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Tuesday, January 28, 2025

Ornette Coleman - The Jazz Musician Interview

Ornette Coleman - The Jazz Musician Interview

© Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.



Almost from its inception and throughout much of his career, many Jazz fans have found his music to be confusing and/or controversial, if not both.

In looking for a way to represent Ornette’s approach on these pages, I searched for a piece that contained his conceptualization of Jazz as explained in his own words. I think the following comes as close as any that I’ve researched in doing just that.

The interview was conducted by Quincy Troupe and appeared in the November 1981 edition of The Jazz Musician. Ornette died on June 11, 2015.

Ornette Coleman is one of the most influential musicians to emerge in the post-bebop period. The possibilities he opened up for improvised music in the late fifties and early sixties, when he scrapped the conventions of Western harmony and pitch for a conception that was both a leap into the future and a recovery of the blues past, show no signs of being exhausted, and the implications of his more recent work, involving symphonic composition, free-funk, and the "harmolodic" system, are now being worked on by a new generation of musicians, many of whom are alumni of his bands.

Born in Fort Worth, Texas, on March 9,1930, Coleman has been an enigma for many years inside and outside the music world. Loved and respected by many, he has nonetheless been maligned for his ideas and innovations, particularly in his first decade of public life. Even more than John Coltrane, Cecil Taylor, and Eric Dolphy, Coleman served as a magnet for the charges of charlatanism that raged in the free-jazz wars of the Sixties, but his formidable talents as both instrumentalist and composer have made his place in the history of instrumental music secure. Only Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, and Coltrane have had a more dramatic effect on the practice of jazz.

His conversation resembles his music in its disregard for linguistic convention and for the liberating effect it can have. A certain amount of editing has been done on the transcript, but the greatest number of conceptual knots have been left untied. Coleman understands how things harden and ultimately die of the sense people make of them (see his discussion of method below). His inventions have always tended to subvert the usual dead verities. His first classic band, a quartet with Don Cherry on trumpet, Charlie Haden on bass, and either Billy Higgins or Ed Blackwell on drums, simultaneously developed and obliterated the parameters of bop.”

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