Jazz Articles about Don Payne

About Don Payne

Album Review

Ornette Coleman: Genesis of Genius: The Contemporary Albums

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

by Jeff Kaliss
April 25, 2022

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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Reassessing

Something Else!!!!

by C. Michael Bailey
July 21, 2011

Robert Louis Stevenson noted that, “The mark of a good action is that it appears inevitable in retrospect." The middle-to-late 1950s in jazz were populated with several “good actions," all considered inevitable evolutionary reactions to earlier genre, specifically swing and bebop--the latter the complex and elevated jazz style that had dominated the creative American musical structure the decade before, and, to some degree has done so since. These unfolding styles included hard bop--perhaps the most direct descendant of bebop; modal ...

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Album Review

Ornette Coleman: Something Else!!!! - The Music Of Ornette Coleman

Read "Something Else!!!! - The Music Of Ornette Coleman" reviewed by AAJ Staff

by AAJ Staff
December 1, 1998

Here it is: Ornette's first recording, containing his most conventional compositions, one ("The Blessing") written in 1951. Even so, it came only after a long period of struggle ("...most musicians didn't take to me; they said I didn't know the changes and was out of tune.") He was an elevator operator in an L.A. department store; he'd take the elevator to the top floor and practice for hours. He was about to return to Forth Worth when Red Mitchell heard ...