The alto saxophonist and composer Ornette Coleman, like Sonny Rollins one of the last truly imposing figures in jazz from a generation full of them, seldom talks about other people’s music. But then people, especially journalists, generally want to ask him about his own, and so that becomes the subject he addresses. Or half-addresses; what he’s really focused on is a set of interrelated questions about music, religion, and ontology. At times he can seem purposefully confusing or sentimental. Other times he comes across as one of the world’s killer aphorists. Depending on the issue, he flickers back and forth between belief and skepticism.
On the telephone, a few days before we met, I asked him what he would like to listen to. “Anything you want,” he said, in his fluty southern voice. “There is no bad music, only bad performances.” He finally offered a few suggestions. The music he likes is simply defined: anything that can’t be summed up in a common term; any music that is not created as part of a style. “The state of surviving in music is more like ‘what music are you playing,’ ” he said. “But music isn’t a style; it’s an idea. The idea of music, without it being a style—I don’t hear that much anymore.”
Then he went up a level. “I would like to have the same concept of ideas as how people believe in God,” he said. “To me, an idea doesn’t have any master.”
To a certain way of thinking, Coleman solved it all a long time ago. The records he made for Atlantic, with his various quartets from 1959 to 1961, are unreasonably beautiful. His music bears a tight sense of knowing itself, of natural form. Born in 1930 and raised in Fort Worth, Texas, he attained some skill at playing rhythm and blues in bars during the late 1940s and early ’50s, like any other decent saxophonist. He arrived in New York (via Los Angeles) with an original, logical sense of melody and an idea of playing with no preconceived chord changes.
His New York debut inspired a character in Thomas Pynchon’s V named McClintic Sphere, and established an unshakable reputation in serious-art circles as a kind of outsider genius. Following the initial onslaught came a short period with a trio. He then disappeared from recording in 1963 and 1964, before emerging with another trio again, followed by a fantastic quartet, from 1968 to 1972, with the tenor saxophonist Dewey Redman. Then came a period of funk-through-the-looking glass with his electric band, Prime Time.
Even in his seventies, Coleman continued to move. In recent years, before I met with him in 2006, he had been working with a new band including two bassists, Greg Cohen and Tony Falanga, and his son, Denardo Coleman, who plays his own version of rhythm—jury-rigged, rushing, often quite loud. Denardo’s drumming would probably be unthinkable in any other jazz group, and perhaps this is why his father has preferred it for so long. The quartet was playing about twenty-five concerts a year, making music that, despite the change in instrumentation, held a certain distant similarity to what he had been doing when he was thirty.
Coleman has a kind of high-end generosity; he claimed that he wouldn’t think twice about letting me go home with a piece of music he had just written, no questions asked, because he would be interested in what I might make of it. But there was some pessimism in his talk, too. He insisted that no review or article had ever helped his career. (This is hard to understand, as since the late 1970s he has received some of the most elaborate, down-on-hands-and-knees, explanations-of-method jobs in the history of jazz criticism.) He explained that most of the history of humanity had been wasted on building increasingly complicated class structures. “Life is already complete,” he said. “You can’t learn what life is. And the only way you die is if something kills you. So if life and death are already understood, what are we doing?”
On Sound Grammar, the live album he released in 2006 on his new record label of the same name, lines travel together and pull apart, following the curve of his melodies, tangling and playing in a unison that allows for discrepancies between individual sound and intonation and, sometimes, key. Like most of his other records, it sold very little and received stupendous reviews. Unlike any of his other records, it won him a Pulitzer Prize.
Unison is one of his favorite words; he puts an almost mystical significance on it, and he uses it in many different ways. “Being a human, you’re required to be in unison: upright,” he said.
Coleman draws you into the chicken-and-egg riddles that he asks himself. These questions can become the dark side of Bible class. Many of them are about what happens when you put a name on something, or when you learn some codified knowledge.
“Do you think ‘the brain’ is a good title for the brain?”
