Ornette Coleman – Of Human Feelings

Of Human Feelings

Ornette ColemanOf Human Feelings Antilles AN-2001 (1982)


Ornette’s “Harmolodics” approach to music was really more of a political ideology expressed through (generally unarticulated) musical techniques that placed all the performers on a radically equal level.  In this sense, Ornette is kind of an anarchist — not the bomb-throwing type (though his music is “the bomb”) but an adherent to a kind of utopian philosophy that posits a society without hierarchies of power, status, etc.  His music might appeal to the fictional anarchist society on the planet Anarres in Ursula K. Le Guin‘s sci-fi novel The Dispossessed (1974) — which took inspiration from the work of libertarian socialist Murray Bookchin.

Ornette’s seminal album Science Fiction set the tone for much of what he did over the next one to two decades of his career.  “What Reason Could I Give?,” the opening song from Science Fiction, laid out the basic format of trying to regulate the the volume, intensity and tone of each performer on an equal basis that serves the whole more than the individual (egotistical) parts.  This resulted then in a relatively slow progression within the song, as one performer makes a change and in a split second all the others adapt to that change in a corresponding way appropriate for his or her instrument. In the time since Science Fiction, Coleman’s band “Prime Time” adopted more funk-rock influence, in the form of prominent electric bass but also in the style of heavier rock drumming, etc.  The opener “Sleep Talk” is sort of a perfect update on “What Reason Could I Give?”  It takes the same basic approach of treating all the players equally, but, aside from the funk-rock and R&B textures, the players have a much wider latitude to make their “equal” individual contributions.  And the pace is now furious.  If “What Reason Could I Give?” seemed to move slowly to give the performers a chance to react, there is no built-in delay any longer.  The sorts of contributions that are equalized is less constrained to playing unison notes, and it is more like little chunks of sound, and within those chunks each performer gets to do what he wants.  The drummers get to pound away more lyrically, and the bass player gets to deploy more rhythm, like in something approaching slap bass style techniques.  “What Reason Could I Give?” stayed close to the realm of almost “new age” feel-good complacity, but the Prime Time band had space to explore other emotional territories, with frenetic, jiving and even aggressive guitar riffs blended with contemplative noodling and sour, playful notes from Ornette’s saxophone.  A song like “Air Ship” even points to a unique view of masculinity in music, by putting elements of machismo in the mix but refusing to either affirm or condemn them.  They just drift by as one more possibility in a song world with many other possibilities.

If “Sleep Talk” is a high water mark for what Ornette’s Prime Time band could do with Harmolodics, then a problem, perhaps, with the rest of Of Human Feelings is that it never really reaches that high water mark again.  It’s a fine album, for instance the second song “Jump Street” is nearly as good as “Sleep Talk” and there are plenty of other fine songs here, but the intensity seems more aimless as the album progresses (“What Is the Name of That Song?,” “Job Mob”).  That’s a bit unfair.  Still, things get very dense when we have subsets of the group working together within the larger group, and therefore harder to follow.  This reflects a slightly different approach to the group interplay, one that tolerates internal factions, if only on a fleeting basis.  Anyway, what Ornette’s music, in general, and recordings like Of Human Feelings, in particular, put forward is not simply a new set of feelings or statements of perspective, but also a new mode of interaction between musical performers (and by extension, people in general). It is that latter aspect of the man’s music that has made him such a controversial figure.  It made him an innovator and revolutionary.  That tends to either generate enthusiasm or contempt, depending on the listener’s outlook.

Paul Bley, an early associate of Ornette, has said that Ornette’s music

“suggested ABCDEFGHIJK, in which repetition was anathema *** It wasn’t totally free because totally free was A forever, metamorphosing.  It was a form that took hold, because you could finally return to the written music, and the audience had something to hold on to.”

