Hearing that Ornette has gone to the great free-jazz meeting in the sky led me to dig up the text below: a review from 2000 of a weird jazz/irish trad fusion event mounted at hideous cost and a reflection on it from 2003 by one of the participants, uilleann piper John McSherry. I published the text in a 2004 book on Irish music.
We only referred briefly to the Ornette experience in the book we’ve collaborated on recently (The Wheels Of The World: 300 Years Of Uilleann Pipers, due out in September), but there was an hilarious interview with another participant, Mike McGoldrick, during the writing of the recent book, where he performed almost a stand-up routine about it – a bravura long-form anecdote with sound effects which just wouldn’t have been the same in print. Ask Mike about it if you ever encounter him and he has 20 minutes to spare…
Ornette Coleman
Whitla Hall, Belfast Festival
Colin H
Concert review: commissioned by The Irish Times, November 2000, but unpublished
Playing his only European dates this year in Belfast the very presence of the septuagenarian tenor sax legend is a real coup for the Belfast Festival’s jazz department. The idea of pairing up Coleman and his truly sensational accompanists – Charnett Moffet on bass and son Denardo Coleman on drums – with a squad of Irish trad players, with no more than two days of actual rehearsal scheduled, was an outrageously daring idea and, regardless of outcome, puts the desperately stale programming of the Festival’s folk wing to shame.
The evening, however, began with a sterling 90 minute set from Coleman’s trio. Although often cited as the father of free jazz, Coleman’s music, on this showing, avoids both the cacophony and the call-and-response inevitabilities of those who trade more willingly under that banner. Rather, his ensemble work together, yet separately, around freewheeling melodies, deliciously unfettered to the strictures of resolving chord sequences. In practice this meant that while the rhythm players at least echoed the bebop tradition, Coleman himself was akin to a sweet-toned calypso-ing spider at the centre of the web – almost effortlessly melodic, favouring chromatic freedom to any single major, minor or modal scale. Six improvisations in and a piece boasting an eastern mode with rock backbeat – perhaps more easily grasped than his more singular work – engendered a heightened response, although everything played was warmly received.
The masses, though, had come to hear ‘The Belfast Suite’ – an advertised premiere of a new fusion piece with trad players. In fact, no such work was debuted: instead, seven traditional players – including the fairly well-regarded Michael McGoldrick, John McSherry and Donald Shaw – came on and played a handful of standard tune sets around which Coleman’s sidemen locked horns with gusto like Riverdance regulars leaving Coleman cruelly exposed as the lone avant-gardist knocking fruitlessly, and with some discordance, at the door of relentlessly unalterable modes and rhythms. The fault for the underachieving lies entirely with either or both the number of Irish players (behaving consequently like sheep) or the individuals-concerned’s sheer inability at interacting beyond their idiom. Oh, that this exercise had taken place with Martin Hayes instead! As it was, we had something akin to an ill-rehearsed version of Davy Spillane’s band. Two songs with Karen Casey were particularly futile. Still, Coleman had willingly made the effort – and the ovation and encores demanded suggested that most of those present appreciated that.
Epilogue: John McSherry remembers…
Colin H
From an interview conducted in Belfast, February 2003.
‘It was a bizarre experience,’ says John McSherry, Belfast-born piper and a man not unaccustomed to weird happenings in the wide world of music. ‘Ornette was supposed to have written this piece called ‘The Belfast Suite’ and when we turned up at the soundcheck/rehearsal – and it wasn’t the two days we’d hoped for, it was the afternoon of the gig – we were all thinking, “Oh God, he’ll have this mad piece of music and we’ll all have to learn it on the day…” I mean, I’d already gone out and bought one of his CDs – and it was crazy. So we all arrived, got up on the stage and Ornette says, “I’ve written this piece of music and I want you to learn it,” and he played these five notes, like a hook. So we locked onto that and said, “Okay, fine, what’s the rest of it?” – “That’s it,” – that was it!’
