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Foreword by Pat Metheny
Berkeley Hills, 1999
244 pages
Ornette Coleman has for the last 40 years substantially shaped the music we call jazz. This books gives an overview of the live of the free jazz pioneer (leaving the details to John Litweilers "A Harmolodic Life", now out of print) but more importantly is a concise guide to his music. The structure of the biographic section - perfectly illustrated with black and white photos by the great Val Wilmer - nicely reflects Coleman's large periods of creativity and silence.
The core of the book however deals with the music of the artist. Approaching Coleman's somewhat vague Harmolodic theory the author - himself a musician - analyses a number of Coleman's compositions and improvisations and illustrate them with transcriptions of sample scores. While a detailed understanding of this small section requires quite some knowledge of musical theory, it might provide even the not-so-knowledgeable music lover with a glimpse of what makes Coleman's music so unique.
More than half of the book's volume is taken by a guide to Coleman's recorded output available on commercial recordings. Organized in a chronological way of recording, each record lists personnel, recording dates and track titles and is supplemented by a black and white image of its cover art. In an informal way, background stories, musical analyses and professional critique are then mixed to build an easy-to-read comment on each record. While most essential recordings are reviewed, the insisting Coleman collector will realize that a number of harder to find records (most of them illegal "bootleg" recordings) are missing. In a few cases this must be considered a shortcoming of this publication: The high-quality, widely available Belgrade Concert of 1971, the CD Jazzbühne Berlin 1988 or Coleman's recent appearance on a CD of the French saxophone player Jochk'o Seffer have to be mentioned here. The author's justification that he wants to focus on easily available releases cannot be accepted as he for instance reviews a next-to-impossible to find Paris Concert. The arbitrary omissions on the one hand and listing of extremely rare albums on the other hand simply seems to be a result of the authors limited collection. The explanation might be that this book is basically an extended translation of a German release of 1989, published by OREOS. At that time almost all albums published then where reviewed. Obviously and unfortunately the author lost the energy or the interest to keep track of all the paces of Coleman after this date.
These shortcomings prevent me from calling this publication the definitive guide to Ornette Coleman's music but they are not serious enough to keep me from recommending this book to every music lover who wants to know more about the man, his music, and his records.
Robert Stubenrauch