Ornette Coleman Goes to School

In 1940, Serge Koussevitzky, Music Director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and a mentor to Leonard Bernstein, created the Tanglewood Music Centre in Western Massachusetts. The Tanglewood Estate had been donated to the BSO three years earlier. It became the summer home of the orchestra, and a music school was established. The first faculty included the composers Aaron Copland and Paul Hindemith.

In 1950, what had remained of the estate including outbuildings, was purchased by a New York couple to create a performing space for folk musicians, including the conversion of one building into an Inn with accommodation. They also created what became known as The Music Barn, a venue that played host to many well known folk and jazz musicians. 

In 1957 they also established a not-for-profit music school. Their faculty included Max Roach and Gunther Schuller. In 1959, just before his seminal album The Shape of Jazz to Come was released, Atlantic Records sent Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry to the school on scholarships. The writer Martin Williams was there, saw the school in action, and Ornette performing. It's fair to say he was impressed by Coleman, calling him 'exceptional'.

Martin's piece was published in the Jazz Review of October 1959, a magazine he had co-founded a year earlier with fellow writer Nat Hentoff. Incidentally, this same edition produced the first part of musician Zita Carno's two articles on John Coltrane, the first to critically analyse his technique and sources, including transcriptions of his solos. Coltrane became a fan of Zita's work.

A Letter from Lenox, Mass. by MARTIN WILLIAMS (photos by Bob Cato) August 31 From the first day of this year's session of The School of Jazz there was undeniably something in the air, and it was not long before one realized exactly what it was: in its third year The School was coming of age. It was probably possible in past summers to overhear a student bull session on whether life or art is more important, but it would hardly have seemed so appropriate--and for most of the people involved this year they were really the same thing. Perhaps Jack Duffy, an auditor and classicist fresh from Tanglewood, caught it best when he said that these people seem to think and feel as one action, and that here the whole idea of work was different. He was right. Work was pleasure, thought, freedom, discipline, passion, self-discovery. One could say that of jazz itself-and in our time one can say it of few other human activities. There were several reasons for this new atmosphere at Lenox but as one reflects on them, he realizes they don't explain it all. The mysterious and natural process of growth is simply a part of it-and perhaps the mysticism of it is too. The faculty has matured as a faculty; musical disagreements being granted, now most of its members seem to know better exactly what they are about and how to work a at it, and the new members (Bill Evans, Gunther Schuller, Herb Pomeroy) are decidedly part of the new atmosphere. Another part of it was a generally superior student body superior in talent, in outlook, and in experience. They were ready for a faculty generally ready for them. There were far fewer "teach me the changes and just let me wail", for whom "self- expression" is inevitably a string of hip clichés, and there were far fewer lvy League dabblers, buying their way into a world they may secretly think they should feel superior to. The Schaeffer Brewing Company scholarships did not bring in such types from the twelve schools where they were awarded, but brought good students. And even students who do not intend to become professional jazzmen contributed to the purposeful tone and musical achievement of the School. (Let us have more lawyers and engineers in American life who know what jazz is and can play that well!) For me to add that trumpeter Al Kiger (see Gunther Schuller in the August issue) recorded with the MJQ at the end of a session is in a sense for me to slight several considerable talents. Let me put it this way: the concert at the Music Barn on August 29 was one of the best concerts I have ever heard and a credit to everyone involved. Even when nothing happened there was rare honesty, and most of the time plenty happened.

Kenny and Max at Play

There were five small groups coaxed, cajoled, encouraged, taught, and finally led, by Jimmy Guiffre; by Max Roach and John Lewis, by Bill Evans, Connie Kay, and Jim Hall; by Gunther Schuller; and by Kenny Dorham. And there was the big band led by Herb Pomeroy. Student composer-arrangers contributed to the repertory of the small groups. Some of the results were phenomenal. For example, one ensemble had a group feeling that some professionals seldom get; Max Roach had taught one very young drummer how to drum musically in three weeks; a composer who had previously produced rather hip pop tunes discovered a real compositional talent for instruments; several who had arrived with heads full of fashionable phrases and turn-arounds, had learned to make real music. And certainly the donors of scholarships-BMI, the Harvey Husten Memorial Committee, United Artists Records, Associated Booking Corporation, Dizzy Gillespie, Norman Granz - can be very proud of their association with such an enterprise. But perhaps the most significant fact was the presence of Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry - on scholarships from Atlantic Records, I hasten to add. If the School of Jazz can teach them (and it did), it has surely made a significant contribution to American culture quite beyond what anyone has a right to expect of any school. 

