By Neil Tesser
"The avant-garde" is, by its nature, a timeless phrase. It literally means "advanced guard" in French: the first soldiers in any fight, whether military, political, or cultural. So it can hardly apply to any one historical era; every era has its avant-garde, which in most cases morphs into the "status quo" as the rest of us catch up, and eventually becomes "old hat." In the 1870s, for instance, the art establishment thought of the paintings of Monet and Renoir as reckless and maybe even dangerous; later events showed their work, in retrospect, to be avant-garde; and today their imagery, on umbrellas and note-cards, soothes the masses. In modern political history, the fledgling United States achieved "avant-garde" status by establishing a form of government based on each citizen having an equal vote; today, that concept strikes so few people as novel that half the populace ignores it entirely.
"The avant-garde" should apply to a constantly shifting station on the continuum. Louis Armstrong's reinvention of jazz as a soloist's art, rather than a strictly communal presentation, represented the future of jazz; it thus made him avant-garde in the mid-1920s. So did Ellington's conception of the jazz orchestra in the 30s, and Charlie Parker's use of the eighth-note in the 40s, and Tony Williams's embrace of rock music in the late 60s. But in jazz, the phrase "avant-garde" suffers from a case of arrested development. It has come to denote a specific period, centered on the 1960s, when improvising musicians sought total freedom from the restraints placed on them by earlier jazz idioms. Perhaps the term has gotten stuck in time for the simple reason that so many subsequent jazz idioms sounded so conservative by comparison.
The Avant-Garde represents something of a lost chapter in John Coltrane's discography: an album that, when it arrived in record shops in the spring of 1966, formed a long-missing link in the chain of events that had made the Coltrane Quartet symbolic of the jazz avant-garde. (By then, the term was firmly established in the jazz community - and used with equal vigor to both praise and malign the music it represented.) The album's release showed Coltrane's first, not entirely comfortable steps along the path blazed by his contemporary and sometime mentor, Ornette Coleman. Soon enough, Coltrane would take elements of Ornette's "free jazz"; borrow the dense harmonic clusters of pianist Cecil Taylor and the timbral squalls of saxist Albert Ayler; and fold them into the intrepid, expressive "sheets of sound" he himself had pioneered in the 50s to produce the monumental quartet performances that capped his startlingly brief career.
(Not incidentally, this album also included Coltrane's very first recorded sortie on soprano saxophone, the instrument he had only recently adopted but would soon establish as an important and popular voice in contemporary jazz. He plays the instrument on two tunes; his solo on "The Blessing," somewhat tentative in its repetitiveness and still closely tied to his tenor-playing, only hints at the mesmerizing storms he would summon with the instrument shortly after.)
When Coltrane recorded The Avant-Garde in the summer of 1960, he had already made five previous sessions for Atlantic Records - in approximately 18 months. His earlier trips had yielded enough material for three albums, but at the time of this recording, only the masterpiece Giant Steps had appeared. On that album and on Coltrane Jazz, released early in 1961, the tireless saxophonist and composer had begun forming his classic quartet with McCoy Tyner; Bags & Trane, the last of these albums to be released (at the end of '61), actually contained the first sessions Trane had recorded for the label, pairing him with the brilliant bebopper Milt Jackson.
The Avant-Garde represents a hybrid of these approaches. Like Giant Steps and Coltrane Jazz (and unlike the soon-to-come Impulse discs Ballads and Duke Ellington / John Coltrane), it pointed forcefully toward future events. And like the date with Milt Jackson, it focused on a high-powered collaboration. But even though trumpeter Don Cherry shares the billing, The Avant-Garde involved not another artist but an entire band - the Ornette Coleman Quartet, minus its leader.
Ornette had signed with Atlantic in the spring of '59, just a few months after Coltrane had moved to the label; it makes one wonder whether the matchup between Coltrane and Ornette's sidemen didn't spring from some bright young A & R man's imagination. The collaboration might have been expected to raise the stature of Ornette's music, which had already garnered plenty of publicity, from the merely notorious to the truly serious. After all, Coltrane had apprenticed with Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, and Thelonious Monk and now finally stood with Sonny Rollins as the tenor titans for a new generation; his imprimatur on Ornette's music could only help.
But in fact, Coltrane had sought out Ornette on his own; as pianist and Coltrane pal Zita Carno points out (in the essay accompanying the reissue of Coltrane Jazz in this series), "He was always looking for things he could work around with and then incorporate into his overall conception."
Charlie Haden, the bassist in the Ornette Coleman Quartet and one of two bassists heard on The Avant-Garde, remembers the scene as if the intervening four decades had never passed. "I was just talking to Ornette about it the other night, telling him it seemed like yesterday," Haden comments now. In April of 1960 Ornette's band returned to the Five Spot, the scene of its historic New York debut six months earlier, and Haden recalls that "Coltrane was in the club every night, hanging out; he would usually sit at the same table and listen to every note we played. . . . He was very very serious and determined to put what he learned from Ornette into his own music. He was taking a lot of pains and a lot of care to choose the right music, and to talk to the musicians and get their input into what was happening."
