Music » Avant Garde & Free Jazz Music

On this highly influential 1959 album, Ornette Coleman's unique writing style and idiosyncratic solo language forever changed the jazz landscape. On classics such as "Lonely Woman," "Congeniality," and "Focus on Sanity," Coleman used the tunes' moods and melodic contours, rather than their chords, as a basis for his improvisations. In so doing, he opened up jazz soloing immensely and ushered in new freedoms--both individually and collectively. Lest these innovations sound too dry or abstract, it must be noted that both Coleman and trumpeter Don Cherry play with a deep-felt emotion and joy that is as infectious today as it was then. This is truly an essential jazz recording, marking the end of one era, providing the blueprint for the next. --Wally Shoup

Release Date: 1993-04-19, Audio CD, Denon Records

Release Date: 1993-05-04, Audio CD, Evidence

Array

Limited Edition Japanese pressing of this album comes housed in a miniature LP sleeve. 2007.

By 1961, when Free Jazz was released, alto saxophonist and composer Ornette Coleman was infamous in the jazz world. His searing alto sax and full-ensemble take on melody were assailed by critics. Free Jazz only furthered Coleman's infamy, with its seamless, seemingly atonal high energy and wholesale lack of a melodic or harmonic center. For the session, Coleman assembled two complete quartets and had them play the same music opposite each other, with diving power and a kind of strange grace usually associated with acoustic blues. The music is raw and incisive, with sharp tones and biting solos appearing amidst propulsive rhythms that still seem whispery in their swishing shuffle. This recording helped cast the 1960s--and every decade since--in jazz. It drew a line in the sand, and critics, fans, and musicians are still haggling over the line today. --Andrew Bartlett

Bassist Arild Andersen assembled this close-knit trio in which he joins a fellow veteran, drummer John Marshall, and Vassilis Tsabropoulos, a young pianist who's distinguished himself in the classical field. It's a remarkable jazz debut for the Greek pianist, whose playing reveals none of the stiffness or empty technical display that often appears when classical players turn to improvisation. He belongs to a distinctly European stream of pianists initially influenced by Bill Evans, but which has developed an identity of its own. For sheer beauty of sonority and effective use of single notes, he can even invoke comparison with another Mediterranean pianist, the brilliant Enrico Pieranunzi. Tsabropoulos can recast the simplest elements in surprising combinations, and he works closely with Andersen and Marshall in creating gradual tension curves. There's delicacy in the way he uses dissonance to expand "Fable," and thoughtful control in the unfolding, Scriabin-like lyricism of "Monologue." Andersen's dark, grainy bass sound and penetrating lines are stimulus and complement to the liquid piano, and Marshall does a superb job of coloring and energizing the floating slow and medium tempos that the group favors. At their subtle best, the trio's blending of light and dark hues can suggest the almost secret beauty of night-blooming flowers. --Stuart Broomer

Release Date: 1998-10-06, Audio CD, Grp Records

Polish trumpeter Tomasz Stanko has plotted something of a musical world tour on From the Green Hill, a polyglot of styles rooted in different folk and traditional forms colliding and commingling over a bedrock of collective improvisations. Stanko's music is surely jazz, if the genre's defined as an international language and no longer simply an American art form--clearly rooted in American traditions, but a flexible flyer capable of transcending borders and incorporating the vocabulary and traditions of the musicians who create it. In that broader vein, From the Green Hill is a varied and satisfying recital, which clearly reflects the aesthetic of producer Manfred Eicher, who has been encouraging the development of post-modernist folk music and idiomatic European jazz inventions since the early 1970s. Stanko's dark, burnished sound brings to mind both Rex Stewart and Lester Bowie, as he favors broad, vocalized inflections and an expressive vocabulary of bends, growls, whinnies, and shouts. Yet, as his whimsical lead over the fat, lilting groove of bassist Anders Jormin and the airy, percussive accents and crystalline cymbal phrases of drummer Jon Christensen on "Pantronic" demonstrate, Stanko's is a decidedly lyrical approach. You can hear it on the lightly swinging "Love Theme from Farewell to Maria," as saxophonist John Surman's furry baritone italicizes Stanko's pungent phrasing. Elsewhere, the violin of Michelle Makarski and the bandoneon of Dino Saluzzi offer savory overtones from Warsaw, Paris, and Buenos Aires. --Chip Stern

These are tunes that Coleman wrote in his early 20s, that he finally got a chance to record in his late 20s, in 1958. He had, meanwhile, been leading the life of a musical maverick, often-fired by leaders perturbed by his idiosyncratic approach. He was, after all, intent on digging up and replanting jazz. Hearing the startling exuberance in Coleman's compositions, and in his own whinnying playing, one senses that--truly--an annunciation is being made: Here is Something Else. With sublime assurance, Coleman was breaking free from the dictates of chordal playing, in search of increased melodic and harmonic opportunities. Pianist Walter Norris obliges by generally staying out of the way, after session producers put him in it--it is clear that the piano was not the instrument that would assist Coleman's mission. --Peter Monaghan