radical druid

This is a reprint of a blog entry from 2002:

When in doubt of where to go musically, when questioning one's ability to hear harmonic structures, to find the “in” groove or chord, or if just in need of a general aural cleansing, there is nothing that will substitute for Ornette Coleman.

I first experienced Ornette's harmolodics at Berklee, where often friends and I would spend late nights with the eightfold attack of of Coleman's Free Jazz: A Improvision by the Double Quartet "barrelling forth from the speakers like the Mongol horde” (a quote from my journals at the time). Now, when you want to learn about phrasing, you turn to Miles' Sketches of Spain; when you want close-knit harmony that weaves in and out around the beat, I always like to put on The Gerry Mulligan Songbook; and when needing to hear just how much you can do in just two choruses (and how anything more than that is simply unnecessary, if you do it right), there's nothing like Charlie Parker. Doesn't matter what your instrument is, or what style you think you play. If you want to focus on these aspects of music, here's where the clues are.

But if you want to know the secret of space, to stretch your ears, to cut to the bare bones, there's no substitute for Ornette Coleman. Just like James Brown can teach you, particularly on Love Power Peace (live in Paris, 1971) that there is nothing outside of a groove (or maybe, cosmologically, it's THE groove), Ornette can help you understand just how melodic the entire world is. Ah ... but I digress ...

Did I mention that it makes great headphone music?

Back to my wonderful cup of tea, a darkened room, and that plastic saxophone ...

Here's a poem that I wrote one night in Memphis after listening Ornette and discussing Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein over endless strong coffee ...

Plastic Pocket Harmolodics

(1993)

Run down changeling boots the funk,
improves the shunned extractionary;
"Stove" in traction rips rough, ready,
pocket not for inner sanctums.

Cherry cola coughs surrender:
queasy Compton did the mother,
freaking heat in slumber tumble;
his xray eyelids slip the winking.

Bop, the Bird, the sticky finger ---
fallen anglos sin cojones
open quiet, quick and greasy;
down the town round wound up lounging.

Run down starlings, cop the mutants;
the groove pontificates for Shiva.
Flip the whip trip, banned in Boston,
this Coleman-ation's green and hunchbacked.

Cherry, copper-coated, kicks
mazal tov and "Off the Mutha!"
speaking shit in rumble mumble;
"X" the spot where Malcolm put it.

Stop the word, the slippery jungle,
pent up houses of the holy.
Open skies bleed hard and humble;
Central busts the changes open.