Listening Notes #1 - Focus On Sanity
(This article is written as an accompaniment to my transcription of the piece, which can be found here.)
One of the ideas that I wanted to explore with this project is how the newness of Ornette Coleman’s music presented commentators with a challenge as to how to write about it, and to think about how what was written about it at the time might affect the way we listen to the same music today. As we know, Coleman’s approach included some radical departures from what was standard jazz practice for the period, and the reactions it provoked from advocates and detractors were almost universally framed in terms of its novelty. To put it simply, everyone agreed that his music was different, but whether the difference was positive or negative divided opinion. Of course, this is an understandable response to hearing Coleman in the context of the early 1960s. However, from a twenty-first century perspective I find it interesting to think about whether the natural impulse to focus on the more radical aspects of the quartet’s approach to improvisation meant that similarities with earlier styles were overlooked.
The liner note essay for The Shape Of Jazz To Come provides a useful example of what I’m getting at. The notes were written by Martin Williams, an early and vociferous champion of Coleman’s music (Williams reportedly once left a phone message for Atlantic Records boss Nesuhi Ertegun saying: “Just wanted to tell you Ornette Coleman is greatest ever”). What’s more, they also achieve the important task of contextualising Coleman – the man and the musician - for listeners who were likely encountering him for the first time. To this end, Williams included a substantial quote from another of Coleman’s most influential supporters, Gunther Schuller. In it, Schuller makes some surprisingly unequivocal claims about how Coleman played:
To be fair to Schuller, a lot of what Coleman himself said about his music was framed in similar terms. Nevertheless, the idea that Ornette’s concept emerged fully formed - seemingly without the influence of, or reference to, any previous musical norms – doesn’t tell the whole story. It was well known even at the time that Coleman had been a sideman in working bands in Texas and Los Angeles before he struck out as a leader. And – as I’ll explore in future posts – at least two of the pieces on the record owe a debt to bebop in both title and musical content. So, while Schuller’s appraisal of the music touches on many of the aspects that makes it so striking, it’s also quite reductive in that it glosses over many of the more conventional factors that might help us better appreciate the evolution of the quartet’s approach to collective improvisation.
Nevertheless, and despite appearances, my objective with this project isn’t to single out Schuller, whose role in advancing Coleman and his music at a time when the weight of critical opinion was against him should never be underestimated. Furthermore, I’m sure his understanding of what the quartet was doing was more nuanced than the quote I’ve used implies. So, while I don’t dispute the decision to focus on Ornette’s outwardly revolutionary ideas about jazz, the tension it creates between the way the music was packaged and presented, and the way it sounds is notable.
Thinking about the question of ‘form/no form’ on these records, it’s important to avoid hyperbole as the precise balance of what’s ‘new’ and ‘old’ appears in constant flux. The first track the quartet recorded for Atlantic provides a number of examples of this. By any standards, Focus On Sanity is a striking piece of music, and in many ways was a radical break from the norms of the time – the frantic, turn-on-a-dime interludes and tempo changes, and Ornette’s solo full of ‘lashing trills and insane double-time phrases’[1]. That said, it seems to me that there are a number of elements – some quite subtle, others less so – that draw a direct line to more established jazz practices.
To my ears, the rapid unison sax and trumpet intro could be an abstract-expressionist rendering of Charlie Parker’s Koko, and the composed interlude that follows Don Cherry’s solo wouldn’t sound out of place on a Horace Silver album of the same vintage, albeit with a typically idiosyncratic twist in the tail. The opening to Charlie Haden’s solo is steeped in country blues, and in terms of the way the improvised parts unfold, the bass, alto and trumpet solo sections adhere to an eight-bar structure, with each interlude landing right at the top of the form. So, while it’s a piece that wears its revolutionary aspirations on its sleeve, it is underpinned by some remarkably conventional elements too.
