Spent the day trying to organize my apartment a little. To pass the time while I assembled some new bookshelves, I listened to Ornette Coleman's 1977 album Dancing in Your Head.
Coleman once said, "I could play and sound like Charlie Parker note-for-note, but I was only playing it from method. So I tried to figure out where to go from there." Where he went was what is commonly termed "free jazz" and Dancing in Your Head is a great big, crazy slab of it. The first two cuts are basically Coleman and guitarists Charles Ellerbee and Bern Nix improvising on a theme in Bb. Coleman had become interested in Moroccan music, as evidenced by the track "Midnight Sun," which featured Coleman in a free-form jam with music critic Rober Palmer and the Master Musicians of Jajouka.
I find myself alternately exhilarated and exasperated by this music. There is a clear joyfulness in the sound and there are moments of fascinating interplay between the musicians. The exposition of the theme, which is pretty simplistic, is a crazy eruption that doesn't sound at all like what we normally hear as jazz.
But there is also a sense that, quite frankly, this is bullshit.
The music is, by design, organized chaos and I find myself wondering if there is a point at which we've left music of enduring interest and just going to a bunch of highly-trained musicians goofing around. Coleman's solos are so out there, so nonsensical, so uninterested in being anything, that I must confess I lose interest and start to feel like we've just ventured into pure randomness. And if we get to pure randomness, do we even need a bunch of guys with stellar jazz chops anymore? What then, is the difference between "Theme from a Symphony (Variation 1)" and, say, "The Waiting Room," off The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway by Genesis? Let's face it, critics were not hailing Steve Hackett and Tony Banks as geniuses for that track.
So I guess this is a confession for me. Maybe I am a Philistine, but I can't help but feel that this is something other than music. I feel happy, but conned.
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7 comments:
George Martin commented on the Beatles experiments with 'randomness' in music. He says that only about 10% ends up being interesting to the listener. I've done my own experimental tracks with drones and random sounds, and though it fascinates me endlessly, for others it's just a mess of uninteresting noise.
I think Ornette is one of those people, like Jackson Pollack, whose greatest contribution isn't so much the actual piece of art, but the idea of how, when, where, and why it was made. One of those artists who exists to push the boundary solely to allow us to see the boundary.
The difference between Ornette and Genesis is quite simply that he was Ornette and they were Genesis. They existed within a rock world, in a time when it was becoming increasinly bloated and self important, while he existed within a jazz world that might also have become bloated and self important. But for him it worked because he could push up against the fence, bending it a little bit- and incidently, inspiring people like Lou Reed in the process. The fact that he and his were so highly trained meant that they were taken seriously by the establishment, even as they acted nonsensically (and quite possibly non-musically).
We all know how one man's noise is another man's music, and that it's a pretty grey line between the two. The last 5 minutes (or maybe 10) of "Sister Ray," for example, move into almost pure white noise, but there's an elation there. Is it a con? I don't know, but I don't feel like it matters, since it meant that Sonic Youth could take this excursion down a wobbly rail and no one thought it odd.
That being said, I own a gorgeous vinyl copy of "Free Jazz," which I don't think I've ever listened to in its entirety.
It gets into a really interesting question of the relationship between the music and the expectation created by the story around it. Do you need to know the story of what Coleman was after to get into it? If you do, does that tell us anything intersting, or does it matter? Does music always have to stand up on its own?
Those are excellent questions.
I think, in its purest sense, music is supposed to stand on its own, but that's darned near impossible.
There is always a context, even if it's just the number of notes in an octave, or the timbres of musical instruments, that put music in a certain place. That's why it's so difficult for Westerners to "get" music from the Far East, for example. Without something as simple as a set of tonal references we get out of our element very quickly.
I think the only reason I got into Ornette (as little as I did) was because of the expectation, entirely second hand (via Lou Reed), of what the music would be - or what it meant (albeit to someone else). I don't know if it's always necessary, but it's hard for me to think of a piece of music that I've heard that didn't have at least some kind of reference in my life. With lyrics it's a lot easier, 'cause the "story" is right there - even if it's metaphorical or nonsensical we still feel like there is something to be unraveled or understood.
Oh yeah, and Genesis sucks.
I got kicked out of John Zorn show for laughing with my friends while enjoying a beer with them. Zorn and his band of pompous monkeys were banging away at extremely high volume and we were tapped out by a bouncer as some snobby elitest stood behind him pointing to us like we were Garp at the Ellen Jamsian Society get together.
I get the point, but it's a con...
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