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Almost from its inception and throughout much of his career, many Jazz fans have found his music to be confusing and/or controversial, if not both.
In looking for a way to represent Ornette’s approach on these pages, I searched for a piece that contained his conceptualization of Jazz as explained in his own words. I think the following comes as close as any that I’ve researched in doing just that.
The interview was conducted by Quincy Troupe and appeared in the November 1981 edition of The Jazz Musician. Ornette died on June 11, 2015.
Ornette Coleman is one of the most influential musicians to emerge in the post-bebop period. The possibilities he opened up for improvised music in the late fifties and early sixties, when he scrapped the conventions of Western harmony and pitch for a conception that was both a leap into the future and a recovery of the blues past, show no signs of being exhausted, and the implications of his more recent work, involving symphonic composition, free-funk, and the "harmolodic" system, are now being
worked on by a new generation of musicians, many of whom are alumni of his bands.
Born in Fort Worth, Texas, on March 9,1930, Coleman has been an enigma for many years inside and outside the music world. Loved and respected by many, he has nonetheless been maligned for his ideas and innovations, particularly in his first decade of public life. Even more than John Coltrane, Cecil Taylor, and Eric Dolphy, Coleman served as a magnet for the charges of charlatanism that raged in the free-jazz wars of the Sixties, but his formidable talents as both instrumentalist and composer have made his place in the history of instrumental music secure. Only Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, and Coltrane have had a more dramatic effect on the practice of jazz.
His conversation resembles his music in its disregard for linguistic convention and for the liberating effect it can have. A certain amount of editing has been done on the transcript, but the greatest number of conceptual knots have been left untied. Coleman understands how things harden and ultimately die of the sense people make of them (see his discussion of method below). His inventions have always tended to subvert the usual dead verities. His first classic band, a quartet with Don Cherry on trumpet, Charlie Haden on bass, and either Billy Higgins or Ed Blackwell on drums, simultaneously developed and obliterated the parameters of bop.
When this quartet broke up, Coleman was fugitively audible for the remainder of the Sixties with a trio, occasional R&B band, or string quartet. He had begun to simplify his playing style (see his distinction between "improvisers," whose strength is in their lines, and "players," who communicate through their sound). In the early Seventies, he was even less available to the public, appearing occasionally with a quartet and even more occasionally with a symphony orchestra, as in his long piece, The Skies of America. In the middle of the decade, he began working with an electric R&B band, Coleman-style, called Prime Time, with which he recorded the seminal Dancing in Your Head and the (hopefully) soon-to-be-released Fashion Faces, and with which he has begun to concertize this year. Coleman has never had trouble making great music, but liaison with the material and economic world has run from shaky to nonexistent. Even in his absence, his influence has been extraordinary and undiminished. Currently managed by Sid Bernstein (of Beatles-at-Shea-Stadium fame), he is with us again.
It's said that the desert camel can feed on the thorn-bush when water keeps the thorns green and alive, but that when that plant dies the dry and darkened thorns lacerate the camel’s tongue, and he dies. Through a subtlety of disposition that combines an almost childlike naivete with a percipience more acute and truthful than that of the conventional intellect, Coleman has succeeded in keeping his music alive, nourishing, and unpredictable.
This interview took place in the offices of Sid Bernstein in New York City, on July 22, 1981.
MUSICIAN: Let Me begin by asking you: Do you think that your absorption of bebop was and is one of the difficulties people have in understanding your music?
