TT 496: SCIENCE FICTION from 1972

Ornette Coleman, born on this day 95 years ago (March 9, 1930)

The greatest Ornette Coleman studio album is Science Fiction, which assembles all of his finest collaborators along with some unexpected surprises.

Side A:

What Reason Could I Give (song featuring Asha Puthli)
Civilization Day (Ornette, Don Cherry, Charlie Haden, Billy Higgins)
Street Woman (Ornette, Don Cherry, Charlie Haden, Billy Higgins)
Science Fiction (free jazz with poetry)

Side B:

Rock the Clock (free jazz with R ‘n B)
All My Life (song featuring Asha Puthli)
Law Years (Ornette, Bobby Bradford, Dewey Redman, Charlie Haden, Ed Blackwell)
The Jungle is a Skyscraper (Ornette, Bobby Bradford, Dewey Redman, Charlie Haden, Ed Blackwell)

The 8 tracks break down into pairs.

“Civilization Day” and “Street Woman” are blowing vehicles with the original 1959 quartet of Don Cherry, Charlie Haden, and Billy Higgins.

“Law Years” and “The Jungle is a Skyscraper” are blowing vehicles with the current early-70’s quartet of Dewey Redman, Charlie Haden and Ed Blackwell with special added guest Bobby Bradford.

“What Reason Could I Give” and “All My Life” are vocal numbers featuring Asha Puthli, both Blackwell and Higgins, and a full horn section including classical trumpet players Carmon Fornarotto and Gerard Schwarz.

“Science Fiction” and “Rock the Clock” are conceptual numbers with no clear melodies.

Of the blowing vehicles, “Law Years” and “Street Woman” are easily singable and inhabit a key, whereas “Civilization Day” and “The Jungle Is a Skyscraper” are dense, virtuosic, and comparatively atonal.

One more pair, revealed only in hindsight: Science Fiction has shone one of the brightest lights on both Asha Puthli and Bobby Bradford.

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The sound is very reverberant, with a huge direct bass tone and major slap-back on the alto and vocal. It’s not a palette that would work for conventional jazz but somehow suits the howling, epic quality of Ornette Coleman perfectly. Engineer Stan Tonkel was involved in many other Columbia releases but nothing else sounds remotely like Science Fiction. The producer is James Jordan, Ornette’s cousin. One wonders who thought of what. It’s easy to assume most of the direction came from Ornette, but Tonkel and Jordan must have also been part of the magic.

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“What Reason Could I Give” Complex layering disguises the work’s simple structure: It is basically a short tune, sung by a Bombay chanteuse, harmonized in triadic fashion by the horns.

What reason could I give
to live
only that
I love you
How many times
must I die
for love
only when
I’m without you
Where will the clouds be
if not in the sky
when I die

The goddess Asha Puthli sings as she pleases; Haden’s bass line is contrapuntal; both drummers play uptempo patterns, swinging like a madhouse. There seems to be only one little movement where an inner line moves independently, otherwise the horns are all parallel, just like most of Ornette’s work with Harmolodics.

Ornette’s decision to start with a searing vocal remains surprising. The closest parallel is perhaps the opening dirge “Lonely Woman” on The Shape of Jazz to Come. The man could always come up with magnificent ballads.

the chart I hand out when teaching a combo class at a jazz workshop

“Civilization Day” The melody is jagged but precise: Coleman and Cherry play it exactly the same way twice at the beginning and twice at the end. Out of the head, the horns play an improvisation without rhythm section. When Higgins and Haden come in, the tempo is brisk.

Unfortunately there are no tapes of the first quartet in action at the Five Spot in 1960. Maybe “Civilization Day” and “Street Woman” give an idea? It is a relief to hear Haden in the mix so strongly (he’s sometimes a bit low on the early Atlantic albums). Don Cherry’s long solo on “Civilization Day” has one matchless phrase after another. Folk music, surrealism, the blues, the avant-garde, deep intelligence, primitive emotion. One can almost hear Ornette listening in delight before stepping up to deliver his own fervent collection of spontaneous melody.

Billy Higgins plays uptempo time brilliantly, of course, but his snare comping is marching along in a moderately obtrusive fashion. He’d never play this way for Cedar Walton or another straight-ahead band. Is this the first time Ornette and Higgins have played together since 1960? The studio is postively crackling with energy.

“Street Woman” While still burning, the next track is less atonal. The melody is simpler than “Civilization Day” and the solos stay fairly connected to G, the home key.

