Jazz Articles
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Free Jazz
by C. Michael Bailey
Ornette Coleman Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation by the Ornette Coleman Double Quartet Atlantic 1961 Alto saxophonist Ornette Coleman's masterpiece, Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation by the Ornette Coleman Double Quartet, is one of the hinges of jazz evolution. As a musical hinge, Free Jazz, heard from this side of its development, is a bit of an anticlimax compared with the two-label, five album prelude to this point: Something Else!!!! (Contemporary, ...
read moreOrnette Coleman: Sound Grammar
by Clifford Allen
It's been a decade since the last bounty of Ornette recordings. 1995-96 saw releases from his free-funk mélange Prime Time; a robust quartet with pianist Geri Allen and bassist Charnett Moffett; and duets with pianist Joachim Kühn, a German free music architect. Indeed, the past three decades have seen an inordinate amount of change for Coleman's groups, and though the fundamentals of his music may remain basically untouched, their aesthetic presence and reach seemed, for a while, to be apples ...
read moreOrnette Coleman: Sound Grammar
by Dan McClenaghan
In the beginning of free jazz, there was Ornette Coleman. Actually, the alto saxophonist was the beginning of free jazz. His 1959 Atlantic recording The Shape of Jazz to Come followed on the heels of a couple of innovative smaller label outings that didn't make a splash at the time. Many musicians have followed Coleman down the path of freedom, but none have equaled him.Sound Grammar is his first CD release in ten years. His last studio efforts, ...
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