COLEMAN: I didn't make my first record until I was twenty-eight or twenty-nine but I'd been playing bebop since the late Forties. It got dated for me, at least the style of it. I had figured out where I wanted to go, myself, musically. The reason I was having problems was I was trying to do that — go someplace else musically — more than trying to prove to someone how that involved bebop language. So, many musicians didn't approve of me playing like that, and at the same time I wasn't having any jobs to prove that I was someone that people wanted to hear. Whenever I went to a jam session, I would try to play the bebop line, but when I got ready to solo, I would play exactly the way I'm playing now, today, which is exactly how I played when I first picked up the horn. Musicians thought I had bebop all screwed up the way I was playing the lines, but I had figured out that most bebop songs were lines interpreting standard songs by using standard changes, but with more advanced lines, you know? I understood that it — bebop playing — was a method, and when I understood that method and had really absorbed it, I found that I could keep the method in my mind and still play independent of it. The method for playing bebop had become stronger than the creativity of bebop. With Charlie Parker, Bud Powell, and Thelonious Monk, bebop was their expression. It wasn't a method to them. It was their expression, it was what they did. And everyone else, including myself, was playing their method, and I had learned their method, the method of bebop, very well; I could play and sound like Charlie Parker note for note. I realized that regardless of how advanced I was going to play bebop, I was still only going to play it from the method. So I banned the idea that I was going to be a very successful bebop player. I accepted the fact that, okay, now that I've observed and absorbed this, now where to go? And then I remembered when I first got my horn I was playing ideas without having to relate to anything. I thought that maybe if I did this I would, perhaps, find something.
MUSICIAN: Did you find something?
COLEMAN: I started with the saxophone, especially the alto. I found out when I played an idea the way I was approaching it — which was outside of the way people were telling me to approach it — I didn't have to transpose the notes to sound right with the piano. The piano key — like a C concert piano — would put the alto in A; therefore, A-minor and C are the same sound when you're inter-changing your method of using them. That's the first signal I got about how I was approaching the saxophone. Instead of thinking of the alto as a transposing instrument, I started thinking of it as a concert instrument. For instance, if you're in the key of C in the piano, that makes your alto A natural, because there are six above to get the same pitch, right? But yet you have the same notes without worrying about that pitch. That's what I was doing: I was playing everything in what I thought was concert. I later found out I was only playing in the concert key of alto, not the concert key of piano. I realized then that melody not only is something a person thinks of to manipulate on the instrument, but it almost by design is a hard sound according to the instrument you're playing it on. Melody, right? A person playing an African thumb piano and a person playing an electric piano are going to have two different ideas about melody, only because of the instrument they're playing.
MUSICIAN: Because of the technique involved?
COLEMAN; Yeah. And the instrument. I started analyzing the difference between the alto sax being in its own concert key as opposed to transposing. Then I came up with the term "harmolodic," which I call the harmony, the melody, the time, and the rhythm all having equal positions. I got involved in writing music. You see, I finally realized that the method set up the musical patterns in bebop, so that if you had a particular song that you liked, a standard, for instance, like "Laura," you'd say A-major 7 to E-minor 7 to B minor. And if you played those voices without playing the melody, you would resolve the voices according to how you heard your horn sound through those voices. I said, well, if that's the way the standard song is played, then what would happen if the instrument became that itself? In other words, if the sound of the instrument was what you were making, the voices sound like more than the melody you were trying to play. I started playing ideas as if I wasn't playing the saxophone — it was just an instrument, but not an instrument that you had to transpose on, you know? I found that I was having much more trouble playing with piano players and other musicians because I would be in one unison and they would be in another. I started understanding the complex voicings of how and why musicians choose certain instruments to play, and it has a lot to do with how they've been related to concert instruments. I'd been playing sometimes with piano players where the piano would be so out of tune that I'd have to play out of tune in order to be in tune with their out-of-tuneness. It only brought me back to that same problem of playing non-transposed sound, you know? So I started writing music that people could play with me so they could understand how that sound was.
MUSICIAN: How did musicians and people respond to you and your ideas then?
COLEMAN: I found a lot of negativeness in the community I was playing in, black and white. They were all saying that this wasn't the way music and the saxophone were supposed to be played. And they weren't seeing it as really putting me down; they really believed from where they were at that I was wrong. I didn't try to show them that they were right or wrong. The only thing I tried to do was see if I could find a way to bring the sound of what I was playing to where they could get something out of it, and I knew, given the chance, it would work.