I honestly believe (not that I am alone or particularly original in believing it) that what Ornette Coleman is doing on alto will affect the whole character of jazz music profoundly and pervasively, and that the first consideration is that what he plays can be very beautiful. (I had better say that I have not heard that first recording and hear mixed reports of it as a picture of his talent.) When he stood up to solo on the blues with the big band on the first day of school, I was taken. It was as if he opened up something in one's soul and opened up the way for jazz to grow. His music makes a new sensibility for one's ears and heart and mind, all the while including the most fundamental things in jazz. It seems impossible for Ornette Coleman to talk about music without soon using the word "love" and when he plays one knows that, undeluded, it is love of man his music is talking about. As is so necessary with an innovator in the beginning he is not afraid of what his muse tells him to play: "I don't know how it's going to sound before I play it anymore than anybody else does". The step he is taking, like all great steps, seems inevitable only when someone has taken it and Coleman is taking it with a sublime stubbornness: if you put a conventional chord or rhythm under my note, you limit the number of choices I have for my next note; if you do not, my melody may move freely with far greater choice of directions. 

Rehearsal at The Music Barn

Chaotic and a-harmonic? No. Sonny Terry is a harmonic, but Coleman is not for he can work through and beyond the furthest intervals of the chords. For John Coltrane, is it not simply because he quite naturally still hears and plays off of those orderly chords that everyone uses, that, like a harassed man in an harmonic maze, he must invite the melodic disorder of running up and down scales? Somebody had to find the way out of that passion ate impasse; it has fallen to Ornette Coleman to do it. When he is really creative (and inevitably he must still do plenty of mere searching), his melodies are unusual, but never jarring and one noticed at the concert, they can reach out and affect each individual in an audience. 

There are problems. Musical ones: he may still have to discover and work out much of it for himself; he must find others to play with besides And formal ones: it is quite true and inevitable that Don Cherry, who breathes as he breathes musically. I don't necessarily need eight bars to develop a line that it took me eight bars to state (the blues is not a strict twelve-bar form to a Clarence Lofton or Sonny Terry), but can a group follow me? But to say that his variations sometimes do not have the usual relationships to his melodies is not to say that they have none. On The Sphinx (the one mature Composition of his in the concert, I think, and a beautiful one) his solo at one rehearsal seemed based on a constant rhythmic development of his theme. 

I have said that the School taught him. When he arrived, he was (through lack of experience) no kind of large ensemble player. In the concert, with the big band and with the group of six, he had become one. And the school taught him about something about which, since he taught himself, he can learn still more: technical mastery of the saxophone. And there was a great lesson for others in his presence at the School: that music has its ultimate basis in the human soul and human feelings, not in keyboards, musical devices, or skills.

Several of the faculty justly hoped that "the critics would not fill him full of wrong ideas about his duty to be the next thing"-or whatever. Somehow, one has the feeling hearing him play or talk that he will simply do what he must do, not taking credit for his talent but simply feeling a duty to explore and use it, so long as he can work not deluded about "recognition", that he will play the music he hears, obey his muse, and fulfill his destiny as an artist, perhaps listening to what advice seems just and helpful but forgetting the rest, and resign him self patiently to the fate that any innovator must have. If he does that, he will be one of the very few American artists who has ever followed his talent without letting himself be somehow exploited by his "public" or his "notices". But, honestly, I really think he will. 

Ornette Coleman is exceptional, but perhaps his presence at The School was not so much an exception as another evidence of the growth it has had. Watching those enlightened faces as Gunther Schuller played and analyzed the intricacies of Grandpa's Spells ("of course some of these breaks seem funny but they are also very beautiful"), I remembered John Lewis's opening speech three years ago: "we will teach you only about the jazz of the past ten years. We cannot show you how Jelly Roll Morton played because we don't know." 

Marshall Stearns had played his records before, but now there was also room for a comparison of the music of Morton, Ellington, Monk, and John Lewis. And there was room for Ornette Coleman.