ORNETTE COLEMAN / “Lonely Woman”

Ornette Coleman started rap in 1959 with a record called The Shape Of Jazz To Come. I don’t mean he literally invented rap, but aesthetically (in terms of the three main elements of music from a Western perspective) what Ornette did in jazz is analogous to what rap did in popular music. Western music is based on a triad of melody, harmony and rhythm. Popular Western music emphasizes melody. The high-art music emphasizes harmony. None of it swings too tough. And in all of it, a premium is placed on composition and technical correctness, i.e. adherence to various, abstract ideal standards that a specific performance is measured against. What we call Black music is a different aesthetic. Hell, we can do away with harmony, simplify the melody, hit a groove and ride for days—like Mr. Dynamite recording a nine minute song without ever crossing a bridge. You know what I’m saying? By Western standards a lot of James Brown songs technically aren’t songs. Plus, recordings both spread the music and froze the music, enabled cross-cultural (and cross-time, cross-place) study and appreciation of the music), but at the same time, the recording device locked the music into a static/processed thing, whereas in Black music one factor that is certain is change. It’s always changing. A record don’t never change. So in one sense while the record enabled the world to hear Black music, it also encouraged people to think that “one” way was “the” way. (I’m coming to Ornette and rap, right now. Stay with me.) Well, Ornette thought, Suppose you didn’t have to adhere to a standardized harmony? Suppose you could play whatever note you wanted to play at a given moment? Suppose your progression was based on your imagination and not a set of predetermined codes? Wouldn’t the music sound fresher? So, that’s what he did. Chord changes? The changes were no longer predetermined ahead of time. For those reared to work off of changes, this freedom was anarchy of the most despicable sort. Hence, when Ornette hit New York in 1959, a number of seasoned musicians, not to mention the corps of jazz critics, thought Ornette was crazy (and that is their assessment when they were being charitable and giving Ornette the benefit of the doubt). In the early Sixties, I was just getting into jazz and I didn’t know that Ornette was supposed to be controversial, not supposed to be considered in the jazz tradition. Of course, once I started subscribing to Downbeat, I quickly found out how wrong I was. I will never forget Downbeat giving no stars (zero, nada, zip) to Meditations by John Coltrane—but that is another story. Anyway, because I didn’t know any better I could dig Ornette. He sounded like he was preaching to me. I mean, in my estimation, he sounded like a preacher. And then when he did his trumpet and violin thing with his then nine-year-old son on drums (the record was Empty Foxhole), well, something was definitely happening that hadn’t happened before. Fortunately or unfortunately (depending on your point of view) Trane was happening at the same time and at that time Trane was the Einstein of harmony. I used to walk out the room when Trane came on the radio because I couldn’t hear it at the time (circa 1963, early ’64). By 1965 I was deep into Trane, but again that’s another story. What I’m saying about Ornette is that his emphasis on melody and rhythm, on preaching over a beat regardless of how he hooked the words up, that strongly appealed to me. And of all of Ornette’s large body of work, the composition that most strongly appealed to me was “Lonely Woman.” So what’s the connection between Ornette and rap? Well, rap took the popular song form, obliterated the harmony part, and emphasized preaching over a beat. And that was a revolutionary development, a development foreshadowed by what had already happened in the jazz world. Meanwhile, over the years, Ornette’s revolution was absorbed by the jazz world. By the mid-Sixties, even Trane adopted and adapted Ornette’s approach—late period Trane is generally appraised as an acquired taste of the rarest sort, and again, that’s another story. Trane is another story. But a converging story in that Ornette’s approach became Trane’s approach. By the mid-seventies, James Brown had saxophone players wailing like Trane—listen to “Superbad”—but it was really an Ornette Coleman approach: preaching over rhythm. Which is part of the reason that James Brown’s music is so often sampled, copied, appropriated, imitated, re-created, etc. in rap music. Whether the beat-meisters know it or not, it’s not simply the beat; it’s an entire aesthetic that they are plugging into. An aesthetic that does not come in a linear fashion from Ornette Coleman to Dr. Dre, but rather a shared aesthetic that represents different ways of drinking from the same well, the water of African musical aesthetics liberally laced with African-American blues elements, the melancholy inside of our joy, the joy inside of our melancholy. The dialectic of getting down in order to rise above. I, of course, contend you can hear all of that in “Lonely Woman,” and even if you can’t hear it, that don’t mean those elements are not there, just might simply mean, you ain’t hearing it—I’m aware it could also be that I’m hearing haints, i.e. hearing stuff that’s not there, but I doubt it: the scream, moan, shout, and cry manifests itself too consistently in Black music to be an accident. The element of trance, riding a groove to an