Format: Artist – Song – Album – Label, as played in sets
Wayne Shorter – Speak No Evil – Speak No Evil – Blue Note
Miles Davis Quintet – Eighty-One – ESP – Columbia
Anat Cohen – Siboney – Notes From the Village – Anzic
Bill Moring & Way Out East – Hop Blues – Spaces in Time – Owl
Brazilian Trio – Paraty – Forests – Zoho
Guillermo Klein y Los Guachos – Ninos – Carrera – Sunnyside
Helen Sung – Equipoise – Anthem For A New Day
Charles Mingus – Self Portrait in Three Colors – Mingus Ah Um – Columbia
Andy Bey – Yesterdays – Ballads, Blues & Bey – Evidence
Geri Allen, Paul Motian, Charlie Haden – Blues in Motian – Etudes – Soul Note
Ingrid Jensen – Fallin’ – Here On Earth – Justin Time
Either / Orchestra – Premonitions – The Half-Life of Desire – Accurate
Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society – Transit – Infernal Machines – New Amsterdam
Richard Galliano – Bohemia After Dark – New York Trio – Deyfus Jazz
Ernest Dawkins – United – Afro Straight – Delmark
Darrell Grant – Tight – Truth & Reconciliation – Origin
Phil Ranelin – Black on the Nu – Inspiration – Wide Hive
Jackie McClean – On the Nile – Jacknife – Blue Note
Passing of Ornette Coleman
One of the true greats, Ornette Coleman, died June 11, 2015. There are many obituaries, with a long one in the New York Times by the very good music writer Ben Ratliff. My favorite articles about Coleman are two: “Seeking The Mystical Inside the Music,” an interview with Ratliff in which Coleman reveals his focus on the essence and not the form of music, and David Yaffe’s article “The Art of the Improviser,” about Coleman’s unmistakably powerful influence on virtually every jazz icon of the 1960’s, whether they liked it or not. I think of Coleman’s arrival that Yaffe chronicles as an event like the atomic bomb – once it happened, the world was altered and everything after that referred to it in some way. (Links to articles at the foot of this post.)
I don’t have a lot to add to these pieces, as they mostly agree with my view that Coleman changed the way we hear music and expanded our notions of beauty and musical truth. For example, Iisten to “Peace” – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJULMOw69EI – and realize that this was part of the music that in 1959 was considered by many to be unlistenable. Few would say that now.
One great Coleman album that’s barely mentioned in these articles, and that stunned me as young man in the 1970’s, is “Science Fiction.” The inspired craziness and haunting songs of that session enlarged my conception of what music could be. I’m sure it opened me to many musical explorations I wouldn’t have made had I not laid on my living room floor a little drunk with my eyes closed and been transported to a world of strange and wonderful beauty I didn’t know could exist.
Since then, every time I’ve checked in with Ornette Coleman’s albums or seen him play, he’s continued to expand my view. I owe him a lot for showing me this spirit of perpetual exploration and enlargement, always reaching for new ideas and ways of hearing and being.
The good news is that because of recorded music I don’t have to miss him. Lucky me, I can summon that searching spirit to inspire me anytime I want. R.I.P., Ornette.
Seeking the Mystical Inside the Music – http://nyti.ms/1L54fDC
The Art of the Improviser – http://www.thenation.com/article/art-improviser
NYT obit – http://nyti.ms/1TgmRTu