Our Kind of Spirituals, No. 63: Ornette Coleman Trio, “European Echoes”

At a book party twenty years ago a trim man in a dark suit, after a brief conversation, which I had initiated, gave me his business card.  

He was Ornette Coleman, and the unlikelihood of meeting this most original of originals at a book party was topped only by the unlikelihood of him representing himself to me with an ordinary business card, and of him representing himself to me, not the other way around.  

That was Ornette Coleman, who died this week, age 85.   Most artists we like we consider originals, and we’re probably right.   They are originals.   They sound like themselves and not somebody else.   But not so many are such originals that you couldn’t imagine a whole way of art-making without them.   These artists paint in their own colors, speak a language in which they alone are articulate.   In their work the push-and-pull in all art between the original and the good can be heard loud and clear.

The alto sax playing lines at once thin and strong, earthy and a touch sharp, simple and yet jagged and polyvalently complicated: that’s Ornette Coleman’s language.   Coleman was so voluminously original that it has taken his death – and WKCR’s weeklong memorial broadcast – for the extent of his expression (thousands of recorded hours) to become clear.  He was so insistently original that much of his music, sounding like nobody else’s but his, also winds up sounding much like much other music of his. A musician who expresses himself in a musical language he alone speaks is bound to sound narrow to the rest of us – is bound to sound, at times, unmusical, even unlistenable.      

Ornette Coleman always sounded like Ornette Coleman.  In his work, the spiritual proposition that every human person is an original, a one-off, recognizable finally and when it counts as no one but ourselves, is made music.

This track is simply the Ornette Coleman tune I know best, because I (not so much an original as he – but who is?) based a song of my own on the opening riff when I was in college.