Seeing Ornette Coleman is serious business.
So, it was that last Friday I boarded a budget shuttlebus from downtown Washington and gladly undertook what developed into a nearly six-hour trek during Friday night rush hour into the heart of Midtown Manhattan. Traffic was so dense that our driver was warned to stay away from the absurdly convenient Lincoln Tunnel and to instead take the ludicrously far-off Holland Tunnel into the city. With nary a second to spare I met my friend from South Carolina just outside Penn Station, and we sped uptown to meet Zingzing, stow our bags in his office, grab a sandwich from a nearby deli, and hustle back down to Times Square so we could find the small nondescript venue tucked away from the garish lights of the world's most visually obnoxious neighborhood.
And there he was, on the stage at Town Hall. Ornette Coleman, 78 years old and still an inspired and inspiring man. He was dressed head to toe in green plaid (well, okay, the head was actually in a gray sportscap), and the minute he put the plastic horn in his mouth the soaring alto tone carried the house away.
It was tremendous. It was unforgettable. Ornette, his drumming son Denardo, and two bassists ran an odyssey through the material on his Pulitzer Prize-winning Sound Grammar, as well as a number of the classics: a bluesy, almost sleazy rendition of his Monk-ish "Turnaround;" "Theme from a Symphony," the opening track of Prime Time's debut Dancing in Your Head; and a uniquely rhythmic setting of the prelude from Bach's Suite for Cello No. 1. The encore of "Lonely Woman" completely did me in, of course. There were oddities about the set — electric bassist Al MacDowell could drown out some of Coleman's subtler passages, and Denardo Coleman on drums may also have been a bit ostentatious — but I didn't care. I was seeing Ornette Coleman. It was a dream come true: here was the most significant voice in jazz, indeed in much experimental music, since Charlie Parker died, and I was watching him work.
When "Lonely Woman" died away and the quartet at last walked offstage (my cellphone camera following them off), we were all ecstatic, clambering down the balcony stairs chattering to each other about what we just saw. "Man! That drummer was amazing! What was up with the bass player and the bow? Ohhh, I'm so glad he played 'Lonely Woman'! What was that one really famous classical one?"
Article comments
1 - scott
Great story!
2 - Pico
Wait a minute, you met....zingzing? Holy shit, what an evening!
All joking aside, that whole thing getting to catch Ornette perform and rubbing elbows with the big boys of jazz journalism sounds like a pretty damn cool experience in my book.
3 - zingzing
pico,
meeting me is something you never forget. unless you drink so much that you forget everything. which happens all the time. or more frequently than it should. mike, apparently, doesn't remember me peeing on his leg. which was a lot of fun.
it was an interesting evening. after the concert we went down to some club in the east village and saw some more jazz, of a decidedly trad nature, with ping-pong and pool going on all around us. there was a plethora of barely-clothed women and vomiting into sinks. AT A JAZZ CLUB. ahh, new york.
4 - Michael J. West
Ahh, yes. The barely clothed women and the vomit-filled sink at Fat Cat were a nice little bonus.
Pico, I've actually known zingzing since we were 6. We've been music-geeking together since high school, drinking together since college, and generally making asses of ourselves in large metropolises all across this great nation of ours.
5 - zingzing
to a quarter century together! raise your tee-ball bats high! higher, mike! swing at the ball, not the tee! for fuck's sake, you little shit, figure it out!
6 - Pico
I dunno zing, maybe Mike didn't notice you because he was too busy peeing down his leg himself when he met Gary Giddens ;&)