the greatest and most important jazz artist alive. You redefined the whole idea of the music, kicked the doors open for a vision of jazz in which your “freedom” subsumed all aspects. Because of you there was John Coltrane, Albert Ayler, Pharoah Sanders, Archie Shepp, Anthony Braxton, Roscoe Mitchell, Henry Threadgill, James Blood Ulmer, Ronald Shannon Jackson, David S. Ware, Matthew Shipp, Greg Osby, and Myra Melford. If you lived another 78 years, the world could never repay you for the exponential musical inspiration you’ve provided it.

You’re also a mass of contradictions. You’re a sweet, gentle, soft-spoken and intellectual man whose music seems so wild, intense, ear-splitting and visceral. You’re a man of vast influence who reinvented the jazz wheel—the last person to do so—and who’s altered the musical perceptions of nearly every artist who’s come into contact with you. Yet you’re a man with few real imitators on his instrument and an artist who embodies the idea of sui generis. You’re a man whose art commands such respect that you have won a Pulitzer Prize, and a man whose art disgusted observers as erudite as Ralph Ellison.

But then again, those contradictions are a part of the reason that you are a treasure. If you embody something special about jazz--a kind of relentless adventure, a creative spirit--you also embody the complexities of existence. You know that, of course, and you've even encouraged it in yourself: nobody who titles an album Of Human Feeling can help being aware of his own complexity. It does just as much as your raw creativity to make your art compelling.

As I write this, I’m listening to the internet broadcast of WKCR-FM, the campus radio station at Columbia University; they are playing 23 solid hours of your music in an “Ornette Coleman Birthday Broadcast.” At this very moment they are playing “Open to the Public” from the 1968 Love Call album (Blue Note). Odd, that: Love Call is half of a recording session that also yielded the album New York Is Now! The latter is not your best album—it’s a moment when your unique vision seemed particularly played out and uninspired; the music I’m hearing from the former, however, is as exhilarating and powerful and unique as ever.

Article Author: Michael J. West

Michael J. West is a writer, editor, and dilettante jazz critic in Washington, D.C. In addition to BlogCritics, he writes for JazzTimes, Washington City Paper, and AllAboutJazz.com. He occasionally writes at Pop Musicology, too. He's very cute. …

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