TOO-MUCH FREEDOM
Efforts to tame free jazz continue. Ok, maybe not tame-perhaps confront, embrace, absorb and advance it. The question remains: Can freedom be learned, adapted, emulated? If so, by what process, and how long does it take?
Both the Bang on the Can All-Stars who performed Ornette Coleman's tri-partite "Haven't Been/Where I Left/UpFront" in its Peoples Commissioning Fund program at Merkin Hall Feb. 22 and the March 13 performance of the New School Jazz graduates' band, which played Coleman tunes at Dizzy's Club Coca-Cola had good intentions and pure ambitions, addressing the music of one of America's most endearingly iconoclastic, creatively intuitive, secularly humanistic individuals.
Yet one group flew beyond lessons its members could have just learned; while the other was hobbled by on core assumptions.
Coleman, who launched "free jazz" decades ago, remains as controversial now as he was when he introduced his quartet in a Village club circa 1959, though he has recorded productively, sustained a concert career, enjoyed critical acclaim and received international honors. His repertoire is indelible; characterized by naturally memorable yet insistently open-ended melodies, rhythms and harmonies. It's evidently fun for sympatico musicians to attempt and thrilling to hear played well. His "harmolodics" concept, however, is radical. His music requires more than digging his themes and navigating their chord changes. You have to take his concept to heart.
Less a systematic theory than a Platonic vision, harmolodics is described on Coleman's Web site as promoting a "richness" that "derives from the unique interaction between the players." Harmolodic musicians "improvise equally together," staying "deeply in tune with the flow, direction and needs of their fellow players." Like a musical version of the Golden Rule, harmolodics encourages "the freedom to be as you please, as long as you listen to others and work with them to develop your own individual harmony." But how to get a piece of that?
Coleman's collaborators have often worked with him directly for decades, sometimes suffering the harmolodic curse-rejection by anyone unwilling or unable to be as free. Some (Kurt Masur conducting the New York Philharmonic, for instance) have come to Coleman from genres quite far from his R&B and bebop background. That's fine with Ornette; he wants to offer universals, not principles for jazz alone.
But those musicians have to set aside their assumptions, and really mean it. There's the rub.
Prior to "Having Been/Where I Left/Up Front," Mark Stewart, All-Stars' guitarist, described what his ensemble was about to do as "an effort in translation." And they tried to do it-damn, they tried.
Drummer David Cossin almost swung Coleman's cheerfully skipping line, which Stewart and Evan Ziporyn on clarinet phrased tightly together then broke into whines and whoops. Bassist Robert Black and cellist Wendy Sutter plucked gamely, while pianist Lisa Moore restated the theme, in shards. The All-Stars breathed as one, and opened unusual sonic niches-Ziporyn popping out low register notes-before Sutter shifted them all into Coleman's balladic part two and Cossin switched to vibes, cluttering things up.
In part three the piece picked up tempo and density. Stewart soloed briefly using his whammy bar, and Ziporyn blew variations a la Coleman himself. But the point wasn't to sound like him, rather for each All-Star to sound like him or herself, then synchronize. It's not easy, and the All-Stars looked relieved when done, though not as sure they'd aced it as after performing pieces commissioned from John Hollenbeck, Annie Gosfield and Yoav Gal, composers who'd written in the sparkly post-modern idiom that's BOAC's stock in trade.
Those pieces required virtuosity and interpretive sensitivity, but no affinity with collectively improvised spontaneous composition. The composers had written scores, after all, and the All-Stars had to follow their dictates, not create together, afresh.
"There's no definitive version of this piece," Stewart said of Coleman's work-which goes without saying in jazz. Indeed, that could be a good thing, if the All-Stars were up to it. But they'd have to believe in, swear by, live their improvisations.
At Dizzy's, the New School alums were in their element. Tenor saxophonist Michael Kammers howled and laughed, grumbled and cooed in personal extrapolations of classic Coleman songs. Alto saxophonist Masahiro Yamamoto stood aside him, playing completely different yet complimentary counter figures with the lighter, keener, focused tone. J.P. Gilbert intersected the saxes on his electric guitar, sometimes lending a countrified feel; Morgan Wiley added sparse piano accents; drummer Adam Sorensen and bassist Marcos Varela were present and propulsive, never overwhelming but not self-deprecating, either.
These are jazz-oriented players at ease with music in the moment, scores or no. The New School trained them in practicalities more than proprieties. Soprano saxophonist Jane Bloom, who'd convened and directed the ensemble, taught Coleman's music via the oral tradition, as she'd learned it from bassist Charlie Haden and drummer Edward Blackwell, who got it by playing with the Old Man himself. Bloom's ex-students knew what to do with freedom. They took the opportunity to do anything to determine exactly what they wanted to do together. They served the music by learning about each other and trusting themselves. They created an ensemble in which each could star by shaping preconceived material as they individually felt it, and how their colleagues felt it, as well.
It's tempting to make a political metaphor of all this. If only peoples in conflict could exercise freedom by being as they pleased, listening to others and working with them while developing "individual harmony." That's a liberal hope or libertarian dream or Platonic vision. It might occur someday, but only as it happens in music: if common assumptions are agreed on, and conflicting traditions set aside.