MUSICIAN: Do you think it might have had something to do with the fact that you wanted to be Ornette Coleman rather than Charlie Parker during the bebop era?
COLEMAN: I met Charlie Parker; I liked him and I enjoyed his songs. But I wanted to have the experience of him hearing what I had done, because by the time we met, in 1951 or '52, I was really into what I did later on my own records. But I couldn't have any attitude about what I was doing — especially with Charlie Parker — because no one had ever given me any attention to think of it as something that was valuable to them. I had always made compromises just to play bebop. But it kept working against me, because regardless of how long bebop has been around, it still didn't reach a success level commercially the way Louis Armstrong was a success. And bebop today, despite critical acclaim, has still never gotten any real big musical play in the way that fusion music has.
MUSICIAN: How did you and Charlie Parker interact?
COLEMAN: I was around twenty-one or twenty-two when I met him. I met him in Los Angeles at a club he was playing on Eighth Street and Normandy. He was only playing standards; he wasn't playing any of the music he had written. But when I heard him playing standards, it blew my mind because I didn't expect it and because I understood so well the method he was using to play his ideas. What I remember about him, though, was the fact that he knew very well he was the musician of the era; it was in his attitude toward himself and whatever he played; he knew exactly what he was doing: He was in total control. I got the feeling from him that he didn't have any problems with his talent, you know? I didn't know then what his personal life was — I later found out that it was pretty bad — but then he was at ease. I got the feeling from him then that I later got from myself; that he hadn't found the outlet, business-wise, that would have brought him to a wider public. I felt that he was still being limited. He and I had the same problem: The money people don't know you, hardly any of them are aware of this music because it isn't commercially viable to them.
MUSICIAN: What has made you commercially "unviable"?
COLEMAN: I found out that I was constantly being limited by the term
"Jazz." This was around 1976. By this time I was writing symphonies, music for string quartets, woodwinds, etc., but the critics were always telling me how "great" a "jazzman" I was. But I was into other things. This limitation bothered me. I thought about how every time I played in public I was always writing a new musical program. I thought this was my duty to an audience — to write new material every time I played in public —because I thought they wanted to hear something they'd never heard before. Then finally, at the Public Theater in New York this summer, I went out and played something I already recorded and got a big response from it. I said, "Oh, this must be the way." I'd never had the experience of someone liking my old music in public because I had never played it. I didn't realize I could play my own music and get the response I got at the Public this summer. Most of that music was off of Dancing in Your Head, which I recorded in 1976. It became clear to me that I could play music I wrote twenty years ago and music I wrote yesterday and have people that knew the old stuff and people who wanted to hear the new stuff enjoying both things.
MUSICIAN: You and Coltrane and Miles Davis have had a tremendous impact on contemporary instrumental music. But in terms of the "fusion" movement, I think you and Miles have created two different but similar musical languages that are both fusionistic and futuristic at the same time.
COLEMAN; Let's start with Trane, because I always had a good experience with him. He used to come and visit me a lot and I, him. About three or four months before he passed he sent me a check and a note and said that he had finally found it, and thanks very much. I never got to see him again. Let me say it this way. The improviser, the person that's called the improviser, has been the maverick of musical expression in the modern civilization that we call the Western world. The improviser is known as the jazzman, and he's been the one who says, "Just give me the horn and put me in front of the people and I will take this horn and do something better than what you can prepare or compose in a structured way." But for me, the improviser has become less and less interesting, because of the method and style of what improvising is; it is bogged down, for the most part, in some personal, social background. Take Albert Ayler. (Now, I knew Albert very well, and Albert was a musician that really was very gifted, one who did not relate to any form but his own. What happened to the kind of music — free-form — that Albert was associated with is that it became connected with the racial phenomenon that took place in the sixties. Critics started saying that this was black expression, a kind of social, black expression of, perhaps, rage. Right? But when ‘Trane started playing this music it brought the critics back to thinking of it just as music. They didn't do this with Albert Ayler. With ‘Trane it was a musical expression, which it was. It was just more demanding to listen to, more so than bebop. The music of the sixties really stretched out; the improvised form had never gotten so individual as it was in the sixties, and the kind of music. I was playing — even the writing sounded like it was being improvised. I started trying to let the themes finally become improvised. I started trying to let the themes finally become even freer than improvising. I was trying to get more free than the structure of improvising had previously allowed. But then that too was becoming a method.
