Listening Notes #3 - Peace

(This article is written as an accompaniment to my transcription of the piece, which can be found here)

So far, we have seen two very different pieces from Ornette’s first session for Atlantic. Focus On Sanityrepresented a striking new approach in many ways, while Chronology seemed more akin to an earlier bebop piece.

The next one in the series is Peace. This is another track that doesn’t give up its secrets lightly. The flowing unison melody reflects the mood of the title, and the horn solos unfold over a relaxed swing from Haden and Higgins that wouldn’t have sounded out of place on any other recording made at the time. Nothing especially revolutionary here we might assume. However, once again, if we look closer, we find there’s more going on than first meets the ear and – I can see a pattern emerging here – what is most intriguing isn’t necessarily what is obvious from the outset. 

Perhaps the thing that most sets the composed melody apart from bebop/hard bop convention is its stop-start variations in the A sections (assuming we take Charlie Haden’s bowed interlude as the B section/bridge). This was not necessarily a common trait of jazz compositions at the time, but it wasn’t a completely new approach either. In fact, in terms of the contribution it made to expanding the role tempo variations could play in jazz, Peace is not even the most advanced piece on The Shape of Jazz To Come. Focus On Sanity might be argued to be more exploratory in this regard. In any case, the tempo changes in the head are not explicitly replicated in the improvisation on this recording of Peace. So, if it’s not the composition that’s of interest, what is it we’re going to look at now?

On numerous occasions during the early part of his career Ornette made reference to his vision for a freer way of playing jazz. For example, in the liner notes for his 1958 album Something Else!!!!, he described how he would have liked his sidemen to play his tunes “with different changes as they take a new chorus so there’d be all the more variety in the performance”. This is interesting in that the freedom he proposes is very much still grounded in the predominant ‘solos over changes’ approach of the time. At this point he still isn’t talking about removing all structural elements, and so remains a way off articulating a vision for the free improvisation that we have come to associate with his later music. That he didn’t start out with the aim of playing free in the way we now understand the term supports my theory that his pre-Free Jazz albums represent a gradual transition to a freer way of playing, and the evidence we’ve seen so far suggests the quartet were still using a version of ‘form, no harmony’ approach in the latter half of 1959.

Rethinking the evolution of free jazz is interesting from a historical perspective, but with my musician hat on, I also finding myself drawn to thinking about how playing in this way might work in practical terms. If I imagine myself being asked to do so, I think I’d have to come up with a way of choosing notes that responded both to my own taste, as well as whatever the other musicians were doing at the same time, all in real time. This would be no mean feat.

At the risk of over simplifying, in standard-based jazz performance, the assumption is that at any given point in time the notes each musician plays are in reference to a pre-agreed chord in the sequence. As a result, while there is a degree of chance involved, the risk of things sounding ‘wrong’ are reduced by the limited number of harmonic variables.

Sonny Rollins – a master among improvising masters – said about playing jazz “I don't want to overtly think about anything, because you can't think and play at the same time — believe me, I've tried it (laughs). It goes by too fast.” This is an important thing to note because improvising jazz musicians don’t have time to deliberate from note to note in the same way that a composer might. Instead, they spend long hours embedding in their subconscious strategies and approaches derived from Western classical composition - voice leading for example. So, when improvising jazz based on standard chord sequences and their derivatives, the tacit understanding that everyone will be playing off the same harmony means there is one less thing to ‘think’ about. As I improvise a new melody the fact that - harmonically speaking - I know what’s coming means I can use my knowledge of voice leading to plan ahead – albeit on intuitive level - because I know instinctively that, say, in 4 bars time we’ll all resolve to C Major.

However, what Ornette described in 1958 was to do all the above – i.e. retain chorus structure, pulse, instrumental roles etc – but without harmony. In other words, standard jazz improvisation but without any guarantee that we’ll ever land on the same chord. For any jazz musician with a grounding in bebop, to do this and make it work would require a monumental reconfiguration of their embedded subconscious/intuitive strategies. This process of reconfiguration is what I think we hear across Ornette’s recorded output from 1958 into 1960. The two Contemporary records – Something Else!!!! and Tomorrow Is The Question - are well-known for not having quite worked, probably due in part to the rhythm section players not having completely understood the ’form, no harmony’ idea. With The Shape Of Jazz To Come we hear a document of a quartet of musicians sympathetic to Coleman’s ideas who seem to have consolidated the no harmony approach. However, as we know, the move towards freedom didn’t stop here.

My feeling is that, with Peace, we start to see glimpses of the next step. Having successfully freed themselves from harmony, we start to find moments where the quartet begin to challenge other predetermined aspects of jazz practice at the time.   

I hear this point in Don Cherry’s solo is one example of this. As I’ve mentioned in earlier posts, there is evidence that the band were still using a cyclical form for improvisation. The moment I’ve highlighted comes at what would be the ‘bridge’ of the form, and – to my ears - Cherry makes a clear offer to move away from the established pulse into a more rubato area. Both Haden and Higgins initially respond, before Haden reintroduces the tempo again.

What to make of this? It’s hard to assign intent in terms of music recorded 60+ years ago by musicians who are no longer alive to comment. Nevertheless, I’m tempted to point to this brief passage as a moment where the band encounter the possibility of playing not only free of harmony, but free of pulse. My 21^st century perspective makes it easy for me to hear this as a wasted opportunity on Haden’s part. Cherry offered him a wonderful opportunity to take the music in a different direction, yet he decided to revert back to what he’d been doing previously. However, this doesn’t account for the fact that my perspective is gifted to me by the countless generations of musicians who worked out multitudes of solutions to the problem that Haden faced at that point – what do we play if leave this behind?

As we will come to see, this is a question that took these pioneering musicians a little while to work out. But when they did, they would change the course of jazz in ways nobody at the time could imagine.

Recommended listening:

Branford Marsalis – Trio Jeepy: This might be too obvious a choice for a list of lesser-known versions, but I think it warrants inclusion for the way they seem to use the same formal markers as on the original - the low bass ‘E’ in bar 2 of the A sections is a giveaway. Branford has recorded Coleman’s music on more than one occasion, and a harmolodic analysis of his solo on Giggin’ is included in Rush’s book. On another note, it’s a shame that Milt Hinton – the bassist on the bulk of the record – is replaced by Delbert Felix here. It certainly been interesting to hear what a bassist of Hinton’s generation made of a Coleman piece in this context.

Barbara Raimondi – Singin’ Ornette!!: A vocalese version of Peace! Not what I’d expected to turn up as I dug around for lesser-known versions, but a testament to the versatility – and lyricism – of Coleman’s music. I generally steer clear of vocalese versions of jazz I know and love as I find it hard to ‘unhear’ the lyrics when I go back to the original. That said, this one is well done, and I like the way it uses Ornette’s music as the basis for a narrative retelling of his life. (In this way it sits with Fred Johnson’s setting of Chick Corea’s Bud Powell.) The album art is also jarringly un-Colemanesque. Should we be reading anything into the classic 50’s cool jazz vibe of the cover?

Harmolodic String Band – The Shape Of Grass To Come Vol.3: I like this one a lot! Meaning no disrespect to the previous two, I think this gets closest to what I imagine Ornette’s vision for the type of jazz discussed in the article above. Swinging, open, yet seemingly unencumbered by many of the trappings of conventional jazz that Ornette spent his career trying to avoid.