Ornette Coleman Music

In one day, several jazz artists were eliminated from the Columbia label: Charles Mingus, Bill Evans, Keith Jarrett and Ornette Coleman. The last artist axed was pretty despicable since he only recorded 2 albums for the label: "Science Fiction" and "Broken Shadows" (not counting "Skies of America" which was an orchestrial effort). Now for all of us Ornette fans we're able to relish both these sessions on a 2 disc set, "The Science Fiction Sessions". Along with some unissued tracks, Ornette re-unites with his sidemen, past and present, like Dewey Redman, Billy Higgins, Charlie Haden, Ed Blackwell, Bobby Bradford, Don Cherry,etc. Coupled with 2 soloist, Africain American and Indian, Coleman entrances us with his unique melodies and improvisations. Some of the tracks like "School Days" were featured in the Sean Connery movie, "Finding Forrester".

this collection of music represents a groundbreaking period in modern american music. ornette put together the perfect ensemble(s) to accomplish the task and they performed beautifully. the whole record is a wonderful meditation on and sublime interpretation of the whole of american music up to 1970.

none of ornette's stuff is for the casual listener, of course, so it's worth the time and effort to peruse his earlier works to build a frame of reference for this record. i consider this to be the pinnacle of ornette's recorded work - which is not to say i don't love his later stuff. but these recordings seem to me the essence of ornette's contribution to music.

At last! SCIENCE FICTION on CD -- 24-bit mapped, and given the full Mosaic-style treatment by Michael Cuscuna. Included are 2 alternate takes and 1 never before released track from the original 1971 sessions, along with all the material from those sessions originally released in 1982 as BROKEN SHADOWS.

SCIENCE FICTION is the first Ornette record I heard, in 1975, and I still love it. Most of it sounds quite like the great Atlantic recordings of 1959-62, with Charlie Haden on bass, either Ed Blackwell or Billy Higgins on drums, and Don Cherry or Bobby Bradford on trumpet (and all 5 on some tracks). Dewey Redman, in Ornette's working band of the time, also plays on many of the tracks. The twist is that there are several vocal tracks -- the 2 with Asha Puthli, the female pop/classical singer from Bombay, are heartbreakingly beautiful. (Some critics did not approve, but they weren't listening!) The title track features the poet David Henderson, and it truly sounds like Science Fiction. Two more vocal tracks, from BROKEN SHADOWS, are more conventional, and frankly can be safely skipped. A highlight of the set is "Law Years," one of Ornette's best known and often covered compositions (by Old and New Dreams and Ken Vandermark, among others). The variety of styles and textures made the original SCIENCE FICTION, to me, Ornette's greatest accomplishment as a cohesive album. (Be aware that many critics disagreed.) There is a wrenching intensity to every track on the original album, the first 8 of the 19 collected here, making a statement greater than the sum of the individual pieces, a testimony to Ornette's compositional vision. It is interesting to find that "School Work" is the theme used in DANCING IN YOUR HEAD, Ornette's first electric Prime Time recording from 1976. That was to be Ornette's new direction following this work, so SCIENCE FICTION stands as the last great recording before Ornette's "Second Period."

Absolutely essential!

While other reviewers have mentioned that it would be useful to hear earlier Ornette albums to have some frame of reference for this one, it's the first Coleman album I ever heard: That said, I became absolutely immersed in it. The variation created by using so many different group configurations, keeps proceedings consistently strong and simultaneously varied. The tracks featuring the Indian vocalist are absolutely breathtaking, and Coleman's playing on these albums is at once obtuse and very catchy. While this music may be complex, it still manages to retain accessibility and warmth. This is the Coleman album I will keep coming back to.

Since writing my original review of this album, I have acquired "Beauty is a Rare Thing". While I would say that most of that material is somewhat more "essential" than the Complete Science Fiction Sessions, I still stand by my claim that this is as good an introduction as any. Other great starting points would be Change of the Century, The Shape of Jazz to Come, or the aforementioned boxed set if you're willing to take the plunge. You'll probably want to anyways once you get your feet wet.

this is a collection of two ornette albums that were previously unavailable on cd in the united states, Broken Shadows and Science Fiction. these two albums, comprised here as one, are lost holes in the vast Ornette Coleman discography. The instrumentation is quite ride spread, including some very interesting vocal pieces. all in all any Ornette fan should buy this and listen to it regularly. it is excellent.