MUSICIAN: Are you saying that people run the danger of becoming the method in any kind of music, or expression, even if it's supposed to be new?
COLEMAN: That's what I'm saying. I have always wanted to move forward. For instance, in 1962 I hired a rhythm and blues band, a string quartet, and my own trio, and performed an original work at Town Hall. I started playing with them not thinking of fusion or anything, but because I wanted to have more color to improvise from, to get away from thinking about improvising, the more voices I had to inspire me, the freer I felt I could be from improvising. I went from there to writing for string quartets and symphonies because if I could create enough sounds in unison, then the listener could see the difference and growth between where I started from and where I was then.
MUSICIAN: And where was that, where were you going then?
COLEMAN: I realized that the multiple expression could be translated into sound where you could hear and sense more than one thing at once. I assumed that I could write a musical idea that would interject more than one particular direction, where musicians and the audience could have more intake, and that this would be more enjoyable to do. I went and bought myself a trumpet and a violin and I started playing those instruments. I started putting those things into the music I was writing. Back to your earlier questions about fusion: By this time ‘Trane had passed, and Miles came out with this rock band that sounded just natural to me. This was in the early Seventies, and by this time the music was moving toward fusion.
MUSICIAN: What were some of the other changes that were taking place in the music during this time?
COLEMAN: Well, in most music, pop, etc., time is dominated by the drums. In the music I was starting to play, every instrument, every person had the right to dominate.
MUSICIAN: Every instrument?
COLEMAN: When I heard fusion it only made me realize that Miles and the people playing fusion had taken the roots of the drums and used it as a form of improvising with whatever melodies they were playing. I had always been doing that, but not in a systematic way. It was then that I realized that it had always been the improviser that had stood out as the jazzman. But understand; the improviser and the player are two different people. I've always wanted to be a player, myself.
MUSICIAN: What's the difference between an "improviser" and a "player"?
COLEMAN: Okay. For me, Johnny Hodges was a great player, rather than an improviser. Charlie Parker was a great player, you know? But I think Johnny Griffin was and is a great improviser. I think Jackie McLean is like that — a great improviser.
MUSICIAN: What would you say about Coltrane?
COLEMAN: I think that Coltrane was about half and half. Great improviser, great player.
MUSICIAN: Where would you put yourself ?
COLEMAN: Like I said, I think I'm more of a player.
MUSICIAN: What would you say about Miles Davis?
COLEMAN: I think he's more of a player than an improviser, though he can be a great improviser, too.
MUSICIAN: That's interesting. What about Julius Hemphill and Arthur Blythe?
COLEMAN: I think they're really improvisers. I think that that's a group of musicians that whether they are backed by instinct, or by sweat, it comes out that way — more like improvisers, rather than like players. I think the trumpet player Olu Daru is a great improviser. But you understand that improvising, to me, is almost self-annihilating. I mean, you know your limitations. As a player you don't really know your limitations that way, because the construction of playing is like architecture — you are always building, you know? Where improvising is like the person who's always putting furniture in, who's always putting this and that in, and sometimes you only get a jumble of stuff that doesn't relate to anything.
MUSICIAN: Do you think "improvisers" can become "players"?
COLEMAN: Yes. I think I was an improviser once.
MUSICIAN: Dancing in Your Head has real funk in it, heavy funk, almost honky-tonk and gutbucket in places.