Good enough for me, I said. But clearly this wasn’t an etymology question.
“Well, whatever you think your brain is,” he persisted, “is that all there is? I doubt it. Everything that has a title has a fixed use, right? When we speak about ‘the brain,’ the brain I’m speaking about is what everyone is using to identify and learn what it is they think they like. That could be inspiration, education, whatever they call it. But the brain itself exists because it’s the motor that causes you to be the human that you are. It doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s making you any better.”
Though he is fascinated by music theory, he is suspicious of any enforced construct of thought. Standard Western harmony is the big dilemma, and particularly the fact that the notation for many instruments (including two of his three instruments—the alto saxophone and trumpet, but not the violin) must be transposed to fit the “concert key” of C in Western music.
Coleman talks about “music” with care and accuracy, but he talks about “sound” with love. He doesn’t know how we will ever properly understand the power of notes when they are bossed around by the common Western system of harmony and tuning. “When you think of a minor seventh chord—E, G, B, and D—well, E-G-B is a minor chord, and G-B-D is a major chord,” he observed. “The only note that’s causing those two chords to have a different sound is D. What blows my mind is, how can intelligence be used to deceive what something is, and still be intelligence?”
Western harmony, in other words, is one of the fixed uses that bothers him so thoroughly.
Don’t misunderstand; Coleman is not endorsing cacophony. He believes that making music is a matter of finding euphonious resolutions between different players. (And much of his music keeps referring to, if not actually staying in, a major key.) But the reason he appreciates Louis Armstrong, for example, is that he sees Armstrong as someone who improvised in a realm beyond his own knowledge. “I never heard him play a straight chord in root position for his idea,” he said. “And when he played a high note, it was the finale. It wasn’t just because it was high. In some way, he was telling stories more than improvising.”
Coleman’s first request was something by Josef Rosenblatt, the Ukrainian-born cantor who moved to New York in 1911 and became one of the city’s most popular entertainers of any kind—as well as a symbol for not selling out your convictions. (He turned down a position with the Chicago opera company but was persuaded to take a small role in Al Jolson’s film The Jazz Singer.) I brought him some recordings from 1916, and we listened to “Tikanto Shabbos,” a song from Sabbath services. Rosenblatt’s voice came booming out, strong and clear at the bottom, miraculous coloratura runs at the top.
“I was once in Chicago, about twenty-some years ago,” Coleman told me. “A young man said, ‘I’d like you to come by so I can play something for you.’ I went down to his basement and he put on Josef Rosenblatt, and I started crying like a baby. The record he had was crying, singing, and praying, all in the same breath. And none of it was crossing each other. It was all separate. I said, ‘Wait a minute. You can’t find those notes. Those are not “notes.” They don’t exist.’ ”
He listened some more. Rosenblatt was working with text, singing brilliant figures with it, then coming down on a resolving note, which is confirmed and stabilized by a pianist’s chord.
“I want to ask something,” he said. “Is the language he’s singing making the resolution? Not the melody. I mean, he’s resolving. He’s not singing a ‘melody.’ ”
It could be that he’s at least singing each little section in relation to a mode, I said.
“I think he’s singing pure spiritual,” he said. “He’s making the sound of what he’s experiencing as a human being, turning it into the quality of his voice, and what he’s singing to is what he’s singing about. We hear it as ‘how he’s singing.’ But he’s singing about something. I don’t know what it is, but it’s bad.”
I wonder how much of it is really improvised, I said. Which up-and-down melodic shapes, and in which orders, were well practiced, and which weren’t.
“Mm-hmm,” he said. “I understand what you’re saying. But it doesn’t sound like it’s going up and down; it sounds like it’s going out. Which means it’s coming from his soul.”
I told him that I liked the way music can do this: make you feel that country and ethnicity and language are finally not such great limitations, since there are always things in it that you can respond to, whoever you are.