Commissioned to the tune of £70,000, it takes a certain amount of chutzpah and a monumental degree of self-confidence in one’s art to be able to charge £14,000 per note. They must, one assume, have been bloody good notes:
‘Well, I kinda knew where he was coming from,’ says John. ‘I mean, I don’t claim to know exactly what he was at, but the man’s been an artist all his life, he can play the music – and if you can play the music why limit yourself? Get in there and play what you want to. Okay, it’s not always pleasant to the ears, but that’s not what it’s about.’
Pinning down precisely what Coleman, often described (to his own chagrin) as ‘the father of free-form’, is about is a question that’s been bothering any number of eminent jazz writers for years. The man has his own rules, his own system – yet nobody seems to know quite what it is. The Virgin Encyclopaedia Of Jazz (Ed. Colin Larkin, 1999) argues for Coleman’s place alongside Louis Armstrong in jazz and Arnold Shonberg in European classical music as amongst the very few twentieth-century musicians who can be said to have single-handedly kick-started the evolution of a distinct art form. And with Coleman, blissfully mistaking the low C on his sax for an A in his instruction book at the age of fourteen, the seeds of his ideas – later defined by Coleman as the theory of ‘harmolodics’ – began by accident. For once he had realised his mistake it ‘started the process which led to a style based on freely moving melody unhindered by a repetitive harmonic sub-structure, and, eventually, to the theory of ‘harmolodics’.
Nevertheless, as the Virgin Encyclopedia pithily notes, ‘even musicians who have worked with Coleman extensively confess that they do not understand what the theory is about’. Consequently, a bunch of Irish traddies hired for an evening, and however accomplished they may have been in their own field, were never going to be anything else than up the creek without a paddle.
With Coleman’s notes appearing to have been randomly selected from a number of conventionally non-complementary keys, chordal accompaniment was a particularly insoluble conundrum: ‘That was a big confusion for Donald Shaw on the keyboards,’ says John, ‘what was he gonna do? But Donald handled it fantastically, he got into it. And Mike [McGoldrick] just turned round to me and said, “What the fuck…? Let’s go for it!” And he started wailing away, going mental – and when we did that in rehearsal Ornette turned round to us and said, “That’s it!” Do what you want to do – that was the attitude. Every time we looked over at Ornette he was always very relaxed; any time we looked at the bass player or the drummer they just shrugged their shoulders – they didn’t really know what he was up to either! It was like everybody playing ‘The Fox Chase’ – but each one starting in a different place. [When it came to the songs] it would have been very difficult for Karen to sing emotionally and stick to the melody, with all these weird notes going on around her – never mind the audience, we were cringing!’
Any time some kind of groove kicked in during the performance of the instrumental material, it seemed to be down to Ornette’s rhythm section almost locking on for dear life to the rigidly-built escape capsule of the jigs and reels: ‘At the rehearsal, after Ornette left,’ says John, ‘the bass player and the drummer hung on and started jamming away with us, this kind of Irish-jazz fusion. It was still weird, like, but it was working. [During the performance] we [the Irish musicians] would look at each other and at them, and try and click with them. But there were odd moments when we’d somehow click with Ornette and he’d get slightly more excited – you could sense that! It was like he was raising his game so we’d raise our game. There were levels of excitement – but you probably couldn’t sense that in the audience!’
Yet there were places – albeit perhaps only a few sequential bars here and there – where the fusion almost worked. John McSherry may not, of his own admission, be in Coleman’s league, but he can see what it takes to get there:
‘You have to have the ability to play loads of notes in the right places,’ he says, ‘before you can get to that stage where Ornette’s at where you’re playing so few notes with so much space. You can’t be an abstract painter without being able to paint ‘properly’ first. Music is boring – Irish music is boring. You’re limited to certain notes, certain structures. If you play it all the time it drives you insane – it certainly drives me insane. With Ornette, we all locked into certain [traditional] tunes, and then locked out of them. Mike would go off on a tangent, I’d follow him, then Dezi Donnelly would go off. Poor old Jon Jo Kelly [on bodhran] had the hardest job, with a drummer behind him crashing around all over the place – what can he do? But looking back, I thoroughly enjoyed it.’
And what about that composition, those exquisitely selected five notes? ‘Well, we knew the notes were there… we just didn’t bother playing them!’