In other words, Coltrane saw himself very much as the acolyte in this crowd. As Ornette would later tell interviewer Peter Watrous, "In the early 60s [Coltrane] was studying with me. He was interested in non-chordal playing, and I had cut my teeth on that stuff. He later sent me a letter which included thirty dollars for each lesson, and thanked me." All of which raises the question of why Coltrane didn't include the free-jazz guru himself on this, or any other, recording. But featuring Ornette on the date would apparently have inhibited Coltrane from putting his own spin on the music - from incorporating Ornette's ideas into his overall conception. And Coltrane was still not ready to go all the way: the three Ornette compositions her chose to record all stem from Ornette's earliest writing, when his songs still contained chord progressions (although Ornette and his band readily ignored them.)
Says Haden: "My sense is that he [Coltrane] wanted to absorb as much of our music as he could, and at the same time he was planning in his mind to do this record. You have to remember that Ornette messed a lot of people up; remember that Sonny Rollins also did an album with some of Ornette's band [Cherry and drummer Billy Higgins]. All these guys who were at the forefront of innovation where Bird left off, they were kind of bamboozled: they had to try to figure this stuff out. Some of them could handle it, and some couldn't. Coltrane was really into the music, though. He wanted to grab the moment, not premeditate it."
His record label had no such zen-oriented commitment, however. By the time Atlantic released the album, six years after its recording, listeners could only treat it as an historical oddity. Compared to the tumultuous, iconoclastic music Coltrane and his quartet had created in the previous few years - including the increasingly elongated "My Favorite Things," the album-length suite A Love Supreme, and the notorious "live" dates at Birdland and the Newport Jazz Festival - The Avant-Garde sounded almost quaint. (The album cover seemed to recognize this by using a fussy, fusty typeface for the album title and the names of the artists.) When the album showed up in 1966, the Ornette Coleman Quartet that had provided its inspiration was four years gone; one of its original members, bassist Scott LaFaro, was already dead. And the soprano saxophone that Coltrane unveiled on The Avant-Garde was already a staple in his music: its dark eastern wail had energized the 1961 Village Vanguard sessions and a few years later turned the Afro-Cuban melody "Afro-Blue" into a surging, apocalyptic anthem.
The opening track on both sides of the original LP featured the musicians Ornette had most recently used at the Five Spot: the remarkably expressive trumpeter Cherry, the harmonically revealing bassist Haden, and recently arrived Ed Blackwell, who infused his freely flowing rhythms with the sassy strut of his native New Orleans. "The Blessing" originally appeared on Ornette's first record, Something Else!; it offers a strong contrast between Cherry's solo, with its relaxed freedom from the song's chords, and Coltrane's anxious flights on soprano.
The trumpeter's own "Cherryco," a delightful melody that creates its own tremendous propulsion, represents the later thinking of Ornette and his associates in that the song has no pre-set chord changes. But as Cherry pointed out in the original notes, Coltrane settles into a harmonic framework of his own making when it comes time to solo; it resembles a modal blues progression not unlike Coltrane's own "Impressions," which he had written shortly before this recording. (Both tracks also feature the dynamic, skittering solos that made Blackwell a unique presence on a bandstand.)
The tragedy of this session is that the other songs recorded by this quartet no longer exist. Haden distinctly recalls recording "four or five" songs with Coltrane, including several others from Ornette's early songbook; and surely it would have made little sense to lay down only two tunes with this lineup. No one knows for certain what happened to the remaining tracks; Haden thinks they quite literally may have gone up in smoke during a fire in the early 70s at an Atlantic Records warehouse.
The album's remaining three tracks feature the same musicians except that bassist Percy Heath replaces Haden. At first it seems odd to find this perennial mainstay of the Modern Jazz Quartet behind either John Coltrane or musicians associated with Ornette Coleman; the saxophonists' careering adventurism seems to veer 180 degrees from the MJQ's storied tastefulness and control. But Heath first played with Coltrane in their hometown Philadelphia, and he played bass on Ornette's Something Else!, a result of his MJQ bandmate John Lewis's ongoing support for Ornette's music.
Heath took an obviously more traditional tack than Haden, hewing to the chordal framework of the tunes; Haden's almost freakish ear for shifting harmonies allowed him, then as now, to spontaneously create a logical chordal framework in response to a soloist's most far-flung explorations. But Heath feels equally if quite differently at home on the Ornette tunes "The Invisible" and the two-part "Focus On Sanity," the latter of which yields an especially interesting solo from Cherry: true to Ornette's muse, he follows pure melody through the uncharted harmonic territory, in contrast to Coltrane's less advanced (but still ingenious) efforts to balance sheets-of-sound arpeggios against this open-sided framework. Heath also fits in perfectly on the album's one "standard," Thelonious Monk's "Bemsha Swing," written only four years before The Avant-Garde was recorded.
Monk, of course, belonged to the avant-garde of another era - the bearded, bereted brain trust that had devised bebop a generation earlier. But he also helped shape Coltrane's music when he hired and directed the saxophonist in his 1957 quartet; and his clean, strong compositions were an influential precursor to Ornette Coleman's brightly chiseled melodies. In taking his initial steps toward his own searing, explosively emotional approach to the avant-garde, John Coltrane clearly knew where to look for advice and support.
Neil Tesser
author, The PLAYBOY Guide To Jazz (Plume)
Reprinted with permission from Rhino Records. Copyright ÃÂÃÂÃÂé Neil Tesser.