I find Charlie Haden’s presence especially notable on this track. In fact, I’ll go as far as to say that his contribution to the piece’s identity is every bit as important as Coleman’s. I hear his opening solo in two parts – the first a loose ABBA structure that implies pulse but not meter, and the second the eight-bar form that’s apparent in Coleman and Cherry’s solos as well. Ethan Iverson pointed out how Coleman encouraged Haden to bring is own ideas into the mix, and that the results – Lonely Woman, Una Muy Bonita, Ramblin’ – all bear the stamp of his inimitable style. With this in mind, I wonder if Focus On Sanity is another example of Haden’s influence that slips under the radar?
The melodic clarity and logic of the first four phrases is unmistakable, and seems to lay out the Bb tonality and prefigure the underlying solo form to follow. In that sense, could we think of this short first section as the ‘head’? As is the case with almost all of Coleman’s Atlantic recordings, the lack of any alternate studio takes or live recordings makes it hard to say to what extent the musicians conceived it as such, but the recording by Ake Takase and Silke Eberhard (see below) shows I’m not the first person to have had the thought. Once the opening phrases are concluded, Haden sets up the groove to be joined by Billy Higgins eight-(ish) bars later, and from then on out the form follows an eight-bar pattern for the remainder of Haden’s solo, as well as the subsequent sax and trumpet improvisations.
For various reasons that I’m planning to explore in more depth in a subsequent article, I don’t really want to get into too much musical analysis here. Instead of trying and failing to conclusively demonstrate what these musicians were or weren’t thinking when they played, I’m more interested in opening a discussion about the relative merits of thinking about free jazz-derived music in these terms. That said, I’d encourage you to download my transcription of the piece and see what you make of it, and if you do, I’d recommend paying particular attention to Haden’s walking lines for the following reason.
In 1961 Gunter Schuller published a collection of Coleman compositions on the MJQ Music Inc. imprint. You can see an extract from his take on Focus On Sanity below:
There are a couple of things that catch my eye. First of all, he presents Haden’s ‘head’ as part of the notated music, and in doing so gives more credence to the idea that this might be a more integral part of the composition than we might think. Second, he includes chord changes for the blowing without any further context or justification. I find this a curious fact in itself given his earlier explanation of Coleman’s music. However, in the context of another version of Focus On Sanity recorded in 1960 by John Coltrane and Don Cherry, there’s yet more intrigue. MJQ bassist Percy Heath clearly spells out the same changes from the outset - although he doesn’t follow them strictly throughout the 12-minute recording. Were it not for the fact the extended group were mostly friends and colleagues it would perhaps be easiest to follow the chronology and so conclude that Heath got his changes by transcribing Haden, and Schuller from Heath. However, the likelihood is that Coleman’s ideas about his music – and probably his collaborators’ own thoughts on its interpretation – were shared among this wider group in conversation, rehearsal and performance. So, while Schuller’s motivation for presenting Ornette’s music the way he did might never be fully known, it seems likely that, at this early stage in the transition towards free jazz, there was at least a tacit acknowledgement among musicians associated with Coleman that some degree of regular structure, and even harmony, was advisable.
There’ll be more to come in the next transcription article next month. However, as always, I’d encourage you to download the transcription here, and share any thoughts, feedback, or even disagreements with me via comment and email.
Some other versions:
Ray D’Inverno Focus On Sanity – The raw energy and unapologetic commitment to the solo changes on this one won me over straight away. Pure hard bop, and the whole thing’s done and dusted in under four minutes. Lovely stuff!
Ake Takase/Silke Eberhard – Ornette Coleman Anthology – I already mentioned the use of Haden’s ‘head’ here too. It’s interesting to note that Eberhard frames this by playing the Coleman’s ‘tutti’ section as a head out. For me, this just reinforces the strength of Haden’s opening melody.
Borah Bergman & Hamid Drake – A completely different approach. Bergman sprinkles fragments of Coleman’s melodies among a torrent of improvised phrases. I’m hooked in immediately and I find myself craning my ears (?) to hear how many bits of Coleman I’m missing.
[1] A Harmolodic Life, John Litweiler p.67