This CD is a bit of an oddball, because you have two versions of "Theme From A Symphony", and then an oddball song with the Master Musicians Of Jajouka. Ornette Coleman recorded "Skies of America" in 1972, recorded "Midnight Sunrise" in 1973, then took a little time off to work on his harmolodics concept. The 1975 sessions produced the "Body Meta" album and "Theme From A Symphony". I haven't heard "Body Meta", but it has a better reputation than "Dancing In Your Head".

So, what's the problem with this CD? There's really just one song. One the bright side, that song is an ear-worm, it has a catchy seven note melody that's hard to stop humming. "Theme From A Symphony" is a good song, the weirdest thing about it is Ronald Shannon Jackson's drumming in the beginning. He's playing a rhythm that's extremely polyrhythmic, so much that Ornette Coleman and his lawyer overdubbed some percussion later to give the song a stronger pulse. By the end of the song Jackson surrenders to 4/4's tyranny. After 15 minutes, the song ends, and they do it again for 11 minutes. "Theme" is very happy, and it's fun to hear electric bassist Jamaaladeen Tacuma funkily zooming up and down the neck of his guitar. "Midnight Sunrise" is not to my taste, it sounds like random saxophone out in the desert somewhere.

I recommend this to people who have "Body Meta" and want the rest of the session, others should probably get that one first, I know it'll be my next Ornette CD.

This is probably my favorite of Ornette's many albums. I really like his late 1970's material the best of his work, just because it just plain works - it's a great work and well worth your time - this cd is much less FREE than the others and it works better too. He's still one of my heroes - for sure... it's important for a person to try to do what they want to do and not just try to fit in and please everybody, and that's what I love about him and his music. Anybody who has the guts to go out there and play a plastic saxophone and expect people to take him seriously is an incredible artist.

The mid 1970s were a time of experimentation for free jazz pioneer Ornette Coleman. It had been quite a while since he had turned the world on its head with his legendary "The Shape of Jazz to Come", and his influence throughout jazz was widely acknowledged, even by some who had previously scorned him. Coleman had become somewhat more eccentric in his working habits, performing and recording less frequently. As such, it seems that looking back some ideas were fully formed upon recording when a large time of development took place.

Two of the great experiments from Coleman during this period was his work with musicians in Morocco (the Master Musicians of Joujouka) and his experimentation with electric instruments in his working band. This record brings together recordings of those two experiments.

The electric band material dominates the record-- two lengthy tracks, two takes of the same piece, the ecstatic "Theme From a Symphony" (originally "The Good Life" on "Skies of America" and "School Work" on "Science Fiction" and later referred to simply as the title of this album, "Dancing in Your Head"). The takes both feature Coleman's shrill sax doubled by guitar stating the theme and fluid and melodic bass playing from Jamaaladeen Tacuma that certainly is enough to secure his place among the greats. But there's differences too-- the first variation is significantly longer, with Coleman occupying almost all the solo space (on the second variation, he shares with a fuzz guitar). Ronald Shannon Jackson's drumming is quite different on the two-- looser and more open on variation two, although in both he quotes the theme during his performance to great effect. One thing that's definite, if you don't care for the theme, you're going to hate this piece-- it's reprised several times, and its sing-song quality is often described as grating (I love it, personally, but I also rank "Jean-Pierre" among Miles Davis' great compositions).

The session with the Master Musicians of Joujouka is a bit different-- Coleman and Robert Palmer (on clarinet) wail away on top of shifting backgrounds. The pieces are certainly interesting, but they've never been something I've been particularly enamoured with.

The remaster is augmented by an alternate take of "Midnight Sunrise" (the piece with the Master Musicians), and features crisp, clean sound that, particularly in the electric session, is well appreciated. A word of warning-- this record is very short-- even augmented by an alternate its less than 40 minutes long.

Lack of variation and brevity makes this one not quite as essential as much of Coleman's other material, but nonetheless it is a critical recording in his canon. Highly recommended.

I still remember when I first heard this record in 1976, shortly after it's release. I had just gotten into Ornette's early quartet and trio recordings and was mourning what I thought was his permanent retirement from recording. I was listening to the late night jazz program on Minnesota public radio and tuned in to this wild funky music. I was immediately captured by the funky beat, the swirling polyrhythms of the guitars and the astounding melodic bass playing. And overtop of it all was this marvelous saxophone. I kept thinking, "jeez (it was Minnesota after all) this guy sounds just like Ornette. But with a funk band!" Imagine my surprise when I found out that indeed, the plastic-altoed Texas master was back recording...and with such a radical conception.