“Yeah, me too,” he replied. “I have a tape here of myself playing with the musicians of Joujouka.” It came from his trip to the Rif Mountains of Morocco in 1973. Small parts of these recordings appeared on his album Dancing in Your Head, but the raw tapes of Coleman playing with about thirty musicians, on drums and oboelike raitas, have not yet been released. Our listening to it violated my rule for these interviews: we must listen to no music that the interviewee participated in. But any rule begins to lose relevance around Coleman. Anyway, I wanted to hear one of the tapes.
It was electrifying: a massed, buzzing sound in no determinate key, with Coleman soloing passionately over it, in his own melodic language. “What’s so amazing is that you can’t enter that by notes,” he said. “You can only be affected by how it’s making you feel, and then you play that. You can’t say, ‘I know where they are. I know what it is.’ You can only respond to how it affects you.”
The idea of people playing together, I suggested, and making their lines entwine in not-so-strictly defined phrases, is something he feels especially close to.
“Oh, I’m trying to get liberated with that every day,” he reflected. “Being a human, you cannot expose something that you’ve experienced personally and expect your environment to reward you. They don’t know that maybe you just got it naturally. I taught myself what I know, and I’ve learned to read music and write it, but that doesn’t make me Einstein, or anything.
“That’s the one thing that I’m beginning to realize, the older I get,” he continued. “For me it ain’t gonna get no better, and it ain’t gonna get worse. I have to choose where I think I am in relation to what I believe. Basically, the only thing that I believe, truly, is that there’s only two destinations: one is life, and one is death. And it seems to me that when death dies, the world is gonna be incredible.
“But let’s talk about life,” he said, cheerily. “There must be something eternal that has existed before anything any other person could see or touch or smell. I’m not talking about the sky. The quality that we call human has never not existed. I mean, we say Adam and Eve, right? But whoever found Adam and Eve? It says that they existed,” he said.
You can say they existed if you believe Genesis, I said. I found it strange that we were going in this direction.
“You mean, they may not exist?”
They may not exist.
“Do you think that your parents, if they hadn’t conceived you, you wouldn’t have existed?”
I do believe that.
“Why?”
I wouldn’t have had a physical presence.
“Oh. All right. Everything around here has a physical presence.” He gestured around the room. “But it ain’t serving nothing. All you’re doing that way is paying bills. We’re talking about a quality that has to do with the creation of form.”
I answered that even a possibility, an absence, can affect human lives.
“It’s impossible for you never to have existed at all, because when you didn’t know that you existed, you did exist. I’m sitting here speaking to you; humanly, we are alive and talking. But the quality that we’re talking about, that quality doesn’t have a beginning or end. It is never not existing. That’s what I mean. And the sad part about it—this is really strange—is that, if it wasn’t for women, there wouldn’t be no people. But who put the woman in a position to do that? Did she put herself there? That don’t make sense!”
You know that male seahorses carry the baby, I said.
“Oh, that’s cold,” he said.
When Coleman grew up in Fort Worth, he knew two saxophonists whom he talks about more than any others: Ben Martin and Red Connors. Both died young, and neither was recorded. Martin was an alto saxophonist, but it was the tenor player, Connors, who introduced Coleman to Charlie Parker.
Coleman grew up loving Parker and bebop in general. “It was the most advanced collective way of playing a melody and at the same time improvising on it,” he said. Certainly, he was highly influenced by Parker’s phrasing.
He saw Parker play in Los Angeles (which he pronounces “Los Angle-iss”) in the early 1950s. “He didn’t play any of the music that I liked that I’d heard on a record. He looked at his watch and stopped in the middle of what he was playing, stopped the band, put his horn in his case, and walked out the door. I said, ohh. I mean, I was trying to figure out what that had to do with music, you know? Basically, he had picked up a local rhythm section, and he was playing mostly standards. He mostly didn’t play any bebop.
“It taught me something,” he continued. “He knew the quality of what he could play, and he knew the audience, and he wasn’t impressed enough by the audience to do something that they didn’t know. He wasn’t going to spend any more time trying to prove that.”
