Sonny Rollins /Ornette Coleman

[Freetoojazz]

If you want to read some good things about this two musicians and great artist, go to this site of Music Scene Fall 2005 (page 18):

http://www.scena.org/pdf-files/TMS4-1lowres.pdf

Here an extracts:

This coming October 29, alto saxophonist and composer Ornette Coleman will be making his first Canadian appearance in 20 some years at Toronto’s hallowed Massey Hall (the very same site as the legendary concert with Charlie Parker some 52 years before). Last June and July, the equally legendary tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins crossed the country during the yearly spate of national jazz festivals. Coincidentally, both men have hit the venerable age of 75 this year, Rollins on September 7, Coleman on March 9. With long careers behind them, both have secured their place in the history books, albeit on very different terms.

Different but similar While both men are of the same generation, they belong to very different worlds style-wise. Rollins, one of the rare surviving masters of the bop and hard-bop eras, is a champion of the great American song tradition, a veritable walking fakebook of evergreens and jazz standards composed by other greats like Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, as well as a few of his own (“Oleo,” “Valse Hot” and the perennial jazz calypso “St Thomas”). Ornette Coleman, conversely, was thrust on the scene amid controversy, heralded as the instigator of “Free Jazz,” a term that until its appearance in the late 1950s meant “music with no cover charge.”

Despite their differences, comparing their respective careers yields some interesting commonalities. For starters, each has been rather shy and withdrawn, taking periodical sabbaticals from the music and recording business... (read more, go the the link above)

[Lazaro Vega]

Can't get the link to work....

[Pete C]

Try this link

[Lazaro Vega]

Very good: the PDF did down load.

A couple of things. Sure wish Ornette would release a CD of live music from this current Quartet. They were incredible in Ann Arbor two years ago.

Ornette's early music, though, did have changes in it: it wasn't free OF harmony, it was free harmony. That is, the changes weren't as "fixed," that they, as much as the melody, were available for improvisation: unplanned modulations occured that the rest of the band would respond to and "follow." Check out "Chronology" for his variation on the changes to "I Got Rhythm" (with regards to Branford Marsalis for pointing that out). But these issues in Coleman's music are from a long time ago. His music today is something far more complicated and more fluid at every level.

As far as Ornette being the first, yes, "Something Else!" from 1958 starts it all, and he was the first to get the kind of attention he did in New York for the new music. Yet it is important to remember Cecil Taylor recorded his first album two years before Ornette's debut album in California, and Cecil's disc is avant-garde against the bebop being played by the figures who would emerge from bebop into the music of the '60's (Miles, Trane, Dolphy).

To really split a hair: "Sonny Rollins didn't invent a style." Yet Rollins method of improvisation, fusing together Bird, Hawk, Pres at the onset, is so much his own it's hard to ignore. "Thematic improvisation" may not be a style per se, and maybe not even original to Rollins, but it is a huge contribution.

[Felix]

Originally Posted by Lazaro Vega

To really split a hair: "Sonny Rollins didn't invent a style." Yet Rollins method of improvisation, fusing together Bird, Hawk, Pres at the onset, is so much his own it's hard to ignore. "Thematic improvisation" may not be a style per se, and maybe not even original to Rollins, but it is a huge contribution.

However, Rollins may not be the inventor of "thematic improvisation" (check out Monk's solos, esp. on Miles' "Bags' Groove", from 1954).

[Lazaro Vega]

Ahhh..

Originally Posted by Lazaro Vega

maybe not even original to Rollins.....

Maybe Rollins learned it from Monk, too, as they worked/recorded together in the '50's....

[Pete C]

I remember when I took a jazz history class with Chuck Israels in 1974. He pointed out Thad Jones' brilliant thematic improvisations with Monk, and was down on Charlie Rouse for just blowing on changes.

Chuck was a very difficult, opinionated person, but he was pretty smart too.