Ornette Coleman: The Outsider
At seventy-seven, Ornette Coleman is a handsome man, with a high forehead, an avuncular mustache. Lithe and graceful, he glides around his sleek loft with an aura of kindness about him. If you were a kid living in the heartland and fantasizing how an unbelievably cool jazz icon lived, this might very well be the crib you’d imagine — an open space with highly polished floors, leather sofas, curving walls and African art, everything buffed to a high-bohemian sheen. The icon himself needs no buffing — today he is wearing a sharply tailored powder-blue blazer, a dark-green sweater vest, a multicolored silk shirt, taupe slacks and impish wingtips.
I am offered a drink — water, if I like, or perhaps a box of Juicy Juice, or a glass of 1996 Comte de Lupe pinot noir. We’re in a slice of midtown Manhattan that seems to be in a 1970s time warp. From the window of this loft are visible: a beauty-supply house, a shoeshine parlor, a discount mattress store and an ‘Everything Must Go’ electronics store. Lady shoppers, their handbags clamped firmly between forearm and rib cage, share the sidewalk below with garment workers pushing metal racks of solemn pants, leather jackets and — another throwback to the Seventies — minidresses in splashy op-art prints. Across the street, completing the Ralph Bakshi landscape, a tenor saxophonist in a purple jacket and a pirate shirt plays on the corner, collecting loose change a quarter at a time, trying to scrape together a few bucks before nightfall.
When I ask if it’s all right to tape our conversation, Coleman looks amused. “OK,” he says, “but then we will have to think of something to say.”
What? But something tells me to get used to it. And I’m right — Coleman never comes down on the one, his replies always make me blink, and even his passing remarks bear the same relationship to everyday social chitchat that his stunning, free-form solos have to hummable little tunes.
A case in point: A few weeks after our first meeting, we are in a minivan driving from Nashville to Manchester, Tennessee. Noting the somewhat anonymous, generic beauty of the highway, I mention that we could be anywhere in America, approaching Albany, Baltimore or even Portland.
Coleman smiles, nods. Like any great improviser, he knows how to make the sidemen feel they are getting in some good licks. “I was thinking something similar,” he says. “Those little lanes going this way? And those lanes going the other way? How they’re really the same.”
Nearly a half-century after his recording debut, Ornette Coleman remains one of the most controversial, challenging and vexing presences in American music, and his playing has lost none of its ability to startle, and sometimes to appall. In dozens of recordings, made in studios on either side of the country and in concert halls around the world, with string quartets, symphony orchestras and sometimes with jugglers and contortionists thrown into the act, Coleman has never once relented in his musical assault on the status quo.