Ornette Coleman - Science Fiction

Ornette Colemen
Science Fiction - Part I
1971 

Why am I writing about this record? [LINK]

Authors Note: This record is really dense and I decided to take a gonzo, real-time free form approach to the experience documentation. It is also a LONG double-disc/LP and I had to break it up into two parts. These are my impressions of part 1.

Pre-listen;

This suggestion comes from one of those few living masters of the Alpha Wave. My dear friend Jody. Our relationship began with him as my piano teacher. I only took a few lessons and then I had to disappear into the world and into myself for awhile to process even the first grain of knowledge he tried to give me. 10 years later we would reconnect for another series of powerful lessons that I am still processing. I love Ornette Coleman but I would say I haven’t ever really ‘listened intently’ to more than a few tracks. I have put his music on while I was studying or playing games, and I recognize his voice. However, there is so much information it feels a bit like trying to absorb Kant or Voltaire.

Fortunately I’m slightly better equipped to process Coleman than Voltaire (thanks in large part to Jody!) so I have an idea of what to expect and I’m eager to jump right in. But because I know what to expect I’m going in with a plan, of sorts. I want to keep from trying to comment on the technical or theoretical aspects of the music and instead I want to listen deeply and try to describe any Proustian jetstreams which are released. This could get weird.

What Reason Could I Give;
Loud, Rhapsody in Blue long notes. Summertime and the living is easy. The fish are jumpin' and everyone in sync. All horns follow the vocals in parallel while the drums and bass coordinate their own independent party. Solid introduction. Close my eyes. Turn up the volume. I swear I hear Chris Cornell in these vocal lines. He no doubt lifted a few things from this type of music.

Civilization Day; Bring it! Excited Geese running the streets of New York on a rainy night. Street lights reflected on wet pavement. Manic obsessiveness for the sake of existing. Joyous Panic. Drums bass, trumpet. Some reverb. That is all. The space is full and brilliant. I resist the urge to look up who is playing here. I should have done that beforehand. "I have to pee!" - “You should have done that at the last gas station” - “Whaaa!”. The sun comes out, it’s morning. What did we do last night? That was crazy. Fast forward motion lights blurred into carnival UFOs. Look out for that car! Jesus am I hung over or still high?

Only five minutes into the first track. I’m exhausted. I haven’t discovered how to listen to hyper bebop like this in a relaxed way. I think that’s the point. It forces you to either leave the room or get fucking hyper. And I know it’s going to keep pushing. I’m strapping in. I’m just going to let it take me. I’ll try to remain still and listen thoughtfully. When the energy finally pushes me to move, I will wait a little longer until the only avenue my mind has is to write the next sentence here.

Street Woman bass solo. How does only bass fill up so much space? Unrelenting forward pocket. Cohesion of aggregate sounds. Trying to identify all the instruments involved during the chorus. Sax, trumpet, bass drums obviously. But something else.. Two additional instruments? I remember, no, this is a quartet. 4 players. Is that right? Overdubs? Surely no overdubs. This feels too fluid, it had to have been played all live.

Science Fiction; There is no chaos here. There are a lot of notes. Some conflicting opinions and competing motives, but it exists as smoke. formless, yet cohesive. This track sounds exactly like the album art looks.

A consensus reached by the players that they should only exist within a wholly shared resonance. Once that consensus is reached, they can do anything they like and the center will hold. Even the introduction of a crying baby which is scientifically proven to be a jarring and unsettling sound is only slightly out of place and while it still pulls at those biological triggers deep within, it serves mostly to to put the rest of the sound into context.

Crying babies are a truly upsetting and dissonant sound, designed specifically by nature to sound so bad you must respond to it. Compare that please, directly with these other sounds. By direct contrast you see the ‘smoke of sound’ being produced is actually quite serene. Perhaps even joyous and meaningful.

There is likely some other meanings that can be derived from the baby, all of which have surely been dissected in a million student essays and critiques during the the last 50 years. There was a man saying something in severely punctuated sentences. Forcing the mind to automatically access the parts of the brain necessary for making sense out of noise. But because the words are so far apart, they lose their meaning. And in the spaces, the brain is forced to use that activated space to solve something, so it goes to work on the music, bringing it all into focus. Good trick.

