Tuesday, January 12, 2010

Ornette Coleman - The Shape of Jazz to Come

1959 Download

2 comments:

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  2. Thanx, this is almost the only old jazz classic I have not found. Oh! Maybe you've got 'Live At Carnegie Hall'with 'Sing Sing Sing' by Benny Goodman?

    Fine music, though scacely as revolutionary as it seemed to the old men who wrote 'Downbeat' at the time.
    This is still well within the parameters of Bop, though the white plastic alto sax of Coleman tends to blur keys a bit, as does his lack of music theory and formal harmonic grounding.( He himself stated that he originally thought his instrument was in some other key. Happens to us all. ) Interesting to note how Coltrane and others managed to keep the piano wthout losing the 'free' feeling of the music. Power chords, ect: a more influential approach, as the years have shown.
    McClintic Sphere, a character in 'V.' by Thomas Pynchon, is loosely based on Ornette.
    A more striking departure from jazz-as-it-was is George Russell's 'The Outer View' and subsequent early '60s releases. He was a trained musician and, like Bach, Mozart, Charlie Parker,..., was able to exploit harmony as a tool, rather than feeling trapped by its intricacies.
    Carl

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