Ornette Coleman - 1960
Ornette Coleman rode to prominence branded as the “avant-garde”. His album titles tell the story: ‘Something Else’, ‘Tomorrow is the Question’, ‘The Shape of Jazz to Come’, ‘Change of the Century’ and ‘Free Jazz’.
But a lot of this “newness” actually predates Jazz itself as ‘Ramblin’ demonstrates.
Ornette Coleman’s language
Coleman’s music is steeped in the blues; not just the blues but the early country blues of musicians like Blind Lemon Jefferson (a fellow Texan) and Robert Johnson. After his first album, Coleman rarely played with fixed intonation instruments like pianos. This let him explore the hollers, slides and quarter tones prominent in early blues.
Blind Lemon Jefferson
Ornette Coleman
The example above shows how one of Ornette Coleman’s signature phrases is rooted in early blues. Musicologist call the phrase a “Tumbling Strain” or “The Violent Howl”.
“In the absence of Western tonal harmony, quartile melodic patterning has spawned the bulk of melodic activity from the dawn of time and the four corners of the world.” (Groves)
This reversion to an older “folk song” language is fundamental to the “Collective Forms” (Link) developing at this time. Albert Ayler is a good example.
Ornette Coleman’s Structure
The similarities between rural blues and Coleman’s music does not end with the language. Ornette Coleman also managed to find a way to incorporate the structure of early blues:
Rural prewar blues often had a very elastic structure. One chorus might have 12 bars while the next might have 10, 14 or 15 bars.
This example is Crossroads by Robert Johnson. When fallowing along with the sketch, try and put the emphasis on the 2nd and 4th beats of the bar. The structure is basically 12 bars but Johnson adds bars or partial bars (marked as 4a, 4b, 12a and so on). The sketch begins after a 4 bar intro.
Coleman had a brilliant solution to how to have this structural flexibility in a group setting. It’s what we might call a “Motivic Stucture”. A motif is a thematic unit that runs through a piece. Any player could begin the motif at any time to signal to the band what was coming next. ‘Ramblin’ has three motifs. Notice how they point to the chord changes.
I included links to Ornette’s original and Paul Bley’s piano version.
