オーネットコールマン Ornette Coleman
(1930年3月19日-)
アメリカのサクスホーン奏者および作曲家。 テキサスのフォート・ワース生まれ。
60年代のフリージャズ運動の主要な改革者の一人。
Ornette Coleman
From Wikipedia, the
free encyclopedia
Ornette Coleman (born March 19, 1930) is an American saxophonist and
composer. He was one of the major innovators of the free jazz movement
of the 1960s.
Coleman was born and raised in Fort Worth, Texas, where he began
performing R&B and bebop initially on tenor saxophone. He later
switched to alto, which has remained his primary instrument. Coleman's
timbre is perhaps one of the most easily recognized in jazz: his
keening, crying sound draws heavily on blues music. Part of the
uniqueness of his sound came from his use of a plastic saxophone on his
classic early recordings (Coleman claimed that it sounded drier,
without the pinging sound of metal), though in more recent years he has
played a metal saxophone.
[Early career]
Coleman moved to Los Angeles in the early 1950s. He worked at various
jobs, including as an elevator operator, while pursuing his musical
career.
Even from the beginning of Coleman's career, his music and playing
were, in many ways rather unorthodox: Coleman was more concerned with
relative pitch than with "proper" equal temperament; his sense of
harmony and chord progression are not as rigid as most swing music or
bebop performers', and were easily changed and often implied. Many Los
Angeles jazz musicians regarded Coleman's playing as out-of-tune, and
he sometimes had difficulty finding like-minded musicians with whom to
perform. Pianist Paul Bley was an early supporter.
In 1958 Coleman led his first recording session for Something Else! The
Music of Ornette Coleman. The session also featured trumpeter Don
Cherry, drummer Billy Higgins, bassist Don Payne and Walter Norris on
piano. Norris was sympathetic to Coleman's ideas, but has been
criticised for not quite grasping them (though, in fairness, it must be
noted that few grasped Coleman's ideas this early on), and further, a
piano tied Coleman to equal temperament.
[The Shape of Jazz to Come]
1959 found Coleman very busy: He abandoned the piano entirely for
Tomorrow is the Question! a quartet featuring Shelly Manne on drums.
Coleman encountered double bassist Charlie Haden – perhaps his most
important collaborator – and formed a regular group with him, Cherry,
and Higgins. They were an unlikely-looking fellowship – Coleman with
his plastic alto saxophone, Cherry playing the pint-sized pocket
trumpet, Haden honing his technique via his Missouri family's hillbilly
band. This quartet recorded The Shape of Jazz to Come in 1959, with
Atlantic Records, who had signed Coleman to a multi-album contract.
The Shape of Jazz to Come was, according to critic Steve Huey, “a
watershed event in the genesis of avant-garde jazz, profoundly steering
its future course and throwing down a gauntlet that some still haven't
come to grips with.” While definitely – if somewhat loosely –
blues-based and often quite melodic, the album's songs were
harmonically unusual and unpredictable. Some musicians and critics saw
Coleman as talentless hack; others regarded him as a genius.
Coleman's quartet received a lengthy – and sometimes controversial –
engagement at New York City's famed Five Spot jazz club. Such notable
figures as The Modern Jazz Quartet, Leonard Bernstein and Lionel
Hampton were favorably impressed, and offered encouragement. (Hampton
was so impressed he reportedly asked to perform with the quartet;
Bernstein later helped Haden obtain a composition grant from the John
Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.) Opinion was, however, divided:
trumpeter Miles Davis famously declared Coleman was "all screwed up
inside," and Roy Eldridge stated he'd listened to Coleman drunk and
sober, but couldn't understand or enjoy his music either way.
On his best-known early recordings for the Atlantic Records, Coleman
led a piano-less quartet with Cherry on trumpet, usually Charlie Haden,
but sometimes Scott LaFaro on double bass and either Billy Higgins or
Ed Blackwell on drums. These recordings are collected in a boxed set,
Beauty is a Rare Thing.
