Ornette Coleman
Something Else!!!! The Music of Ornette Coleman

THE REVIEW

Not much time has passed. They showed up with this tiny kitten in one hand. They said it passed unharmed through the wheels of a truck, and so they picked it up. They thought it would die because its body temperature was so low, but then it didn't die, and the problem was keeping it. So, now it's here. It sleeps on the porch because it will have to gradually get used to the dangers of the yard, because the other animals will gradually get used to it.
Spring has arrived and it chases the leaves moved by the wind. The leaves rumble, vibrate on themselves, and it crouches, belly almost to the ground, waits, then, when the wind makes them fly away, it pounces and brings them back to the asphalt. It looks like a little tiger with a little gazelle. It has the instinct, but it's new to this world and goes clumsily. It wiggles as it plays, while trying to be serious.
It could be that my eardrums, in these weeks, are owned by Ornette Coleman, it could be that I watch it play with the leaves while an alto sax lights up my synapses, but its movements - necessary because imprinted by life itself and clumsy because still not ready for this life -, it itself reminds me of Ornette. In every way.

Ornette Coleman always complained that other musicians didn't want him around, that they always considered him out of tune, that he forgot the changes and so, when you are left alone, you can only be free and he was free. Anyway, he was an elevator operator. He pressed the wrong button and shot up to another planet. That's it.
It's not his phrasing that strikes me. It's not furious or deep like Coltrane's. It doesn't burst out of the speakers like McLean's increasing one - to stay on the alto sax theme. For me, his phrasing is instinct. No mediation between the content of the mind and the action. Straight ahead, pawing at the melody, with his ears, Ornette's, ready for any stimulus the world can grant him. Listen and play over it. That's the motto.

"Something Else!!!!", 1958, something else, the desire to reach a new dimension but not yet knowing how to do it. "Something Else!!!!" won't be Coleman's most beautiful album - honestly, I couldn't choose my favorite -, but it certainly has the charm of a borderline, frontier album: one foot on hard-bop and the other on the future, on this "free" that he feels, glimpses but still doesn't know how to describe and face. Adding more charm is the debut album factor, and hence that natural desire to give "everything" that's possible to give. Perhaps too much.

Don Cherry on trumpet; Payne-Higgins taking care of the rhythm; Norris on piano, chiseling the melody on the rhythm... it'll be the last time. The piano kept the music anchored to coordinates; freedom is not relative and thus away with the piano, but this is the future. Not now. Now we go from the subway "The Sphinx" to the suave "Jayne" - the longest composition on this album, my favorite -; from the refrains that are memorized at first listen of "The Disguise" and "Angel Voice" to the sense of peace and joy, nestled between the lines of "The Blessing" - already composed in 1951 and that some even credit as "his first composition". Now there's "Invisible": the beginning of the journey, which possesses "that certain something" that, indeed, transforms it from a simple composition to the beginning of a journey.

Perhaps not the best starting point, perhaps not. It remains - "Something Else!!!!" - an episode, for Ornette Coleman, more unique than rare.

It will be called Ornette. It's decided. Someone says it doesn't fit, as a name, for a cat, but considering that Descartes, my old cat, was a great cat, I am at peace. At least no less than usual.