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The free jazz alchemy of Ornette Coleman: See the jazz giant in action in seldom-seen studio footage
05.28.2018
05:54 pm
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“I’m in love with eternity . . . I don’t care about how many changes that go on, as long as it keeps going on.”

Ornette Coleman

In 1965 a bohemian American expat in Paris named Tom White shot an almost silent B&W art film “happening” titled Who’s Crazy? His movie depicted the inmates of an insane asylum who are being transported somewhere by bus when they are able to escape to a farmhouse where they frolic, eat, dance, prance, primal scream, make a mess, pull faces, drip candle wax on each other, light stuff on fire and generally “act out” and get their Vietnam-era freak frenzy on, plus there is a kangaroo court enacted at one point. And a wedding. If this sounds like what a Living Theatre production of King of Hearts might have looked like should they have attempted one, well you’re in the immediate ballpark already as the inmates were in fact played by actual members of the Living Theatre, then living in exile in Europe while their married leaders Julian Beck and Judith Malina did a stint in prison back home in America for tax troubles. White’s film was screened at the 1966 Cannes Film Festival and Salvador Dali was reported to have loved it, although the Becks hated it, telling White that his film did not represent the Living Theatre’s “energy vector.” (“Well they would think that, wouldn’t they?” I can almost hear you saying under your breath.)

Who’s Crazy? never found any sort of distribution and was forgotten for fifty years, with just one extant 35mm print stored in White’s garage when it was rediscovered in 2016 by Vanessa McDonnell, a programmer at Brooklyn microcinema Spectacle. Since then the film has screened at Lincoln Center and Anthology Film Archives and been written about in the New York Times.
 

 

“To be a man, whatever a man is… There is something that is very important about being a man. And it’s not necessarily your honesty, or your philosophy; but it has more to do with you being able to get away with what you can do and someone else saying, ‘Well that’s him.’”

—Ornette Coleman

But White’s oddball film is not really our topic here, it is the film’s remarkable soundtrack, which was improvised in Paris by Ornette Coleman and the two other members of his trio—David Izenzon on bass and Charles Moffett on percussion, the same musicians who accompanied Coleman on his classic Golden Circle albums. In 1966 Ornette Coleman would have been considered perhaps the most far-out of the furthest-out avant garde jazz musicians of that era (and long past it) and in the mid-1960s he was on a creative hot streak that had been going on for quite some time. He met White while touring in France and agreed to do the soundtrack for Who’s Crazy? The trio improvised some nervous and beautifully chaotic music whilst watching the film as it was screened for them in the recording studio.  A young Marianne Faithfull sings lyrics written especially for her by Ornette “Is God man? Is man God?” in a track titled “Sadness.”

But Coleman’s music—released as bootlegs in the late 70s and a Japanese CD in the early 90s—was not the only ancillary result of Tom White’s pre-hippie art film: English documentary filmmaker Dick Fontaine made his own short film, titled David, Moffett, and Ornette, about the soundtrack recording session. The film is an amazing treat, by far the most intimate portrait we have of this giant of jazz at the height of his powers. Comparable to being able to watch the master painting in The Mystery of Picasso or indeed the footage of Miles Davis and his Quintet similarly improvising as he watched Louis Malle’s film noir, Ascenseur pour l’échafaud (“Elevator to the Gallows”) unspool, we get to SEE a great musical genius at work and in Ornette’s case we see his fingers on his violin and piano (yes piano, an instrument Coleman never played on any album) and his lips on his horn. You get to see him THINK and it’s absolutely an extraordinary thing to be able to witness.

Ornette Coleman: The Atlantic Years deluxe 10-LP vinyl box has just been released by Rhino. Enter below to win.
 

 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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05.28.2018
05:54 pm
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Ornette Coleman, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, John Cage and Sonny Rollins in superb sixties jazz films

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The three short films below are all phenomenal documents of a seminal period in American modern jazz avant-garde experimentation captured candidly, directly, and thrillingly through the superb filmmaking talents of British documentary visionary, Dick Fontaine. Currently head of documentary direction at the National Film and Television School in Great Britain, Fontaine boasts a long career in which he’s created nearly 50 films. Starting out as a researcher for Manchester’s Granada Television, Fontaine is credited with making (in conjunction with the Maysles brothers who later directed Gimme Shelter and Grey Gardens) the first British film that employed direct cinema techniques with 1964’s Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!, a Granada audience hit that captured the Beatles’ first visit to the United States. Music and musicians have been a constant theme in Fontaine’s work, another fine example being 1984’s Beat This! about the golden age of hip-hop in New York City. 

Fontaine, himself a musician, clearly understands the power of the on-the-spot creative process. Each of the short films below are vibrant portraits of the artist in the act of making music and include what are perhaps some of the most intimate behind-the-scenes moments ever filmed for some of these frontrunners of the avant-garde all gathered with hand-held cameras and sound equipment. Think jazz versions of Don’t Look Back.

For the sake of chronology, let’s start with 1966’s David, Moffett and Ornette, which captures alto saxophonist Ornette Coleman, bassist David Izenzon and drummer Charles Moffett as they travel to Paris to record the lush soundtrack to an obscure Belgian film called Who’s Crazy?. The performances in Fontaine’s film, which often take place in front of Who’s Crazy? as it is projected for the trio are nothing short of gorgeous, and interviews and candid footage with the band members reveal their reasoning for taking on what was a majorly controversial way of performing at the time. In particular, the interviews with Coleman that address race, sexuality and poverty are so relevant and alive that any serious student of his music simply has to watch this. The soundtrack to Who’s Crazy? on which Coleman plays alto sax, violin and trumpet, was released in 1966.