COLEMAN: You see, all the things I grew up with back in Fort Worth, Texas, affect the things that I play. There was honky-tonk, blues, and funk there, so it comes out naturally in the things I play. That's why I am a "player," because when I picked up my horn, I didn't think about improvising; I thought about playing, I've always thought about playing. I have always tried my best to stay clear of having a particular style. For some reason, improvising doesn't have a style, but a style has improvising.
MUSICIAN: Are you saying you don't want, ever, to have an identifiable style?
COLEMAN: Yeah. I wouldn't like to have a style.
MUSICIAN: But there are musicians — Coltrane, Blythe, yourself — that as soon as I hear them, I know who they are.
COLEMAN: I know, but that's pitch. When I hear your voice, I know that's you. I think that what you're talking about is the character of a person's breath marks. It's in their pitch, in the pitch sound. I don't think that makes the sound better, though. Look at Paul Quinichette and Lester Young. The only way you can tell Quinichette and Lester apart is that when you hear Lester you get an emotional experience from that sound, and from Quinichette, you get a remembrance; he's just making you remember where you heard that particular emotion from. But it sounds just like Lester. I can play like Charlie Parker all the way down to his sound because I know the things to avoid and the things to touch to create that sound. And I am sure someone that wished to repeat the things I'm playing could do it if they really wanted to. The only thing different in the way I'm playing is that I don't use any structure to play that way.
MUSICIAN: Do you think it's very difficult for some other alto saxophonist to duplicate your sound?
COLEMAN: When someone plays ideas in logic, in the same logic as I would, it's much easier to do. But when you play the same idea without that logic, it's harder. And that is what I'm trying to do; to play logical ideas without using logical terms.
MUSICIAN: How would you explain the "harmolodic" theory?
COLEMAN. What instrument do you like? What is your favorite instrument?
MUSICIAN. I like saxophone, trumpet, bass, guitar; I like most of the musical instruments.
COLEMAN: Okay. Let's say we use a string instrument, like the guitar. On the guitar you've got six strings. When you want to make a sound you pluck the strings and they vibrate, right? But there's an order that's already there, on the instrument; the order that is designed and made is already there. So if you play something that makes you feel good, you think it's you, but all you're doing is playing something that's already there. In "harmolodic" theory, or music, I suggest to everyone: Don't think that just because there is something you want to play, and the instrument that you want to play it on, you have to put your mind to working out something only to make mistakes until you find out what you're really doing. The thing is to acknowledge the fact that the instrument is going to respond the way you approach it, right? So, basically, the only way you can approach any instrument is to find the relationship between the sound you want to hear from it and the place you have to put your mouth and fingers to bring about that sound. Now, the only thing that keeps you from doing that is the method that's already there on the instrument, how that instrument was built to play in the first place. So in "harmolodics" what happens is that the particular method, the sounds that you want to play, or the ideas, say on a guitar, might be trumpet ideas in your mind. So what I tell the person is that whatever instrument you want to play, just think of the music that you want to play more than how you want the instrument to sound. Once you find the place to put your fingers and carry the sound to the next sound, you will find yourself playing in a sequence. And most all Western music is written in sequences. When you start learning music, you find out these sequences are called chords, they are called keys, and they are called changes; they're called lots of things. The thing to realize in "harmolodics" is that you want to manipulate it — the idea on the instrument — and then you find out the limitations of the instrument.
MUSICIAN: So the musician takes the initiative on the instrument, bends it, so to speak, to his will, to what he wants to do with it?
COLEMAN: Right. If you brought me an instrument I'd never seen, never played, I wouldn't try to figure out what the traditional role for playing that instrument has been, but I would try to figure out what I could do with it just from knowing it's already built to play whatever it is designed to play.
MUSICIAN: You were saying earlier that the drums have dominated the time in music at one point, and that you wanted everyone in your band to have the chance to dominate. Could you talk about that a little more?
