The Records 1. Ornette Coleman. Focus on Sanity (from The Shape of Jazz to Come, Atlantic). Coleman, alto saxophone.
“Of course, it’s Rudy Wiedoeft, right? [A virtuoso American saxophonist whose compositions and solos on recordings helped popularize the instrument]. Laughs!
Well, I’ll tell you. I have never heard Ornette in a club. I understand strange and wonderful things happen that don’t happen on a record. So much has been said about Ornette by so many different cats that he has been built into something so untouchable that everyone walks around on tiptoes, excusing their opinions by all kinds of qualifications, which are then taken back in the privacy of a living room.
Since there is no particular need for me to ingratiate myself with the quorum of people who dig this, I may as well be totally blunt. Basing it on this record, which I’ve never heard before, and allowing for the fact that I've never heard a whole evening of Ornette, the worst thing I can say about it is not that I hate it or that I think it’s pretentious or anything, but the one thing that nobody has said about Ornette—and that is that it is an unmitigated bore! This has nothing to do with being adventurous or nonadventurous, new paths or new frontiers; it’s just a terrible bore. If someone is bent on broadening that which has come before . . . developing upon precedents, then I’m for it, but turning your back on any tradition is anarchy. It’s one thing to develop time and get it away from 4/4; it's another to broaden the field of abstract improvisation and not worry about changes. But just to turn your back on them is no excuse. It's a private world which literally no one can enter.
If any art form — and I'm not restricting this to music — has to be explained before and after— with all these learned articles about what he is going to prove and what he just proved — I’m damned if I can hear it while the music’s being played. I am as vituperative about this as you can possibly get. . . . This whole thing with Ornette, which started out as a fascinating experiment, has been built into something it is not, and Ornette himself has begun in interviews to intellectualize to an extent it simply can’t take. His personality is not such that could warrant his being called a fake. I understand Ornette is deeply serious about this, and perhaps in his own mind, he knows the goal he’s after. In terms of communicating, he is a million miles from achieving that goal. I'm not suggesting he try to reach the masses. I can’t imagine there are more than a handful of people, who are afraid of missing the boat as they did on Bird, who really seriously dig this. If there are. I am happy to be an outsider and to be labeled backward and old-fashioned.
Musicologically. I see nothing in it. Possibly, if the lines were played more cleanly, I might get a little out of it, but I think it’s giving this too much credit even to analyze it as long as I have. It’s a bore, self-indulgence, and utter nonsense."