We listened to “Cheryl,” a Parker quintet track from 1947. “I was drawn to the way Charlie Parker phrased his ideas,” he said. “It sounded more like he was composing, and I really loved that. Then, when I found out that the minor seventh and the major seventh was the structure of bebop music—well, it’s a sequence. It’s the art of sequences. I kind of felt, like, I gotta get out of this.”
He talks a lot about sequences. (John Coltrane, he believes, was a good saxophone player who was lost to them.) Regarding his Parker worship, he kept the phrasing but got rid of the sequences. “I first tried to ban all chords,” he said, “and just make music an idea, instead of a set pattern to know where you are. I’m at the point now where modulation is the closest thing to pure improvisation.” Coleman has thoughts, of course, on how to define the ideal of pure improvisation. “No key, no rhythm, and no time,” he quickly recited, like the answer in a catechism. “Just the idea itself. It’s how you put it.”
Ben Martin, that other big presence in Coleman’s mind, seemed to get this. “With him, it was just the idea, not the execution on the horn. To this very day, that’s the one thing that I’m very nervous about: the idea. The idea is not an environment. It’s not an arrangement. It’s not a key; it’s not a chord. It’s only the idea.”
He suddenly posed another question. “Is the idea the only repetition that the brain allows you to function from?”
This word threw me. The only repetition?
“Yeah,” he said. For instance, the other day I was rehearsing with my band here, and I was trying to figure out whether I can play ideas and still be where the band is,” he said. “I realized it wouldn’t work.”
So the ideas he was talking about weren’t structural, I ventured. They were spatial ideas, or textural ideas.
“Something like that,” he replied. “I was telling my band, there’s these three chords, and they have all twelve notes in them. I can show you that there’s one note that couldn’t enter any of those chords, because it would always be out of key. That exists. I can’t be a church on all styles, but it seems that the ‘idea’ for music is not the improvised concept; it’s more of a mathematical concept, like a whole step and a half step—like D, E, F, those three notes—a whole step and a chromatic. That, basically, is not an idea. It’s a thought-out logic.”
But he found that he had run into another riddle. “I started thinking, what is an idea?” he continued. “You can’t have an idea if it doesn’t correspond with the present information that you’re using. Now, what is the difference between an idea and something that works?”
In essence, through this question, Coleman was arguing that a musical idea can be valid without imposing itself as an inviolate system.
You mean, I said, rephrasing the question, do all ideas have to work?
“Yeah,” he said, “that’s right, that’s right.”
Do all abstract ideas have to work?
“Yeah.”
In music?
“The answer is no.”
It is strange, Coleman’s obsession with taxonomy, measurements, scales, church doctrine, all of which he calls unnatural. But why does he let it bother him at all? He proved early in his career that he could write beautiful melodies by ear. (Coleman didn’t come to terms with standard music theory until about 1960.) Everybody’s got some sort of system, and he does too. He phrases melodies a certain way; he mostly avoids minor tonality; he favors a certain upper-middle pitch range on his horn. People learn to play with him, and they can learn his tunes without sheet music. What’s the problem? Why can’t he just forget about what he has no use for? For instance, when he was rehearsing with the band, trying to play “ideas” and then realizing it just wouldn’t work, what made him decide that it wouldn’t?
“That’s a very good question,” he said. “When you say, ‘what made you decide that it didn’t work’—well, there’s something in your mind, when you said that. You realized that there’s something that could make it clear. That’s why you asked. Well, I agree with you. That’s a legitimate question. I don’t have the answer. But I know why you asked the question. Let’s assume that the reason why you asked me, and the reason why I don’t have the answer, is the same.”
This is the sound of Coleman’s gate closing. He loves exposing you to his cast of mind, but if he senses you trying to pick it apart, or superimposing a grid of Western logic on it, he holds you at bay with a charming tautology.