“Street Woman” was part of the set list on the 1971 Ornette Coleman European tour with Redman, Haden, and Blackwell, and thus remains the only song on Science Fiction we have multiple versions of by Ornette himself. Both Blackwell and Higgins play a kind of Afro-Latin rhythm under the head; Haden’s pedal points are also important to the tune’s identity. Cherry’s harmony in the studio here is different than Redman on tour.

During the horn improvisations Haden creates tension and release with chromatic guide tones in manner derived from his favorite composer, Johann Sebastian Bach. Haden never hid his Ozark hillbilly sensibility, either. Sam Newsome commented on how “Ornette taught white musicians that it’s OK to embrace a white sound.” There’s no better exhibit of this than Charlie Haden, who always sounds like a cracker even when playing the hippest jazz.

“Science Fiction” Ornette looked around at the New York art scene when forming his early-sixties trio with David Izenzon and Charles Moffett. Through Gunther Schuller, he was exposed to European modernist classical music; through his first wife Jayne Cortez, he was exposed to contemporary poetry and dance.

That trio with Izenzon and Moffett would consistently play chaotic works featuring Ornette’s noisy violin and lyrical trumpet. These were palate cleaners, stops along the way between the ballads and the jazzier numbers. This concept continued with various groups in the later 60’s; eventually spoken word was introduced on 1969’s New York Is Now with “Now We Interrupt for a Commercial,” where Dewey Redman gamely interjects some vocal levity into the mayhem.

“Science Fiction” is a continuation of these themes: a noisy “commercial” for the most abstract and unrelenting sonorities, this time in service of Black Arts poet David Henderson. A crying baby may relate to Ornette’s oft-stated curiosity about the natural intuition of the very young.

“Rock the Clock” is the only tune with the current touring quartet of Dewey, Haden, and Blackwell. It’s another conceptual noise piece but a bit more organized than “Science Fiction.” At first, Ornette plays Don Cherry-ish trumpet, Redman works out on his musette, and Haden scratches frantically away with his bow. Eventually Haden funks out on wah-wah, Blackwell settles into some serious New Orleans groove, and Ornette delivers his impeccable noise violin. The highlight is Redman’s stellar tenor blues.

Jazz had used popular music as a source for improvisation ever since Louis Armstrong. “Rock the Clock” was Ornette first response to the rise of rock music; soon he would forgo acoustic music entirely and form Prime Time.

“All My Life” Asha Puthli gets a turn with just bass and two drummers before the horns enter as a kind of sympathetic chorus. At the beginning, it seems like Higgins and Blackwell are playing triplets. When the horns come in, they move to a faster four.

The two tracks with Asha Puthli are the pinnacle of Ornette’s songwriting. On Science Fiction all the patterns came together just right. Just devastating music.

“Law Years” boasts a charming and distinctive melody that instantly became one of Ornette’s most-covered pieces.

Perhaps inspired by the theme, all the participants take immortal solos. It goes in a smooth curve of blues: Haden: Redman: Bradford: Ornette: Blackwell. In general “Law Years” is in C, but of course Haden moves the keys around while following or prodding the horns. Ornette’s final high “C” to wrap up the track is perfect.

Sadly, a mid-60’s quartet with Ornette, Bradford, Jimmy Garrison, and Charles Moffett never recorded. Still, Bradford plays so good on “Law Years!” If he had never done anything else, he would still be known in this music.

Ed Blackwell is one of the most distinctive musicians. While his student Billy Higgins smoothed out some of the angles and went on to be one of the most recorded musicians, Blackwell always remained bit of outsider. Blackwell never saw the need to tone down the NOLA parade or the celebration of African rhythm in order to be more slick or professional. It was generous of Ornette to allow us the luxury of comparing the two genius drummers side by side on Science Fiction.

“The Jungle Is a Skyscraper” The head is an aggressive blur like “Civilization Day,” now with three horns instead of two.

Redman begins his solo by singing and shouting through his horn. I was there at the Leverkusen festival in 1993, where Redman let loose with some extraordinary and passionate extended techniques including singing through the horn. The crowd roared its approval, and afterwards Dewey told me, “Europeans enjoy the avant-garde.”

As the title suggests, “The Jungle is a Skyscraper” is another one of Ornette’s profound mergings of the basic and the knowing.

Ornette Coleman, Dewey Redman, and Bobby Bradford were all black musicians born in Texas before the civil rights era. In 1972 — the same year as this record — Darko Suvin defined science fiction as a “genre whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition, and whose main formal device is an imaginative framework alternative to the author's empirical environment.” Having all three of these immortal Texas bluesmen playing as avant-garde as possible in front of hillbilly/Bach bass and New Orleans parade drums is about as “science fiction” as earthlings can get.