altered state of consciousness, is a constant in this ever-changing music. So, finally, what I’m saying is that there is cultural unity or commonality to all forms of our music that address the basic aesthetic of saying something over a groove, of inducing a trance as a way of transformation. And that’s what I liked about Ornette Coleman. Obviously, I was not the only person who felt that way. In 2004 the San Francisco Jazz Festival commissioned Joshua Redman to lead a small band who would perform both original compositions and a program of compositions by a selected jazz composer. The inaugural year featured composer was Ornette Coleman. It’s a brilliant idea, wonderfully executed. A limited-edition 3CD set of music was released—one CD is all Coleman interpretations and the other two CDs feature one composition from each of the eight band members.   “Lonely Woman” is on the recording and features the excellent alto work of Miguel Zenon. In fact, they ought to release the Coleman interpretations as a single CD—it’s just that good. “Lonely Woman” is undoubtedly Coleman’s most covered composition, but usually by instrumentalists, and so I close with a gem of a vocal interpretation by the Boston-based Titilayo Ngwenya. Her version of “Lonely Woman” is one part of a seamless composite composition titled “Male Drug.” (The Beatles’ "Lucy In The Sky" is also included). Hearing how Titilayo works Coleman into the Western song form is instructive and indicative that ultimately Coleman’s revolution enriched rather than replaced the musical tradition. Titilayo’s interpretation is on a broad-ranging debut release that covers the gamut of jazz from early swing compositions such as “Savoy” and “Ain’t Misbehavin” to original dramatic songs. Trained at the New England Conservatory, Titilayo has the technical adeptness one would expect from such an educational background, but, via her Nigerian mother and Mozambican father, she also has a grounding in an African aesthetic. Listen to the original recording by Ornette Coleman, the heavy jazz arrangement and blowing by the SFJazz Ensemble, and then follow with a quiet listen to what Titilayo does. After checking all that out, I think you will begin to appreciate how many different tastes you can get from the water out of Black music’s sacred well—and, hopefully, you can also make the aesthetic leap and begin to appreciate that the Coleman approach has found it’s most popular manifestation in an entirely different discipline, i.e. rap. Additionally, I strongly urge you to check out a video documentary called Freestyle, The Art of Rhyme by Kevin Fitzgerald. Why? Well, because the art of freestylin’ in rap is aesthetically the same approach as Ornette Coleman. Ornette and rap, for me it’s not a case of one leading to the other, or even one coming before the other, it’s simply what happens when the same sensibility is manifested by different individuals in different eras and different contexts. So actually I should have said: Ornette Coleman is a pre-rap manifestation of rap and rap is an Ornette Coleman approach to popular music. Seen? Heard? —Kalamu ya Salaam Click here to listen to an NPR interview with Titilayo. Titilayo Ngwenya website: www.titilayo.com               no way, jose           James Brown, absolutely. Ornette Coleman, no way. By no way, I mean that there is no direct line that you can point to that connects Ornette Coleman to hip-hop music. Are Ornette’s musical developments and his unorthodox approach to harmony and rhythm analogous to some of the things hip-hop musicians did with popular music? Of course. But as you accurately point out, that similarity has a lot more to do with the African Aesthetic as a whole than it has to do with Ornette Coleman specifically. I would doubt very seriously if any of the cats who were instrumental in creating and/or popularizing hip-hop music have any idea who Ornette Coleman is beyond ‘a jazz cat.’ I can guarantee you, on the other hand, that every one of them knows James Brown…by the book, chapter and verse. The problem isn’t so much that the argument makes no sense (it doesn’t, but that isn’t the main problem) as much as it’s that the argument obscures the real point. (The same point you yourself make later.) The real point is that there are certain, specific methods of music-making that ALL forms of Black music (at least in their early, non-commercial forms) rely on. As for James Brown, without him, there would be no hip-hop. (At least there would be no hip-hop as we know it.) And that’s it for that. I dig the Ornette Coleman version of “Lonely Woman” a lot. A whole lot. To my ears (ears that really aren’t well-educated or acclimated to jazz), it sounds a lot like a Miles Davis tune named “Fall.” (Not literally, I’m talking about the technique. The repetition of the melodic line, with each horn playing the melody slightly differently, coupled with the frenetic rhythm.) Of course, I wrote that backwards: it would be “Fall” that sounds a lot like “Lonely Woman,” given that the Miles tune came out a good eight years after Ornette’s did. Of course, my ultimate reaction is the same as it always is when Kalamu posts one of these classic jazz tracks that I’ve never heard: I’ve got a lot more listening to do. —Mtume ya Salaam

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 8th, 2006 at 1:33 am and is filed under Classic. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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