Don't Blame Ornette

This is the man whom many hold responsible for the death of jazz as a popular form of music. Not me. That long, drawn-out event starts with the be-boppers, and the end of jazz as dance music. Ornette just followed his head, and took off in a new, but in retrospect, predictable direction - and if he wasn't such a good musician as player, leader, and composer, no one would have noticed or cared. Miles even cared enough to call him crazy - "Hell, just listen to what he writes and how he plays. If you're talking psychologically, the man's all screwed up inside." And Miles would know, right?

Today's listening is the Ornette Coleman set in the Ken Burns Jazz single artist release series. Whatever else can be said about the Jazz series, the single artist releases offer excellent career overviews of some fine jazz musicians. The tracks are carefully selected to be representative of career changes and peaks, and through some miracle, Burns was able to get rights from just about every label that counts, so that a single album can have cuts from Atlantic, Columbia, Verve, Blue Note, Riverside, etc. and this is no small achievement.

I'm liking Blues Connotation, which is very boppy with clear improv lines and solid bass work from Charlie Haden (great sidework from Haden all over the disc and some fine work from Don Cherry, too); I'm also liking the playful European Echos with its waltz quotes in oompah-pah time. The driving Theme From a Symphony (Variation 2), from his recording with the guys who later became "Prime Time", adds two electric guitars laying down funky riffs and rhythms over which Ornette builds a fast dance line with a North African vibe (I'm putting the source album for this track, Dancing In Your Head, on my short list).

That said, I definitely don't dig some of his harmolodic work, like the cut from Skies of America. There's plenty going on, for sure, and I don't doubt for a moment his sincerity or the quality of his chops - but I just don't enjoy listening to it (and you sure can't dance to it - but like I said, the last time you could dance to jazz was long ago). It is funny, though, how relatively tame so much of his work sounds in retrospect - like Stravinsky or the Post-Impressionists, who went from "crazy" to icons. Ornette has now become iconic enough to be graced with a Ken Burns Jazz disc all his own, the audio equivalent of a museum retrospective.