InRO Weekly — Volume 1, Issue 10

KICKING THE CANON
OF HUMAN FEELINGS
Ornette Coleman
There is perhaps no bolder album title in all of 20th century music than Ornette
Coleman’s The Shape of Jazz to Come. And what’s more, it was entirely appropriate:
Coleman’s arrival in New York City in 1959, followed shortly after by the record’s
release, sent shockwaves throughout the jazz world. There were plenty of doubters
who dismissed Coleman’s innovations as a fad, an affront to jazz tradition, but the
test of time has proven that record’s wild proclamation to be true. There’s
actually a shared theme among most of Coleman’s early album titles
(Tomorrow Is the Question, Change of the Century) that, correctly,
positions the jazz provocateur as a progressive force in the genre’s
development — as well as a figure oriented toward the future. Crucially,
though, Coleman’s music also has deep ties to the past. Consider a
record like 1969’s Ornette at 12 — again, the title signals a focus on time,
but going in the opposite direction. Ornette at 12 tapped into not only the
music of Coleman’s youth (though that is a permanent consideration,
too), but the uninhibited intuitiveness of being a child — a notion
supported by the decision to have his then-12-year-old son, Denardo, on
drums. Denardo would grow into a formidable player as an adult, but he was
clearly an amateur in 1969 — and, indeed, his youthful abandon is more or less the
point. Coleman may be commonly regarded as a forward-looking innovator, but to
fully understand his work, one must also recognize its debt to the past — both in a
historical and a personal sense. And there may be no better way to come to that
understanding than to examine a less heralded period of Coleman’s career,
which began around 1975 with the formation of his first electric band, Prime
Time.Listening to Prime Time with 21st-century ears, the music still sounds a
good deal more radical, more outlandish than Coleman’s ’60s quartet
masterpieces. By the mid-’70s, the jazz fusion movement was in full swing, but Coleman’s
electric jazz had little in common with Weather Report, Return to Forever, Mahavishnu
Orchestra, or any of the other groups that sprung up in the wake of Miles Davis’ adoption of
electric a half-decade earlier. Even today, there’s hardly any music that sounds like what
Coleman was doing with Prime Time. The closest resemblance can probably be found in some
of the more funk-inspired groups from the downtown New York no-wave scene, but none of
those bands really approach the complexity and abstraction of Coleman’s outfit, nor do they
embody its improvisational principles (and, of course, Prime Time anticipated no-wave by two
or three years).
Part of Prime Time’s uniqueness can be attributed to its unusual instrumentation. The typical
lineup featured an arrangement that remains uncommon today: two electric guitarists, two
electric bassists, two drummers, and Coleman on alto sax (with occasional trumpet and violin
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