COLEMAN: The word "dominate" is not the right word. In classical music, in a symphony orchestra, you sometimes have thirty to forty different instruments. Now, imagine if those thirty or forty instruments were playing their own line, you'd hear many different ideas, right? But those thirty to forty instruments have been designed to only play, basically, four different voices, which we call in the Western world the bass, treble, tenor, and alto voice. What I mean by "domination" is that the rhythm concept is the only free movement in sound that doesn't have to have a strict pitch to be heard. In Western music, what's called the tempered scale, there is a strict pitch. If we're in the key of C, you'd have to produce that C and I would, too. Because of that strict pitch, musicians have been limited rhythmically. Whereas in the drums, Eddie Blackwell, Buddy Rich, always played the rhythm as if it was as valuable as the note. A lot of drummers don't do this. They play notes over rhythm.
MUSICIAN: What about young drummers?
COLEMAN: The person, for me, that has taken the drums to a more advanced place is Denardo.
MUSICIAN: Your son Denardo?
COLEMAN: Yeah. Now Denardo, for some reason, can play a set of drums the way African people play talking drums. On a talking drum, you can reproduce the actual melody, with the sound, and independent of the rhythm at the same time. Denardo uses the concept of what talking drums must have done before drums had to establish a regular sense of time.
MUSICIAN: I remember when I first met you in Los Angeles back in 1967, you were getting a lot of bad press for using Denardo, because he was so young.
COLEMAN: Yeah, I know. When I met you I was playing at Shelly's Manne Hole in Hollywood, and I remember Shelly Manne saying Denardo should go and become a "garbageman," or something like that. All that time, Denardo was not only playing freer than any drummer I had played with outside of Billy Higgins and Eddie Blackwell, but he was also inspirational to play with. The first thing I recognized when I heard him play was the way he saw the time, the way he saw keeping the time. He sounded to me like he had been listening to a lot of drummers, and although he had a teacher teaching him about reading and everything, it seemed to me that this hadn't affected the way he already wanted to play; it seemed to me that he already had his own concept of how he wanted to play, even way back then. He really enjoyed playing. I never tried to tell him what not to do, or what to do; the only thing I have ever talked to him about was how good he could get doing what he believed he could do best. He has perfected how to play the drums as if he was singing.
MUSICIAN: Could you talk a little about your present band?
COLEMAN: The band that I have now has two guitars, two drummers, and two basses. You see, I couldn't afford to have an orchestra, which is what I would prefer to have. The guitar is the most popular social instrument, especially to white people; it's what the tenor saxophone is for most black Americans. Anyway, the guitar takes up a lot of the string section. Having two of them usually means you use one for the rhythm and one for the melody. What I have done in my band is that the structure and the playing both interweave. For instance, if I give a melody to one of the bass players, I'll say I want to play the harmony equivalent, and I'll give the guitar that number. Everyone is playing a lead that's equivalent to the same results, so we don't reach a climax by someone being at a certain place at a certain time. That's the difference between "harmolodic" music and arranged music; the musicians don't have to be at a certain place with some rule reaching some climax. It can happen instantly and according to the way the mood and feeling of whatever we're playing dictates.
MUSICIAN: Does Denardo play saxophone lines on the drums, and do you play drum lines on your saxophone, violin, and trumpet?
COLEMAN: That's what I'm saying. I think he plays the vocal concept and the rhythm concept. That's what he does. And I do, loo.
MUSICIAN: So everyone is playing all kinds of different parts and voices at the same time?
COLEMAN: Right. Everyone's also playing what they think would be best if they had their own band.
MUSICIAN: How do you approach rehearsals, and how is new music brought in and introduced to the band?
COLEMAN: What, happens is that all of these guys have their own music, right? And, they would probably like to have their own band if they had the same outlet that I have. At rehearsals, I will write out a musical idea. I'll play it on the saxophone and then I'll have them play on their instruments the equivalent of what I played. Then I'll write it out. But the main thing that happens is the motive of the idea. Ideas are very interesting, but it's the motive behind the idea that's very stimulating. So if you get hung up in playing an idea, it might be outdated and not stimulating at all. For me what makes a musical motive is when everyone gets excited about how it affects them. If I brought in a new musical idea, it has no validity other than for it to be manipulated on the instruments. But when someone else shares in it, then it becomes really musical. And that is one of the great things about having a band: playing the music, exploring new frontiers of musical consciousness.
