Clarifications and reflections
I had originally intended to make this post a Listening Notes article, but following a recent conversation with a friend and colleague I thought it might be an opportune moment to restate the objectives of the Silent Form project, gather my thoughts and clarify what I hope is not too widespread a misunderstanding of my motivations for this work.
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Tony Dudley-Evans has long been a major driving force behind the UK and European contemporary jazz and improvised music scene. He’s a tireless champion and promoter via his association with various organisations (currently Fizzle and TDE Promotions), and in his eighth decade remains one of the most voracious seekers-out of new music that I know. While I’m sure he wouldn’t mind me saying that he has very little technical knowledge of music, his commitment to understanding how and why improvising musicians approach their work in the ways they do is rare among non-players. On a personal level, that I have a career in this music to speak of is thanks in no small part to Tony’s support over the last two decades, and I try to make time to catch up with him for a chat whenever I can. All of this is to say that he is someone whose opinion I value highly, and the following exchange gave me pause for thought.
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We last spoke shortly after I published February’s article in which I speculated whether some of the processes that Ornette’s first quartet used were perhaps closer to bebop that is commonly acknowledged. Having read what I’d written, Tony was curious to know why I seemed to be arguing that Ornette’s music was somehow less free than most other people understand it to be. He phrased his thinking in a follow-up email like this:
“One point about the latest piece about early Ornette. I have tended to see the points you are making as a criticism of Ornette himself. In this I may be being influenced by all the criticism of Ornette in the 60s onwards, e.g. Benny Green, the [British jazz] critic that said at a talk in 1962 that Ornette's music is NOT the future.”
It’s worth noting that Tony was a record-buying jazz fan in the early 1960s and so brings an important perspective to this project. His instinctive reaction was to see my work as supportive of contemporary critics of Coleman. In other words, questioning the idea that Ornette’s reputation must turn on the claim that he was a genius who operated outside of the social and cultural norms of the late-1950s jazz scene somehow diminishes the value of his achievements. This is a position I hadn’t so far considered. I had taken for granted that Ornette’s legacy as one of the pioneers of free jazz is beyond dispute, and that my interest in not if but how he achieved what he did was plain for all to see. However, Tony’s comments made me realise this is potentially no so clear cut. So, for the sake of clarity, here’s a brief recapitulation of one of the ideas behind Silent Form.
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Instead of relitigating the ‘was he a genius or was he a fraud’ argument, I’m interested to think about why we have always tended to frame the issue in such starkly binary terms at all, and what we might learn if we set these arguments aside and focus instead on better understanding the musical process of the Coleman circle of the late-1950s as opposed to battling over the value of the results.
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The entry for Ornette Coleman in the fourth edition of The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD opens with the following:
“No jazz musician – possibly ever – has so comprehensively and irredeemably divided opinion. To some, and the supporters included Gunther Schuller, he is a visionary genius who has changed the shape of modern music. To others, he is a fraud, innocent or otherwise, whose grasp of musical theory is at best shaky and for the greater part unbearably pretentious.”
This is a common theme that, in 1992 when the first edition of the Penguin Guide was written, was already 40 years old. A further 20-odd down the line and we still tend to fall into the trap of thinking about our relationship with Coleman’s music in binary terms.[1]
This quote frames the issue very neatly. In a discussion about Ornette, we must take a side. Are you pro- or anti-Coleman? Initially we might take this to be a simple question of taste. Are you a fan of the music? However, a subtext implies that our answer to this first question is representative of our position on a further series of binaries; ‘genius or fraud’, ‘intellectual heavyweight or delusional naif’ and so on.
One of several problems that this quote poses is that, assuming I accept the premise and align myself with the ‘pro-Coleman’ camp, it is tacitly understood that I also agree with everything that other ‘supporters’ – like Schuller – have said. As my previous posts have shown, there are claims made in support of Coleman that I believe are reductive, misrepresentative or otherwise worthy of critical revaluation. This being the case, is it reasonable to expect that my interpretation of The Shape Of Jazz To Come, informed as it is by the ensuing sixty years of history as well as my own experience performing and researching free jazz, should align with Schuller’s earnest yet flawed attempt to parse this music less than a year after having first encountered it? My feeling is that it should be possible to agree with some of the things that are said – ‘the Ornette Coleman quartet’s music of the late-1950s was striking in many ways and prompted many of his contemporaries to reevaluate the way they understood jazz’ – while also disagreeing with others – ‘Ornette Coleman had no meaningful understanding or experience of jazz conventions, therefore his achievements must be the product of ahistorical, visceral genius’.
With this in mind, I’ll reiterate how the aim of Silent Form is to attempt a more impartial reading, to sidestep questions about the value of the Coleman circle’s influence and legacy, and instead to critically engage with the documented evidence of how their music evolved. There are many questions, problems and challenges this work throws up. Themes of freedom, tradition, authenticity, originality, improvisation and so on informed the Coleman quartet’s work, and are representative of the historical moment in which the musicians were embedded as well as the way modernist ideas still shape our thinking. These are all themes that I plan to unpack and explore more as the project evolves, and to contextualise in respect of the musicological-analytical work that I will continue to share on the project’s main website here, and in forthcoming publications. However, what recent conversations have shown is the importance of remaining vigilant to the possibility of biases and tendencies that end up perpetuating the kinds of misrepresentations that my work aims to rectify. In this respect, dialogue and communication is key, so please do get in touch in the comments or via email to let me know what you make of all this!
[1] To be sure, I myself have been doing so up until with my friend, colleague, mentor and co-investigator on Silent Form Nick Gebhardt recently asked me if I need to adopt a pro- or anti-Coleman stance at all. While I haven’t yet decided exactly how I feel about this, and I am certainly a fan of Coleman’s music, I have come to realise that favourable scholarship doesn’t always need to be framed as advocacy.