For me, Prime Time was and is a revelation in the music of the seventies. Though funk and free jazz have many commonalities and the ties between them go back at least to Archie Shepp's and Pharoah Saunders' Impulse albums, the relationship is mostly unnoticed. Miles' early jazz-rock experiments were largely free jazz albums with funky beats. The Art Ensemble of Chicago recorded some potent free-funk in 1968 in Paris of all places. And groups like EWF and especially P-Funk often had extended moments in their jams where the improvisation lost touch with earth for a minute or two and floated freely into the stratosphere. But by 1976 much of the initial creative fever in jazz-funk had died...Miles was retired, Herbie's Headhunters were moving more to disco, and most of the early promise of the movement on the jazz side was sliding towards what would become "smooth jazz" a decade later.

Then Ornette came on the scene with this album and with his translation of the "harmelodic" principal to jazz-funk and a whole new generation of the music was born. Harmelodics is Coleman's much vaunted and little understood idea of how to organize free jazz music. Basically stated, it is an idea that the counterpoint of melodies creates constantly shifting harmonic dissonances, which, along with the polyrhythmic denseness of the rhythm section, creates a rising tension that substitutes for traditional harmonic progression. (It's couched in much more mystical language which serves to obscure the concept to the point where even some of the musicians who've played with him remain confused by it. One of my friends, who actually plays on this album, calls himself a "victim of harmelodics") Applying this principle to jazz-funk creates a sound unlike anything else...it's often dense and polytonal, but as is the case for all of Coleman's free jazz, it's still deeply rooted in the blues and Texas R and B.

Dominated by two long takes of the same melody, "Theme from a Symphony" which is a favorite Coleman tune that has an almost childlike sing-song quality, the music is a dense jam that at times resembles American funk and at other times sounds like Nigerian highlife gone sharply left. Coleman embraces the spirit of real funk here, which at heart is an African-based spirit, in which the individual players express their individuality and yet work together to create a marvelous collective stew. This African inspiration becomes more obvious on the two tracks of improvisation with the Master Musicians of Jajouka. Mixing wild free improv over the ecstatic Sufi music creates an almost trance-like feel, though neither track truly gets going before it's time to stop. They are more interesting as experiments and as signposts in Coleman's intellectual development than as successful tracks in their own right.

The electric group on this album, which was to become Prime Time, went on to release several very successful albums, perhaps even more successful than Dancing In Your Head. However this album is essential because of the ground it broke when it came out. Coleman and Prime Time had an electrifying effect on the downtown New York scene when this music started getting around the lofts. Its influence can be felt in the work of Blood Ulmer, Joseph Bowie's Defunkt and any number of Bill Laswell projects. But its biggest impact was on the burgeoning No Wave movement in the punk world. Teenaged Jesus and the Jerks cited Coleman as a major influence, and James Chance actually sounded like a more punky and less talented Ornette when he blew on his saxophone. And with the rise of the neo-no-wave groups out of Chicago the influence continues. Hopefully, with its re-release, Dancing In Your Head will reach an entirely new generation of musicians and continue the party well into the new century.

Chris Forbes

I remember buying this LP based on some review I read in some long forgotten magazine (Stereo Review, maybe?). I was in college at the time and just discovering jazz--you know, "Kind of Blue" and "A Love Supreme" were still new to my ears.

Anyway, I bought this LP and but it on the table and just sat there stunned. I had never heard ANYTHING like this before and really felt almost assaulted by the wave that crashed down upon me. I didn't listen to this record again for about a month and then slowing began to spin it more and more. There is a "goove" here laid down by Bern Nix that is like nothing that came before it--you have to listen to understand. The sing-songy chorus that goes on and ON finally explodes into one of the most astounding Coleman solos ever captured. I listen and listen and still can't get to the bottom of it. I've even transcribed it and it still confounds and amazes me.

Earlier this year my neighbors put their house up for sale and held "open house" every weekend for a couple of months. I got tired of the parade, so I opened all my windows, put the old LP on the table and BLASTED "Dancing in Your Head" at FULL VOLUME all afternoon. It was awesome.