[Free Jazz]
In 1960, Coleman recorded Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation, which
featured a double quartet, including Cherry and Freddie Hubbard on
trumpet, Eric Dolphy on bass clarinet, Haden and LaFaro on bass, and
both Higgins and Blackwell on drums. The record was recorded in stereo,
with a reed/brass/bass/drums quartet isolated in each stereo channel.
Free Jazz was, at nearly 40 minutes, the lengthiest jazz recording to
date, and was instantly one of Coleman's most controversial albums. The
music features a regular but complex pulse, one drummer playing
"straight" while the other played double-time; the thematic material is
a series of brief, dissonant fanfares; as is conventional in jazz,
there are a series of solos features for each member of the band, but
the other soloists are free to chime in as they wish, producing some
extraordinary passages of collective improvisation by the full octet.
Coleman intended “Free Jazz” simply to be the album title, but his
growing reputation placed him at the forefront of jazz innovation, and
free jazz was soon considered a new genre, though Coleman has expressed
discomfort with the term.
Among the reasons Coleman may not have entirely approved of the term
free jazz is that his music contains a considerable amount of
composition. His melodic material, although skeletal, strongly recalls
the melodies that Charlie Parker wrote over standard harmonies, and in
general the music is closer to the bebop that came before it than is
sometimes popularly imagined. (Several early tunes of his, for
instance, are clearly based on favorite bop chord-changes like "Out of
Nowhere" and "I Got Rhythm") Coleman very rarely played standards,
concentrating on his own compositions, of which there seems to be an
endless flow. There are exceptions, though, including a classic reading
(virtually a recomposition) of "Embraceable You" for Atlantic, and an
improvisation on Thelonious Monk's "Criss-Cross" recorded with Gunther
Schuller.
[1960s]
After the Atlantic period and into the early part of the 1970s,
Coleman's music became more angular and engaged fully with the jazz
avant-garde which had developed in part around Coleman's innovations.
His quartet dissolved, and Coleman formed a new trio with David Izenzon
on bass, and Charles Moffett on drums. Coleman began to extend the
sound-range of his music, introducing accompanying string players
(though far from the territory of "Parker With Strings") and playing
trumpet and violin himself; he initially had little conventional
technique, and used the instruments to make large, unrestrained
gestures. His friendship with Albert Ayler influenced Coleman's
development on trumpet and violin. (Haden would later sometimes join
this trio to form a two-bass quartet.)
Between 1965 and 1967 Coleman signed with legendary jazz record label
Blue Note Records and released a number of recordings starting with the
influential recordings of the trio At the Golden Circle Stockholm.
In 1966, Coleman was criticised for recording The Empty Foxhole, a trio
with Haden, and Coleman's son Denardo Coleman – who was ten years old.
Some regarded this as perhaps an ill-advised publicity ploy on
Coleman's part, and judged the move as a misstep. Others, however,
noted that despite his youth, Denardo had studied drumming for several
years, his technique – which, though unrefined, was respectable and
enthusiastic – owed more to pulse-oriented free jazz drummers like
Sunny Murray than to bebop drumming. Denardo has matured into a
respected musician, and has been his father's primary drummer since the
late 1970s.
Coleman formed another quartet. A number of bassists and drummers
(including Haden, Jimmy Garrison and Elvin Jones) appeared, and Dewey
Redman joined the group, usually on tenor saxophone.
He also continued to explore his interest in string textures – from the
Town Hall concert in 1962, culminating in Skies of America in 1972.
(Sometimes this had a practical value, as it facilitated his group's
appearance in the UK in 1965, where jazz musicians were under a quota
arrangement but classical performers were exempt.)