MUSICIAN: What kind of music are you composing today and how long is it?
COLEMAN: I am writing a piece of music, a long piece, for what I call the oldest musical language, and that's what it's called: The Oldest Language. The music will be for about 125 musicians, and for as many non tempered musicians as I can get into it. More than half of it is written. I think it would be at least two hours, maybe three, when it's performed. But I haven't thought about where I'm going to play it, or how I'm going to make the time to play it. If I get it done, I will play it somewhere.
MUSICIAN: What instruments are you writing for in this music?
COLEMAN: The talking drums. The sitar. The kind of instruments African people play, instruments that Arabs play. Basically, string, wind, brass, and probably some other instruments made out of some form of metal.
MUSICIAN: I know you're going to have Denardo's drums in this, right?
COLEMAN: Oh yeah, right. Denardo's drums will be there, too. But the thing that I'm more interested in is having the experience of hearing the musicians express how these sounds are going to affect how they play as an individual. That's the result I'm looking for, that's my motive behind doing this. And what I hope to bring about is, shall we say, some form of medicine in the music.
MUSICIAN. Medicine? Could you explain?
COLEMAN: What I would hope for is that some kind of healing medicine would be incorporated in these sounds, coming from these ancient instruments. I would like to try and bring about some kind of medical sounds that could actually cure depression, cure whatever it could. I think that some certain people outside of doctors do this now, already, but it's done in such a camouflaged way, you know?
MUSICIAN: So you think music can cure?
COLEMAN: Oh, Yes.
MUSICIAN: Why did Shannon Jackson call you a "magician"?
COLEMAN: Well, maybe he was using that word for describing how I think. I don't think of myself as a musician, or composer, but as a human being that has the same problems everyone else has, in that I have to figure out how to do my share in this human state we call living. I think that maybe Shannon was giving his philosophy about how he thinks I think about things I believe in. You see, I believe that immortality is distance, and that things take up more than just one-dimensional aspects of our living. I think that what we call the earth and human beings and the way we live and die is distance, you know?
MUSICIAN; What do you think about the connection between your music, Blood Ulmer's, Shannon Jackson's, and "punk" music?
COLEMAN: Well, I think that everybody can logic. But I don't think the label, necessarily, has to be transcribed. When someone says "punk rock," when you use any term that is nonmusical, you're really talking about a person, or a group of people. It's much easier to label a group of people than it is to label music. I saw the movie The Decline of Western Civilization. It's a "punk" movie. And what I got from it was that a lot of rich white kids that have grown up with human ideas are now using music to express violence. So if that is the particular signal they enjoy being stimulated by, then they will, or must eventually grow out of that, because violence usually leads to death.
MUSICIAN: You have no animosities toward critics, no hostilities?
COLEMAN: No, I don't have any. I always say I don't have any enemies, period.
MUSICIAN: What about the experiences you had in Morocco and Nigeria?
COLEMAN: When I went to Morocco, there was a festival they were having, a festival that had been handed down for the last six thousand years, and their music was as old or older than that. It was really beautiful. The same thing in Nigeria. I guess for some reason in a society like America, where the people haven't figured out a way to grow closer together, that basically it's the goodness of being a human being that transcends the structure of what someone doesn't want you to be or have. My outlook for being born in America and being an American person, I feel the same way as any person that's born in America, and being an American person, I feel the same way as any person that's born — that where you are born has something very important to do with what you are born to live as, and that you don't have to imitate any race, or to force your race on another person, but to find a way to better the conditions of why you were born. These are some of the things my trip to Africa taught me, that I could be myself, because I didn't have nobody else to be.”
