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JAZZ
Sonny Rollins
This coming October 29, alto saxophonist
and composer Ornette Coleman will
be making his first Canadian appearance
in 20 some years at Toronto’s hallowed
Massey Hall (the very same site as the legendary
concert with Charlie Parker some 52
years before). Last June and July, the equally
legendary tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins
crossed the country during the yearly spate of
national jazz festivals. Coincidentally, both men
have hit the venerable age of 75 this year,
Rollins on September 7, Coleman on March 9.
With long careers behind them, both have
secured their place in the history books, albeit
on very different terms.
Different but similar
While both men are of the same generation, they
belong to very different worlds style-wise.
Rollins, one of the rare surviving masters of the
bop and hard-bop eras, is a champion of the
great American song tradition, a veritable walking
fakebook of evergreens and jazz standards
composed by other greats like Charlie Parker,
Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, as well as a few of
his own (“Oleo,” “Valse Hot” and the perennial
jazz calypso “St Thomas”). Ornette Coleman,
Legends in Our Time
Ornette Coleman - Sonny Rollins
MARC CHÉNARD
conversely, was thrust on the scene amid controversy,
heralded as the instigator of “Free Jazz,”
a term that until its appearance in the late 1950s
meant “music with no cover charge.”
Despite their differences, comparing their
respective careers yields some interesting commonalities.
For starters, each has been rather
shy and withdrawn, taking periodical sabbaticals
from the music and recording business.
Coleman, for one, has gone through so many
stops and starts in his career, releasing records
in short bursts, and spending the rest of his
time away from the studios. In fact, his last disc
to date was a singular duo recording with
German pianist Joachim Kühn, cut in concert in
1996 and released two years later. Rollins, for
his part, dropped out of sight a couple of
times, the first being his legendary bridge period,
where he spent time practicing on the
Williamsburg bridge in New York between 1959
to 1961. From 1966 to 1971, he bowed out
once again, studying Far Eastern philosophies
and religions. In more recent times, he had not
issued an album in about four years before the
newly released Without a Song, the 9-11
Concert, recorded five days after that great
tragedy).
While Rollins’s reputation squarely rests
within the “modern jazz” tradition (i.e. bop and
hardbop), he too was lured to the music of
Coleman at one time. In fact, he put a group
together with two of the latter’s associates,
trumpeter Don Cherry and drummer Billy
Higgins, the main document of that period
being Our Man in Jazz, released by RCA in the
early 1960s. Coleman, in contrast, was really
the first American jazz musician to have broken
the obligatory link between solos and tune
lengths. In other words, if a piece was 32 bars
long, improvised solo chorus had to fall within
that frame and the set harmonies within it.. But
with Coleman, one needed not solo any more
like that, but could play as long as one would
want, with or without any of the underlying
chords. It’s no surprise then that the early period
of the late-1950s-early-1960s (documented
on both the Contemporary and Atlantic
labels) saw him in a pianoless quartet, a context
that liberated musicians from the necessity
of having to listen to a keyboardist’s harmonic
reiterations.
Masters under Scrutiny
As heated as the debate was back then, the
records of that period, including Coleman’s
pioneering double quartet session “Free Jazz”
of late 1961, now make us wonder what all the
fuss was about. But this is yet another example
of how the rifts of yesterday smooth themselves
out over time. Nowadays, even a figure
known for his disparaging of anything remotely
audacious in jazz, one Stanley Crouch, has
come to Coleman’s defence, invoking his link to
the blues and earlier forms jazz.
Ornette Coleman
Like all prominent personalities, both Rollins
and Coleman have had to deal with their fair
share of critical assessments (and broadsides).
Many have seen the former as a larger than life
musical Prometheus who, in spite of his
tremendous gift, had the tendency to underwhelm
his fans (at least in the long string of
studio recordings cut for the Milestone label
over the last thirty years). But he is well aware
of this, though he remains ever the gentleman
about it; in interviews he also expresses selfdoubts
about his abilities, but his motivation
to practice his horn on a daily basis remains.
Coleman has had to endure far more slings
and arrows of outrageous fortune than Rollins,
which has made him a rather relunctant interviewee
over the years. Whether in his early
years, in his resurfacing in the 1970s with his
electrified Prime Time band, and even in his
decision to play with pianists again (not only
Kühn, but also Geri Allen), Coleman has set
himself up to journalistic scrutiny, especially
with respect to his ever diffuse “theory” of
Harmolodics, which still baffles the most astute
of his fans. As such, one could venture to say
that O.C. is one of the very few musicians
today still capable of embodying that “sound
of suprise,” a turn of phrase the prominent
writer Whitney Balliett once coined as his definition
of jazz.
But both musicians are markedly different in
one aspect: in spite of his famous tunes, Rollins
remains a blower at heart (and a very hard one
18 Fall 2005