Jazz: Back from Exile

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In conversation, shy, slight Ornette Coleman sounds more like a librarian than a revolutionary. But not when he breathes into a saxophone. No sooner had he arrived unheralded in Manhattan in late 1959 than he blew up a typhoon of controversy such as the jazz world had not known since the mid-'40s when now-legendary Saxophonist Charlie ("Bird") Parker was blasting out new musical horizons.

Camped for six months in a dark den called the Five Spot, Coleman gave vent to a new style of atonal jazz, a free association of angular and seemingly disjointed sounds that brought curious jazzmen flocking to the club. Many, like Modernist Composer Gunther Schuller, found it "the first realization of all that is merely implicit in the music of Charlie Parker." Leonard Bernstein cried, "Genius!" Composers Aaron Copland and Virgil Thomson also came and were conquered. But others shared Trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie's reaction: "Are you cats serious?" Some even dismissed Coleman's music as "anti-jazz." Coleman said wryly: "I guess it's pretty shocking to hear someone like me. They figure that now they may have to learn something new."

After the first crowd-pulling shock wave, Coleman had trouble getting club engagements at the fees he expected. So in December 1962, after staging a well-received concert, Coleman retired at the age of 32.

Uncharted Universe. Last week Ornette Coleman was suddenly back on the scene at Manhattan's Village Vanguard. On opening night the turn-away crowd was studded with jazz notables anxious to hear what the bearded musician had been up to in retirement. Plenty, as it turned out. After two long, probing numbers on the white plastic saxophone that is his trademark, he casually broke out a violin and began sawing away with his left hand at a furious clip, torturing the strings into a chilling, whining frenzy. Then, without a word, Coleman uncased a trumpet and raged on in piercing splashes of startled, yelping notes.

Disdaining the limits of standard rhythms, harmonies and tonality, Coleman's music is a constant quest for new freedom of expression, a reaching out into the uncharted universe of sound. The effect is a kind of stream-of-consciousness music, an unchained melody of jagged cries, urgent bleats and halting, irregular leaps, played to the splintered cross rhythms of his sidemen. Coleman's genius is that, like an abstract painter, he is able to impose a connecting pattern on an elusive free form. When it works, it is the most exciting music being played in jazz today.

Quiet Revolution. Coleman's two years of exile were "hard and hungry." In February 1963, he was evicted from his Village apartment and his meager possessions, horns and all, were tossed out on the street and removed by the Department of Sanitation. He slept in a friend's pottery studio by night, roamed art museums by day ("I feel a rapport with Jackson Pollock," he says). Last year he got by on $500. Living in one room cluttered with stacks of tape and three tape recorders, he worked on a book explaining his music and practiced on the violin—a $15 pawnshop bargain —"until somebody started knocking on the walls."