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Rating: "I know that saying you listen to free jazz sounds as cool as declaring you've caught leprosy"
a DeBaseriota
Do you remember the first record you ever listened to? I don't. But I would like to know what sensations I might have felt at that moment when the first note touched my eardrums. I believe I have come very close to that sensation, thanks to Ornette Coleman.
Question: "Who da fuck is Ornette Coleman?"
Recently, this almost eighty-year-old gentleman passed through Bologna for a festival in his honor, with prominent lips masked by a mustache and the inseparable hat on his head of sparse hair, not to mention the inevitable saxophone. As a young man, when he was in his thirties, he set out to light the fuse, that is, to invent a new music, something that went beyond. But beyond what? Beyond everything, essentially, something that, once all that there was to be absorbed from contemporary jazz had been absorbed, it would deny it to seek an unprecedented language that would allow the maximum artistic expression of oneself. After all, the titles of his first albums speak for themselves ("Something else", "The shape of jazz to come"): there are no chords, the gentleman in question creates harmolodics, with the soloist who does not make variations, the notes constitute the musical fabric of the piece (if it can still be called a piece). Why do it? And why not, but above all because Ornette Coleman is a revolutionary in times when the only way people of color could express themselves was jazz: the destruction of established (or at least, assimilated) musical structures and conventions by white men is therefore also a political act.
But those albums were still raw; they weren't completely free yet. And then, one could, one had to, dare more.
On December 21, 1960, Coleman gathered, along with his own, a second quartet: eight exceptional musicians, including Eric Dolphy on clarinet, Donald Cherry on trumpet, and Charlie Haden on bass. One quartet would play in the left channel, the other in the right channel, exploiting the (for the time) new possibilities of stereo. Coleman gave few hints, some lines to follow, and the adventure could begin. Think about it: eight people who play together freely. Not at random, mind you, but free. Free to dialogue, not to follow any structure, indeed, to avoid following every preconceived structure, towards something new, that heart of darkness of black Africa that every jazz musician has sought. Emotion matters; technique is the means, absolutely not the end. "Free Jazz", nomen omen.
Coleman himself says that "what mattered was playing together, still allowing room for every musician, and being free to follow an intuition offered to me by another soloist". This is free: it is the least technical, cerebral, and complex music there is; it is raw emotion, it's like sinking your hand directly into the lava rather than touching the cold rock when the magma solidifies and crystallizes, it's a continuous becoming that stimulates the depths of the soul. That night, shortly before Christmas, eight men played together for a single 37-minute take something transcendent. Therefore, don't be discouraged by those who say that free is difficult, complicated, or not understandable: there is nothing to understand, gentlemen, only music to love.
Drink up; this water is for everyone, and not drawing from it would be a crime.
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