Shaun de Waal CD of the week
In the early Sixties, Ornette Coleman spearheaded a revolution in jazz, and this is the album that gave that new movement its name. Free Jazz is one of a handful of works re- released in deluxe (that is, fiddly sleeve-within- sleeve) packaging to celebrate the 50th birthday of the great, innovative Atlantic Records.
Free Jazz was the fourth of seven albums recorded by Coleman for Atlantic in a three-year burst, each of them key statements of the last big quantum leap in jazz. Led by his gritty alto-sax-playing, Coleman and Co threw themselves in the deep end, discarding the song-forms and harmonic paradigms that had, until then, been the basis and the frame of jazz improvisation. The idea was to jump off the simple unifying devices provided by Coleman – a unison passage or repeated figure – and then just go wherever the music went.
The single 37-minute piece that is Free Jazz (with a half-as-long first take added as bonus) is the most radical instance of Coleman’s approach, doubled in difficulty by the collison of two quartets, Coleman’s usual one with Don Cherry on trumpet, Charlie Haden on bass and Ed Blackwell on drums, and one with multi-sax-player Eric Dolphy on bass clarinet for the occasion, Freddie Hubbard on trumpet, Scott LaFaro on bass and Billy Higgins on drums. The possibilities for interesting developments – and the potential for disaster – aren’t just doubled, but squared.
But the crazy beauty that eventually emerges from what at first sounds like pure cacophony shows that this wasn’t just an experiment that had to be undertaken. It is a burst of energy (appropriately, a Jackson Pollock painting adorns the cover) that takes on its own life, still a shock to the ears almost four decades later.