 

Who’s Crazy? (1966)
 
The next film is called Sound?? from 1967. I’d be doing it great disservice by describing it as anything short of importantly badass. The piece, a collaboration between highly influential multi-instrumentalist musical madman, Rahsaan Roland Kirk and avant-garde sound artist John Cage, explores the very nature of sound and music itself as the piece shifts between the two pioneers. Kirk does his thing. He plays onstage with three saxophones at once, and a flute and a whistle. He hands out whistles to the audience at one point and calls for a participatory “blues in the key of W.” He plays with animals at the zoo. The footage of a performance at Ronnie Scott’s in London is incendiary. Cage, for his part, is interspersed throughout the film reading rhetorical questions in a variety of city locations about what it means to make music. If music is just noise, can anyone do it? What’s the point in making it? “Sounds are just vibrations,” Says Cage, “why didn’t I mention that before? Doesn’t that stir the imagination?” The whole thing, if nothing else, certainly stirs the imagination. I really can’t do this justice in a blog post. Just watch it. It’s great.
 

Sound?? (1967)
 
The final of the three films, 1968’s Who is Sonny Rollins?, is a more somber affair. It’s a searching portrait of saxophonist Sonny Rollins, who, as the film states, recorded his first record in 1948 and had by 1959 become one of the most important and influential jazz performers in the world. He then summarily quit playing publically. Rollins returned to live performances and recording again in 1962, but by 1968 he was on a second performance sabbatical. He was, to hear Rollins tell it, fed up with the debauchery of the club scene which he simply says “kills off a lot of people.” Rollins and compatriot Paul Jeffrey are filmed improvising on the Williamsburg Bridge, a place where Rollins loved to play, incorporating the sounds of trains and other environmental noise. Rollins and Jeffrey explain their philosophy of freeing music from the club in more candid interviews and Rollins is filmed in a variety of outdoor locations while he explains his musical journey. It’s another fine piece of filmmaking. I’ll be damned if it’s not Charles Moffett (who started out as a trumpet player) who makes another appearance in Who is Sonny Rollins? when Rollins visits a music classroom in Harlem. It would make sense as the two did collaborate on a number of occasions.
 

Who is Sonny Rollins?
 
David, Moffett and Ornette and Sound?? were released on DVD as simplyDavid Moffett & Ornette despite the fact that both films are included on the disk. 

In 2013, Fontaine released a new film about Sonny Rollins called Sonny Rollins: Beyond the Notes in conjunction with Rollins’ 2010 80th birthday performance at The Beacon Theater in New York.

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Ornette Coleman: Dancing In Your Head For Decades
‘Beat This!’: Must-see document of Hip Hop’s golden age with Malcolm McClaren, Afrika Bambaataa
Sonny Rollins, Ken Nordine, Was Not Was and Leonard Cohen together on late night TV

Posted by Jason Schafer
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01.12.2015
12:39 pm
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Brubeck in context: The BBC’s ‘1959: The Year That Changed Jazz’

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Pianist Dave Brubeck’s shedding of his mortal coil yesterday reminds us how important it is to view a figure like him in relation to his time.

Luckily we have BBC4’s 2009 documentary, 1959: The Year That Changed Jazz to do just that. Produced by documentarian Paul Bernays and UK jazz DJ Jez Nelson, 1959 scrutinizes the impact of Brubeck’s classic Time Out album alongside three others from that year: Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue, Charles Mingus’s Ah Um and Ornette Coleman’s The Shape Of Jazz To Come.

The main Brubeck segment starts 12 minutes in, and the doc explores both the racial politics inherent in the Brubeck phenomenon, and the influence of his band’s groundbreaking 1959 tour of the Soviet Bloc, Mideast and South Asia on Time Out. But the whole hour is worth watching, if only for the compelling close-readings of masterpieces like Davis’s iconic “So What,” Coleman’s intense “Lonely Woman,” Mingus’s firey “Fables of Faubus.” The doc’s juxtaposition of Brubeck’s ascendance to Mr. Cool-ness against Coleman’s Cold War-tinged urgency is also a nice touch.

With an interview roster that includes Hal Wilner, Lou Reed, Stanley Crouch, Charlie Haden, Sue Mingus, Herbie Hancock and Nat Hentoff, 1959 offers up some crucial background as to what made Brubeck and his contemporaries what they were.
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Dave Brubeck Quartet: In Concert, Germany 1966

 

Posted by Ron Nachmann
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12.06.2012
04:52 pm
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Ornette Coleman: Dancing In Your Head For Decades
12.17.2009
11:43 am
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National treasure Ornette Coleman has been showing people what freedom sounds like for more than 50 years. Here are two takes on his wildly manic (yet strangely accessible) “Dancing in Your Head” seperated by twelve years, from a small room in Rome for a film crew to a huge amphitheater in Japan for a rapt and adoring crowd. Coleman has long been a thorn in the side of so-called “jazz” lovers the world over with his self-styled harmelodic excursions . Just take a look at these anguished comments and witness some hapless musos trying to come to grips with what they’re hearing. Fun tip: play both clips simultaneously for extra harmelodic goodness !

 

Posted by Brad Laner
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12.17.2009
11:43 am
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