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Jazz Articles about Ornette Coleman

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Album Review

Ornette Coleman Trio: At The Golden Circle Stockholm Revisited

Read "At The Golden Circle Stockholm Revisited" reviewed by John Eyles


As the ezz-thetics label has already released two of Ornette Coleman's Blue Note albums together on New York Is Now & Love Call Revisited, both recorded in April and May 1968, it was always in the cards that both volumes of At the Golden Circle Stockholm, recorded in December 1965, would not be far behind. Sure enough, here they are, both together on one disc with a running time of eighty minutes. That means this single disc includes all of ...

16
Multiple Reviews

Ornette Coleman: An Innovator of the First Order, But Certainly No Messiah

Read "Ornette Coleman: An Innovator of the First Order, But Certainly No Messiah" reviewed by Richard J Salvucci


At the remove of sixty years, there is a temptation to say, “Ornette Coleman, so what?" His early music does not sound particularly out there. And by contemporary standards, it is not. The initial shock of Ornette Coleman in the mid 1950s wore off decades ago. Some of his compositions have passed into the standard repertoire. Coleman may have been a founding member of the Free Jazz Movement, but Cecil Taylor and Albert Ayler among others, moved beyond abandoning Western ...

Album Review

Ornette Coleman: New York Is Now & Love Call Revisited

Read "New York Is Now & Love Call Revisited" reviewed by Stefano Merighi


Verso la fine degli anni Sessanta, il jazz deve combattere una battaglia impari contro il mondo del nuovo rock, sviluppatosi dopo l'anno del flower power e dell'influsso dei nuovi gruppi inglesi negli USA. Il pubblico è attratto dalle insorgenti fusioni stilistiche--che Miles Davis intercetta con genialità--ed evita con indifferenza il mainstream e ancor più la durezza dell'avanguardia legata al free jazz. Anche la figura cristallina di Ornette Coleman non se la passa troppo bene, tra difficoltà discografiche e ...

10
Album Review

Ornette Coleman: Ornette At 12, Crisis To Man On The Moon, Revisited

Read "Ornette At 12, Crisis To Man On The Moon, Revisited" reviewed by John Eyles


The re-release albums on Ezz-thetics, by jazz legends from the 1940s, '50s and '60s, have been widely praised, particularly for their sound quality which is invariably much improved compared to the originals or later rereleases. Another impressive aspect of these re-releases is the behind-the-scenes detective work which has tracked down rarities by some iconic musicians. One notable example of this is the three previously unreleased live recordings by the Albert Ayler Quintet, from their autumn 1966 European tour, which appeared ...

7
Book Excerpts

A Life In Music

Read "A Life In Music" reviewed by Wulf Muller


The following is an excerpt from the Chapter “1996," from Wulf Müllers illustrated chronicle A Life In Music (Amazon Direct Publishing, 2022) Dee Dee Bridgewater performed three sold out nights at the glamorous and legendary Paris venue L'Olympia, with new signing to Verve France, singer Jeffery Smith, opening for her. Dee Dee's show was spectacular and really established her as a star in France. She had young trumpet player Roy Hargrove and saxophonist David Sanchez as guests ...

4
Liner Notes

Ornette Coleman: Ornette At 12 / Crisis

Read "Ornette Coleman: Ornette At 12 / Crisis" reviewed by Howard Mandel


Ornette Coleman, the musical savant who freed jazz and every other art form that cared to dispense with stifling conventions and stultifying pretense, recorded Ornette at 12 and Crisis at the height of the 1960s' countercultural creative promise and world-wide unrest. It was an era of citizens claiming hard-won freedoms as civil rights, of youthful energies fueling fast changes and expressive artistic innovations--but also of backlash, assassinations, inequalities, riots and war. The music Coleman and his band of ...

6
Album Review

Ornette Coleman: Genesis of Genius: The Contemporary Albums

Read "Genesis of Genius: The Contemporary Albums" reviewed by Jeff Kaliss


For many an Ornette Coleman devotee, devotion was pledged with the singular saxophonist's The Shape of Jazz to Come (Atlantic). It was recorded in May and released in November of 1959, and it's a matter of when in our life we caught up with it. For some of us, that's when we first felt liberated by jazz. That album, produced by Nesuhi Ertegun, remains a hard act to follow, even for Coleman himself. Or to precede. But “Hollywood ...


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