The Shape of Jazz to Come

Coleman, Ornette

album cover

The First Great Wail of the Jazz Avant-Garde

Cue this up whenever you want to be transported back to a time when radicalism was on the loose in America. These days, it's pretty much in the deep freeze. The culture that once revered the brave frontier explorer and the cranky outsider has become wary, reluctant to change, conservative in the most basic sense.

It wasn't always thus. When this album appeared in 1959, sparks were in the air, and there was growing receptivity to alternative views in art and society. Ornette Coleman, an alto saxophonist from Texas, seized the opening; through sheer force of will and a bit of press-agent moxie, he loudly created space for what became known as the jazz avant-garde. The Shape of Jazz to Come amounts to his founder's manifesto. It features no piano—and doesn't rely on the predetermined chord sequences that had defined jazz since the 1920s. Instead, he and his group seek out open, mutable harmonies that can change with the melodies, acquiring new colors and characteristics with each note. Coleman called this approach "Harmolodics," and his accomplices get right into it: As Coleman and trumpeter Don Cherry play questioning melodies and asymmetrical provocations, bassist Charlie Haden and drummer Billy Higgins interject jabbing, slashing rejoinders as the discussion evolves. (Among the many examples of Coleman defying expectations is the ballad "Lonely Woman," a plaintive theme that bears no traces of insurrection.)

Even some jazz hipsters weren't ready for "Congeniality" and the other winding, winningly melodic agitations on The Shape of Jazz to Come. And they sure weren't ready for Free Jazz (1961), which featured two fierce quartets playing at once, an étude for sirens in stereo. Somehow, though, a few bold souls responded to Coleman's shape-shifting music right away, and by the end of 1961, free jazz was in full cry, changing everything in its path.

Genre: Jazz
Released: 1959, Atlantic
Key Tracks: "Peace," "Congeniality," "Lonely Woman."
Catalog Choice: Free Jazz; Dancing In Your Head; In All Languages
Next Stop: Archie Shepp: Four for 'Trane
Book Pages: 181–182

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