[Later career]
Later, however, Coleman, like Miles Davis before him, took to playing
with electrified instruments. Albums like Virgin Beauty and Of Human
Feelings used rock and funk rhythms, sometimes called free funk. On the
face of it, this could seem to be an adoption of the jazz fusion mode
fashionable at the time, but Ornette's first record with the group,
which later became known as Prime Time (the 1976 Dancing in Your Head),
was sufficiently different to have considerable shock value. Electric
guitars were prominent, but the music was, at heart, rather similar to
his earlier work. These performances have the same angular melodies and
simultaneous group improvisations – what Joe Zawinul referred to as
"nobody solos, everybody solos" and what Coleman calls harmolodics―and
although the nature of the pulse has altered, Coleman's own rhythmic
approach has not.
Some critics have suggested Coleman's frequent use of the
vaguely-defined term harmolodics is a musical MacGuffin: a red herring
of sorts designed to occupy critics over-focused on Coleman's sometimes
unorthodox compositional style.
Jerry Garcia played guitar on three tracks from Coleman's Virgin Beauty
(1988) - "Three Wishes," "Singing In The Shower," and "Desert Players."
Twice in 1993, Coleman joined the Grateful Dead on stage playing the
band's "The Other One," "Wharf Rat," "Stella Blue," and covering Bobby
Bland's "Turn On Your Lovelight," among others. Another unexpected
association was with guitarist Pat Metheny, with whom Coleman recorded
Song X (1985); though released under Metheny's name Coleman was
essentially co-leader (contributing all the compositions).
In 1991, Coleman played on the soundtrack for David Cronenberg's Naked
Lunch; the orchestra was conducted by Howard Shore. It is notable among
other things for including a rare sighting of Coleman playing a jazz
standard: Thelonious Monk's blues line “Misterioso.”
The mid-1990s saw a flurry of activity from Coleman: He released four
records between 1995 and 1996, and for the first time in nearly forty
years, Coleman worked regularly with piano players (either Geri Allen
or Joachim Kühn). Many critics noted that it took jazz piano nearly
that long to catch up with Coleman's innovations.
Coleman has rarely performed on other musicians' records. Exceptions
include extensive performances on albums by Jackie McLean in 1967 (on
which Coleman played trumpet), and James Blood Ulmer in 1978, and cameo
appearances on Yoko Ono's Plastic Ono Band album (1968), Joe Henry's
Scar (2001) and Lou Reed's The Raven (2003).
In September 2006 he released a live album titled Sound Grammar with
his newest quartet (Denardo drumming and two bassists, Gregory Cohen
and Tony Falanga). This is his first album of new material in ten
years, and was recorded in Germany in 2005.
[Legacy]
Although now an elder statesman of jazz, Coleman continues to push
himself into unusual playing situations, often with much younger
musicians or musicians from radically different musical cultures, and
continues to perform regularly. An increasing number of his
compositions, while not ubiquitous, have become minor jazz standards,
including "Lonely Woman," "Peace," "Turnaround," "When Will the Blues
Leave?" "The Blessing," and "Law Years," among others. He has
influenced virtually every saxophonist of a modern disposition, and
nearly every such jazz musician, of the generation that followed him.
His songs have proven endlessly malleable: pianists such as Paul Bley
and Paul Plimley have managed to turn them to their purposes; John Zorn
recorded Spy Vs Spy (1989), an album of radical thrash-metal versions
of Coleman songs; and there have even been country-music versions of
Coleman tunes (by Richard Greene).
[Bibliography]
Selected articles:
Coleman, Ornette. Interview with Andy Hamilton. A Question of Scale The
Wire July 2005.
Jost, Ekkehard (1975). Free Jazz (Studies in Jazz Research 4).
Universal Edition.
Spellman, A. B. (1985 originally 1966). Four Lives in the Bebop
Business. Limelight. ISBN 0-87910-042-7.
[External links]
Ornette ColemanOfficial
web site
Article
on Coleman's early music
[Listening]
Ornette
Coleman tribute by Jazz at Lincoln Center