Rock the Clock; Let’s play all the most annoying noises we can on the fiddle. This is experimentation with magic. A consensus has been reached with these fellows. As long as all of them are 100% in agreement at all times, the center will hold. "Hey, let’s see if we can do this thing that would not work under any other circumstances!" There is a wookie growling at someone in the background of this track. Do Wookie's play trumpet?

All My Life; Thank God, a respite. I love listening to the drums on the ‘calm’ tunes. Testing the absolute boundaries of the pocket. ‘The Pocket’. The holiest of temporal concepts, understood only vaguely by most and by me, practically not at all. Until I met Jody. It took him a long time but he was patient and I finally got it. I can’t always execute my feelings exactly in the pocket, but I can instantly recognize it now and maintain a deep appreciation for the dual tangible and quantum natures of it.

This is a template. Drums and bass carry on in tandem and seemingly obvious to the rest of the band. The rest of the band follows in parallel with a sliding and slow melody line. Both times accompanied by a solo/soaring vocal.

Law Years; Bass is revolutionary here. My concept of music history and who’s who is always a bit fuzzy. I don’t hold details like that in my brain very well. But this has a little bit of Mingus, some Ellington and something else? Bill Evans? It’s classy but incredibly dirty. Such perfect reciprocity with the drums. Of course, I know that Ornette Coleman is a sax player. But the trumpet player sounds just like him too. I’ll have to look this up afterwards. I’m not aware if Coleman played trumpet at the same level as the sax but it has got to be the same person. Except, I’ve heard trumpet and sax at the same time. Of course, those sounded like written lines that could be played by 'anyone'. It’s the improvisation parts on trumpet that sound exactly like ideas coleman would have on sax.

Drum solo. Every drummer since this time must have just lifted the vocabulary from this record. What he’s doing sounds like 99% of drum solos I’ve ever heard, but this feels like it’s close to the original source material, if not directly it.

Speaking of, ‘The Jungle is a skyscraper’ begins with an extended drum solo that is pure imagination. Then back to swinging. God, I should know where Coleman falls in relation to Coltrane. But off the top of my head, I do not. I’m going to say coleman comes before Coltrane. This is where Jody would point to a GIANT picture of a disapproving Miles Davis he kept on his studio wall and say something like "Miles is not pleased with you." I know, I know. 

I hear a lot of the same thoughts but Coltrane sounds more like a ‘roughed’ up Coleman. So, how did he rough it up if he didn’t already hear it somewhere? The trumpet player here is different. And that must be Coleman on sax growling/screaming into it as he plays. Visceral Carnage.

Each song is over before I can even process what I’m hearing. I wanted to just listen and be taken away but it keeps re-engaging my brain. Then the metacognitive kicks in and I want to examine what these hooks are. How they are grabbing me? Where are they sticking? How hard are they pulling?

School Work; Currently, the hooks are embedded deep in the adrenal glands, releasing adrenaline in massive quantities. Quickened breath. Acute sense of shift in vibration. The bass is responsible. Existing in a difficult to define space between “as forward as possible in one pocket” and “as far back in the next one”. Somehow existing outside all of time and space. I wonder if this is called school work because it consists of little ‘exercises’? The sax solo sounds like a series of small technical workouts vs. the stream of consciousness flavor of previous breaks.

Country Town Blues; One thing I’m noticing these days with masterworks such as these; If you really focus your attention, you can hear every note. Every idea is crystal clear. Even if there are several thoughts happening at once, the perfect counterpoint created by total consensus supersedes any Fuxian theories transcending instead to a driving conduit of pure energy. But each phrase is full of intent and purpose and without approximation. Crystal clear signal from Outerspace.

A translation of universal vibration in the same way an antenna can pick signals out of the air and convert them to sound, so are these musicians communing with a higher plane and translating the physical information back to us via music. This is coaxium. Unrefined. Pure energy. This is the data inside of an optical undersea cable. A blurring flood of bundled information to be decoded on site. ?Refined quickly before it can explode. 

This is the light of a long dead supernova, reaching through eons of space to trigger the aurora borealis in your soul. 

This is one of my favorite performances available online from Jody (he’s the one on piano). There are moments of transcendentalism that still spark my core every time I listen to it. Go listen to at least the first 10 minutes to get your tits completely blown off. [LINK]