ornette wins pulitzer

from the AP:

Ornette Coleman won the Pulitzer Prize for music on Monday for his 2006 album, "Sound Grammar," the second jazz artist to receive the honor.

a small sign that something is right with the world, as i just wrote jessica who sent word of the news. surprising? well, it's one of those things, i think, kind of like when robert duncan won big awards for poetry in 1978 -- major artist releases first new work in ten years -- in duncan's case, the groundwork book. and likewise as duncan's work had circulated privately and in limited editions, so coleman had been touring with his two-bass quartet for a number of year. so anyone who was listening knew this was great music, tho i had no idea there was a CD in the works until it was released. and it as i wrote a while back, it is a pretty special recording.

what's more shocking is that coleman is only the second-ever jazz musician to win the pulitzer, and when wynton marsalis won it in 1997 it was for his three-hour oratorio on slavery. so this is the first time it's ever been won for a jazz work since it was first awarded in 1943!

malaby, coleman, the ex

lots of great music discoveries this weekend...

tony malaby is a reed player (tenor and soprano sax) whose name i've increasingly seen mentioned in "inside/outside" contexts (meaning a player comfortable working both inside and outside conventional chord changes and tonalities) and a few of whose discs i've picked up though they hadn't made a very marked impression on me. i picked up sabino largely because of the members of his backing band -- marc ducret, who i've heard play some mean guitar with tim berne; michael formanek, a stalwart bass player on the downtown NYC scene; and tom rainey, another solid member of the tim berne crowd. it didn't do much for me: very restrained all around. then i picked up adobe, which boasted another dynamite rhythm section, drew gress on bass and paul motian on drums. this one i was warm to immediately, perhaps in part because it opens with a cover of ornette coleman's "humpty dumpty." while never really cooking at full boil, this record simmers along very nicely throughout and still left me wondering where the "outside" was gonna come in.

well, tone collector (malaby, right; bassist eivind opsvik, middle; and drummer jeff davis, left) came to an die musik in baltimore saturday night (and will be at sangha cafe in takoma park on october 17 and for the ars nova workshop in philly two days later), and this is easily malaby at his most outside, their self-titled disk (on the norwegian jazzaway label) easily the most enjoyable of malaby's recordings i've heard to date. (read michael mccaw's review for allaboutjazz.)

joe lovano and joe henderson are frequently mentioned in that "inside/outside" context too, and if forced to i'd place malaby somewhere between the two, perhaps closer to the latter since i have yet to hear the appeal of lovano. in fact, malaby has a different palette of sounds and tone colors than henderson, even though both of them start from a sort of rollins-esque fullness of tone. i always think of henderson as maybe what would happen if you centered rollins between the thin, light tone and attack of lester young and the barking upper register trills of sam rivers. (i know this may not make sense, but it does somehow to me). malaby is somewhere in here too, perhaps, but even more relaxed and open.

restraint is the watchword in this group, but the sound wonders they work within their chosen range. in fact the words "restraint" and "range" are the perfectly appropriate pairing because the group does indeed range broadly and freely. opsvik walks strong and long but never in a fixed groove, and at one point 2/3 of the way through the first his arco work ran interference on malaby's buzztones and davis' minigongs in stop-time holds that reminded me of feldman's late works. davis seemed to attack the kit from awkward hand positions and yet this was always with the goal of coaxing forth some new muted taps. malaby sways sideways and searches for new twists in the run, no need to blast because the energy is already there, concentrated. this was a thoroughly and enjoyably exhausting pair of sets, the second one on the house since there were only 9 people in the audience for the first (18 for the second including a few repeats besides me and ryan). i'm telling you people, come out come out or bernard's gonna get fed up and quit bringing us this shit!

* * *

picked up sound grammar, the first new CD in 9 years by the 76-year old ornette coleman. this is a live show from ludwigshafen germany in 2005, with a quartet that features his son denardo on drums and two bassists, greg cohen (pizzicato) and tony falanga (arco). i'd heard some of these shows already and been extremely impressed, so this new CD was highly anticipated. there's no letdown here, ornette soars. the basses really provide the grounding, denardo chatters along midrange and up. mostly new material but three reworkings of previous tunes, "turnaround" going all the way back before the classic atlantic recordings to the tomorrow is the question. there is also "song x" from the album with pat metheny (one i still, unexplainably, don't own and have never heard), but the biggest surprise and treat is probably "sleeptalking," which ran as "sleep talk" on the 1978 recording with the prime time group, of human feelings. there it's played at a medium-fast with a kinda stiff fusion-techno feel to it; here it's stretched out to a beautful ballad, such that the little "sacre du printemps" opening lick becomes one of coleman's most soulful melodies since "lonely woman." this is one of the great masters in his prime folks.

* * *

also some pleasant surprises in the form of history is what's happening (1982) and joggers & smoggers (1989), two CDs by the ex, a dutch post-punk band still going strong after nearly thirty years. think of the brittle angularity of gang of four with the anarcho-communalist (or in this case socialist) aesthetic of crass who go on to forge working relationships with sonic youth and the dutch free jazz scene. these are dutch import CDs that i snagged at regular used prices (amazon currently has a copy of joggers for $90, suckers!) and that will be on heavy rotation in the short run.

ornette coleman 1978

it's official: i'm now enjoying the riches to be found at dimeadozen.org. and one of the first things to be a real ear-opener (partly cuz i've not been listening to much jazz lately, brain not seeming capable of the kind of attention the music requires) is an ornette coleman sextet show from berlin in july 1978.

but first: an anecdote. i was in downtown music gallery with bill and kevin, probably when we went up for the cecil taylor show at castle clinton (or possible for the vision festival), and manny lunch was pushing these ornette coleman CD-Rs on us, vinyl transfers of stuff that's not yet been reissued on vinyl (or was of quasi-bootleg status to begin with), and he's playing the first track of one of the early prime time band records and a few seconds in and i'm like hey waitaminute, that's rites of spring. and everyone's like what, and i'm like that, that horn lick, that's the opening oboe melody on stravinsky's rites of spring.

then on some subsequent trip to philly -- i think it was subsequent, and i think it was late december 2005 when i was there for the MLA -- i picked up ornette coleman's Of Human Feelings, a 1979 session that came out on a 1982 LP he did for the antilles label (the budget division of island records -- god i wonder which of the big five bought up those rights? which is of course why you won't see it reissued on CD anytime soon) which i found at a.k.a. for seven bucks. when i brought it home and put on side one i realized it was the same CD-R that manny lunch was trying to sell us at DMG with the rites of spring lick.

all this by way of saying that the ornette coleman sextet show, live at the quartier latin in berlin, july 4 1978, opens with that same damn track with the rits of spring lick. it's called "sleep talk," and unlike the 3:31 version on the LP, this live version is a 20:29 blowout! i've not listened to the of human feelings album much cuz it just sounded a little to clean and tight and, well, like disco or something. (peter niklas wilson calls it "probably the catchiest, yes, one could even say the most commercial album, that Coleman had recorded up until 1979" (Ornette Coleman: His Life and Music, page 206). this live show however rocks. it really sounds like what would happen if you crossed bitches brew with ornette's free jazz record: loose and chaotic where the former is tight and controlled. so you can bet i'll go back to the album and whatever others i can find cuz i really don't know this period in coleman's work well at all.