The anarchistic impulses of Ornette’s Prime Time band made this A vs. ABCDEFGHIJK issue a closer question.  Occasionally, Prime Time sound like a band playing just “A”, metamorphosing, rather than progressing to something outside “A”.  This, at least, is the challenge that Harmolodics presents.  The band probably lets ABCDEFGHIJK win most of the time.  But it isn’t always a clear victory.  There is also a sense that the band is expressing itself as a kind of new urban elite, trading in sleek, street-wise riffs.  In short, they almost claim “mission accomplished” when hindsight has shown that there was still a ways to go before the ideas bound up in Ornette’s music had achieved what they sought from society at large (this being a central feature of Le Guin’s book The Dispossessed).  The tone of elitism also sits somewhat uncomfortably with the premise of Harmolodics.  Lastly, it must be said, the notion of treating all instruments and performers as equals (see also “Kontra-Punkte“) sometimes reduces itself to a rather tedious and pedantic exercise in mapping out and assigning values to each contribution — to treat them equally there must be values assigned to each part, enabling the “equation” to be balanced like a mathematical formula.  In that way Ornette’s quest to make music that is “real” ends up taking on the opposite quality, that of superficial appearances driven by the balancing act between the instruments, with a subtle tendency to favor content that fits more easily under Ornette’s Harmolodics regime over content that expresses something deeper.  The humor and playfulness of Coleman’s early music is not always so apparent under those circumstances.  Harmolodics works best when the performance is somewhat less polished, so that in a postmodern way one can hear the imperfect machinations that produce the music.

Given that the textures of late 1970s and early 1980s R&B have fallen somewhat out of favor, and that Of Human Feelings is conceptually challenging, this is definitely not the place to start with Ornette Coleman’s music.  Even just within the output of the Prime Time band, many listeners seem to prefer Dancing In Your Head.  Yet this music is crucial to understanding the impossible dreams Ornette was driving towards in his music.  The early, more well-known stuff formed a path to this, and if this just raised more questions than it provided answers, it may help explain the technical workings of Harmolodics more plainly than other Coleman albums.

Ian Dury – New Boots and Panties!!

New Boots and Panties!!

Ian DuryNew Boots and Panties!! Stiff SEEZ 4 (1977)


To put Ian Dury in context, I’d say he has a little of the nostalgic and slightly off-kilter, insecure sense of humor of Jonathan Richman (this comes through quite strongly on “Sweet Gene Vincent”), matched with a gritty and edgy lyrical sense and musical vision like Jim Carroll and perhaps less inhibition.  Of course, he’s also fundamentally British.  You might say he was the wittiest and smartest guy in the same type of scene that would produce working class punk and Oi! like Sham 69 and Cock Sparrer, though his band The Blockheads gives this a funky, sometimes jazzy, almost disco sheen vaguely like Marianne Faithfull‘s Broken English of a couple years later but with more visceral drive. Yet the use of such a nondescript style instrumental backing, almost devoid of personality (not to sell The Blockheads short — what they do here is pitch-perfect), places this, along with The The‘s Soul Mining, as a testament to witty lyrics and vocals that are full of character making any music capable of intimacy and charm.  And when they use a prog-rock, jazzy-inflected synthesizer solo on “Blockheads,” it is of course prefaced with a fart sound.  There is a sense of wonder about life in this music.  Yet Dury never takes himself too seriously.  He is always ready to make a fool of himself, and offer a hilariously off-color comment, usually while talking loosely and casually about going out and doing things, having fun, and getting by.  Interesting too that Dury released this, his first album, in his late 30s, somewhat a rarity in rock.  A great one from the punk era.

Dorgon + William Parker – Broken/Circle

Broken/Circle

Dorgon + William ParkerBroken/Circle Jumbo 5 (1998)


