A BRIDGE TOO FAR:

During Ornette Coleman's legendary 1959 run of shows at the Five Spot club in New York, there was a joke going around: "A waiter drops a trayload of drinks and a man says to his lady-friend, 'Listen honey, Ornette's playing our song.'" The punchline is a doozy, capturing the nightclub's dankness (capacity: 75; ambience: urine), the hype around Coleman's radical new sound, and the confrontational difficulty of his music.

The first night of that run, November 17, represented a turning point in American jazz. There were other bebop musicians playing with experimental forms in the 1950s, like John Coltrane and Miles Davis, but Coleman brought something wholly unexpected to his signature white plastic saxophone. His sound's arrival in New York made Coleman "an overnight underground sensation," Maria Golia writes in her new book, Ornette Coleman: The Territory and the Adventure.

He was the shock of the new. Before Coleman, "free jazz" was an eggheads' pursuit, so obscure that he and his band once had to bail out of a gig that was advertised as a "Free Jazz Concert," which a crowd had assumed meant no entrance fee. [...]

Golia clarifies that Coleman's atonality never diminished his jazz's "requisite virtuosity," although it could certainly sound bewildering. Instead it "proposed an alternative means for its expression." Collaboration and close listening among a practiced ensemble of musicians were essential to accomplishing a state of intimacy Coleman called "unison."

Describing the way Ornette Coleman's music sounds is a challenge, and Golia rounds up some delightful attempts by music critics past. "Eldritch wrongness" is a phrase from Brian Morton's obituary of Coleman for The Wire, describing the sinister sounds Morton thought were the result of Coleman's misapprehensions about musical theory as a child. Francis Davis wrote in the Atlantic Monthly in 1972 that, "Perhaps the trick of listening to his performances lies in an ability to hear rhythm as melody, the way he seems to do, and the way early jazz musicians did," which is genuinely helpful advice. In notes hastily written while "under the spell of a first discovery" of The Shape of Jazz to Come, Martin Williams wrote that "if you put a conventional chord under my note, you limit the number of choices I have for my next note; if you do not, my melody may move freely in a far greater choice of directions." For Williams, this innovation was an escape hatch for a musical form in stasis: "Someone had to break through the walls that those harmonies have built and restore melody."

Critics were as much in search of a language for the avant garde as for a summary of a record. Coleman resisted critical language, Golia notes, quoting his disdain for people who "don't trust their reactions to art or music unless there is a verbal explanation for it." Coleman had a gnomic way with words himself, however. "How do you turn emotion into knowledge? That's what I try to do with my horn," he once wrote. In the liner notes to Change of the Century (1960), he reminds us that "the only thing that matters is whether you feel it or not. You can't intellectualize music; to reduce it analytically is often is to reduce it to nothing very important."

Personally, I still don't get it.

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