When, about six months later, Coleman won a Grammy Award in the lifetime achievement category, a friend of mine shepherded him around Los Angeles for a few days. The night after Coleman’s memorable acceptance speech—which began, “It really is very, very real to be here tonight in relation to life and death, and I’m sure they both love each other”—he faced a field of microphones at one of the backstage press rooms on his schedule. “Ornette,” my friend counseled, “some reporters are going to ask you very fluffy questions now. You don’t have to give them more than one-line answers. They don’t want more.”
“Ornette Coleman!” ventured one. “What is the achievement in your life that you are proudest of ?”
He looked pensively at her. “I’m gonna have to go way back to answer that one,” he said. “Way, way back. In fact, I’m gonna have to go back to the moment when you asked me that question.” The interview stopped.
I had suggested listening to gospel music, and Coleman was enthusiastic. “It’s a true sound of what people call the sinner trying to make peace with God,” he said.
I brought something I felt he might like: a record of sacred harp music—white, rural, choral music, about a hundred voices, groups of them in loose unison. We listened to “The Last Words of Copernicus,” written in 1869 and recorded by Alan Lomax in Fyffe, Alabama, in 1959.
“That’s breath music,” he said, as big groups of singers harmonized in straight eighth-note patterns, with plain voices but much character. “They’re changing the sound with their emotions. Not because they’re hearing something.” But then we were off on another topic: the idea of whether a singer ought to seek a voicelike sound for his voice.
I tried another one: the Kyrgyzstani singer Zainidin Imanaliev, accompanying himself on the komuz, a three-stringed lute. He was singing a song called “Küidüm Chok,” highly emotional and pitch-precise, with guitar patterns that inevitably, for Western listeners, recall the blues. You can’t mistake what he’s singing about: helpless love. (The last stanza, translated, sighs: “Like a blossoming silvery poplar/you walk coquettishly in a silvery scarf/unable to find a way to be with you/I am left suffering like a weeping young camel.”)
“Mm!” Coleman responded. “You know what I realize? That all sound has a need. Otherwise it wouldn’t have a use. Sound has a use. More than any other element. You use it to establish something—an invisible presence or some belief.”
Here, as a kind of refrain, Imanaliev made the notes of his chest voice ascend and narrow into a high whistling tone—almost like Howlin’ Wolf’s howl. “Whew,” Coleman said. “He’s singing like he’s a little kid. Mmf. But isn’t it amazing that sound causes the idea to sound the way it is, more than the idea?”
Finally, the experiment broke down. It’s hard to keep Coleman talking about anyone else’s music. These mystical-logical puzzles are too interesting to him.
He still writes new pieces for each concert and was about to leave for some European shows. “Right now, I’m trying to play the instrument,” he said, “and I’m trying to write, without any restrictions of chord, keys, time, melody, and harmony, but to resolve the idea eternally, where every person receives the same quality from it, without relating it to some person. I don’t know what causes us to have an idea. But you can’t learn what life is. It’s already complete.”
He told a childhood story about his mother, who, as he kept reminding me, was born on Christmas day. After he received his first saxophone, he would come to her after learning how to play something by ear. “I’d be saying, ‘Listen to this! Listen to this!’ ” he remembered. “You know what she’d tell me? ‘Junior, I know who you are. You don’t have to tell me.’ ”
Set List
Cantor Josef Rosenblatt, “Tikanto Shabbos,” from The Great Cantors (Pearl), recorded 1916.
Charlie Parker, “Cheryl,” from Best of the Complete Savoy & Dial Studio Recordings (Savoy), recorded 1947.
Alabama Sacred Harp Singers, “The Last Words of Copernicus,” from Southern Journey, vol. 9: Harp of a Thousand Strings—All Day Singing from the Sacred Harp (Rounder), recorded 1959.
Zainidin Imanaliev, “Küidüm Chok” (translation: “I Burn, I Smoulder Like Charcoal”), from Music of Central Asia, vol. 1: Tengir-Too, Mountain Music of Kyrgyzstan (Smithsonian Folkways), recorded 2004.