Thursday, April 1, 2010

Ornette Coleman - The Shape Of Jazz To Come (1959)


Uh oh. People are resistant to change. They don't like to be uncomfortable. They like reliability...

Considering the other "top" records from 1959; Miles Davis' Kind Of Blue, Charles Mingus' Mingus Ah Um, Art Blakey & The Jazz Messengers' Moanin' and The Dave Brubeck Quartet's Time Out; the world wasn't exactly ready for Ornette's "changes". He was giving clues (mostly hidden in plain view; the titles of his albums for one- Something Else!!!! and Tomorrow Is The Question: The New Music of Ornette Coleman are as obvious as it gets) as well as the clues in his music; abandoning structure ever so slightly, it's not as "free" as Coleman would eventually become (or as out there as Ayler, Sun Ra and eventually Coltrane) but these are the seeds being planted in the soil, right next to all those other big trees that have their roots planted firmly in the earth of hard bop; it would shake their foundation to the core and by 1964 the entire jazz community would embrace "free" jazz.

So yeah, this kind of started it all...


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