Dorgon (a/k/a Mr. Dorgon, a/k/a DJ$shot, b. Gordon Knauer) is one of those characters few people know what quite to do with.  Allaboutjazz has a series of reviews of his works under the title “Mr. Dorgon: Genius or Charlatan?“.  He found a niche in the late 1990s New York downtown jazz scene, and recorded not one but two sessions with the era’s leading bassist in William Parker.  And Broken/Circle shows how diverse the New York scene was at that time, providing space both for Dorgon’s methodical and almost (subtly) rock-oriented expositions and Parker’s highly refined and adaptable jazz faculties.  Parker is the acknowledged master of the era.  A towering figure, and with as many credentials as could possibly be amassed.  Dorgon has, well, none of the same credentials (though liner notes on various releases on his own Jumbo Recordings label sometimes attribute fictitious ones, just as the back of this album fictitiously states it was recorded in 1949 on board the ocean liner USS Bhutan).  The wooden, plodding noises emanating from Dorgon’s c-melody saxophone have a single-mindedness that forces Parker to adapt and expand the sound all on his own.  Nothing Dorgon does gives Parker a clue, so the bassist is constantly on his toes.  And that really is the point here.  Dorgon throws out sounds like challenges and Parker responds—always admirably.  If in performance technique Dorgon’s playing is rudimentary, he certainly succeeds in creating a context for some of William Parker’s most intriguing playing of the day.

Some of Dorgon’s recordings on his label are well worth investigating, especially those that pair him with talented players like on this album and Dorgon Y Su Grupo.  Many were released with handmade covers.  My copy of Broken/Circle is painted and written on a piece of Kraft paper that seems to be cut from a paper bag.

Count Basie – The Complete Decca Recordings

The Complete Decca Recordings

Count BasieThe Complete Decca Recordings GRP GRD-3-611 (1992)


Good stuff, of course, though I could do without some of the tracks, mostly cuts with vocalists that bore me.  For a more potent distillation of what you find here, I heartily recommend The Best of Early Basie.  If you want a full overview of the kings of the swing era big bands, try Fletcher Henderson‘s Wrappin’ It Up, Ellington‘s The Blanton-Webster Band (reissued as Never No Lament: The Blanton-Webster Band) and the aforementioned The Best of Early Basie.  From there, you can check out Benny Goodman, Lionel Hampton, Teddy Wilson, Jimmie Lunceford, Jay McShann, Artie Shaw, Woody Herman, Glenn Miller, you name it.

FKA twigs – LP1

LP1

FKA twigsLP1 Young Turks YTCD118 (2014)


LP1 is basically music in the style of new electro R&B, like The Weeknd, which makes some overtures to various electronic pop genres mostly originating from the UK.  But there is something else going on here.  Experiments and outsider music are being co-opted in pursuit of conformist commercial success in the usual channels.  The lyrics of this album evidence a sort of low self-esteem protagonist degrading herself for external validation.  That at least is what it tries to be.  There is a strong sense that this is very contrived music.  It resembles the sort of “feminism” that — idiotically — declares adherence to stereotypical gender roles to be revolutionary, like “shopping as identity”.  This is immanently self-defeating more than anything.  Although perhaps this appropriates some interesting bits from other sources, the conclusion remains: fail.

Funkadelic – One Nation Under a Groove

One Nation Under a Groove

FunkadelicOne Nation Under a Groove Warner Bros. BSK 3209 (1978)


Landing on major label Warner Bros., Funkadelic combined the more accessible elements of Parliament (the funk version of the band) and Funkadelic (the rock version of the band) to arrive at the sound of One Nation Under a Groove.  The edges have been rounded off some of the rock guitar solos, and the funk is a little less hard — you don’t HAVE to dance, but you still very well could.  Things glide by pretty comfortably though.  This is definitely shooting for the widest possible audience.  So, sure, this is probably the easiest entry point.  But at the same time, this falls short of the crazy (and I mean CRAIZEE) unique, grooving, classic music the band made elsewhere.  But you could more readily play this for some squares you know (yeah, you know some) and they would be less likely to shit their pants listening to this one than some others.

Funkadelic – Free Your Mind… and Your Ass Will Follow

Free Your Mind... and Your Ass Will Follow

FunkadelicFree Your Mind… and Your Ass Will Follow Westbound WB 2001 (1970)


The debut was pretty jammy, and this one is too but, for better or worse, it’s even more freaky, loose and psychedelic.  The black Grateful Dead?  Sort-of.  If you come to this looking for well-defined “songs” you’ll be disappointed.  But guitarist Eddie Hazel proves the star.  He lights up side one.  This one has its place.  It can’t compete with what came next though, the stone-cold classic Maggot Brain.