Customer Reviews

The Shape of Jazz to Come

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A lot of people are unnecessarily afraid of Ornette Coleman because the words "free jazz" and "avante-garde" have been applied to his music. But his music is quite approachable. This album is a great place to start for people who are new to Ornette. This album caused a stir in 1959 when it was released, with jazz critics exploding in wrath. The reason for all this furor? Ornette chose not to use a chordal instrument on this music. No piano, no guitar. He and Don Cherry harmonize to imply chords, and occasionally Charlie Haden (bassist supreme!) supplies the occasional three or four note chordal riff, but mostly the music consists of melodies (and very melodic solos) played over an implied structure. Ornette's tone is sharp and lemony on the sax, while Don Cherry's cornet tone is sweeter and more rounded. They state themes and then toss melodies back and forth, while Haden and drummer Billy Higgins interject and support. The music on this album is like listening to four intelligent, funny people having a conversation. The musicians are obviously listening to each other and bouncing ideas off one another, which is exactly as it should be in jazz. The music is played with wit, soul, and emotion, and in spite of the skeleton crew instrumentation, the melodic and rhythmic ideas are of such quality that you can listen to this CD many times, and get something new out of it every time. How many records can you say that about? I wish more of the new jazz artists would base their creations on this kind of innovative, interesting music, instead of rehashing the same old swing and bop cliches as they tend to do. Ornette's "Shape of Jazz to Come" is still as relevant as ever. Listen especially closely to Charlie Haden's bass playing on this CD and note how far ahead of his time he was; there wouldn't be a more innovative jazz bassist until Jaco Pastorius came along twenty years later. This is indeed the shape of Jazz to Come; hopefully one day the rest of the music world will catch up, because I guarantee you the world will be a better place when they do.

I highly recommend shelling out a few more bucks for this remastered version (Atlantic Masters, 2005)--the sound is greatly improved (higher resolution, more "information") compared to the original CD version. Sounds more like you're listening to four great musicians instead of a recording of 'em. This is a classic and beautiful album that was revolutionary at its time, and is still very appealing today. Incidentally, I noticed it's one of only a handful of Jazz albums that appears on the Rolling Stone Top 500 albums of all time list.

This is an excellent product, and should be distinguished from the original CD version.

Because it is populated by drug addicts, ne-er do wells, misogynists, slackers, and people who wear sunglasses after dark, the world of jazz is thought of as a "cool" place where anything goes. Surprisingly enough, there is stodginess, conservatism, and resistance to change in the world of jazz just as there is everywhere else. No one knows this better than Ornette Coleman.

In the late `50s, sporting a plastic alto sax and some wild new ideas, Coleman blew onto the scene and was quickly fed into the teeth of a whirring buzz saw. Jazz insiders disagreed about Ornette Coleman; some saw him as a deranged savage with no grounding in jazz traditions, others saw him as a grandstanding opportunist attempting to pass off bizarre behavior for avante garde music, and frightening the dogs in the process. Both groups agreed he should be burned at the stake. A smattering of advocates knew better than to speak up.

What's so funny is that 40 plus years later, everyone admits he's a giant of jazz and hugely influential, but nobody listens to him. (He's like PBS in this respect). Two things jump out. When he kicked the piano out of the ensemble, the chords, the musical foundation, went too. Heresy. Next, as good as Don Cherry is, Coleman put all the musical pressure on himself, his alto carries everything. This might be thought of as chutzpah or recklessness except that he really is that good.

The Shape Of Jazz To Come proves this beyond all debate. Though Coleman is considered "way out," this CD is thoroughly listenable and exquisitely beautiful. Coleman's abilities as a solo artist are absolutely stunning, in a class with giants like Coltrane, Parker, and Young. In later efforts, like the Stockholm recordings, he would venture even further off of Main Street, and at times the results are not mellifluous. It doesn't matter. Coleman is the real thing, a fearless originator, a prodigy, and a national treasure. He is like the film director Terry Gilliam in that even his failures are better than the successes of almost all his colleagues. With The Shape Of Jazz To Come, Ornette Coleman succeeds unequivocally.

Ornette Coleman is a name frequently associated with the very challenging world of avante-garde jazz. But The Shape Of Jazz To Come, while certainly revolutionary and groundbreaking, is not difficult music at all to listen to. Later records such as 1960's Free Jazz would fit that bill, but this is a splendidly accessible post-bop jazz album. Even people who hate Coleman's later work and the whole concept of free jazz (I'm sort of mixed on the idea myself) will probably love this.

The main breakthrough of this album is the idea of implied chords. Rather than placing a conventional chord under each note, Coleman chooses instead to only imply the existence of the chord and in so doing leaves open many different possible melodies to improvise with. While this could seemingly invite chaotic dissonance within the framework of a quartet, the band plays with fluidity throughout. Every track is full of easy melodies, which is not something you could say for a lot of Coleman's other albums.

Of course, when you have a band this talented (Don Cherry on trumpet, Charlie Haden on bass, Billy Higgins on drums) it shouldn't come as too much of a surprise. Each player is among the cream of the crop on their respective instruments, and Ornette himself is no slouch either. Every track is a stone-cold classic--the elegant opener Lonely Woman, hard bop numbers like Eventually, Focus On Sanity, and Congeniality, the graceful ballad Peace, and the solid closer Chronology.

Along with other landmark jazz albums released in 1959 (Giant Steps, Kind Of Blue, Time Out etc.) this is vital to the casual listener's collection and the one Coleman disc I'd reccommend to even a novice jazzer. At the same time, if you are a fan of later Coltrane, Sun Ra, Dolphy etc. this is where it all started, so dig in and enjoy.

1959 is to jazz what 1977 is to punk rock: glorious. John Coltrane's Giant Steps. Miles Davis recording Kind of Blue. Charles Mingus and his eponymous Mingus Ah Um. And my personal favorite, Time Out by the Dave Brubeck Quartet. 1959 also introduced one man whose debut album shook the foundations of jazz and introduced a shift in jazz music that is still felt today.

The young man with the plastic horn. Unprecedented.

Ornette Coleman's The Shape of Jazz to Come

Jazz had not seen anything like it. It would be safe to assume that no one thought anything of this caliber would be possible. With its apparent lack of chords, its atonality, and its complete disregard for traditional jazz conventions, Ornette Coleman's debut album angered many. It was easily dismissed as junk, noise, garbage. This isn't music, many said. For them, this wasn't jazz.

But it was. And is.

The Shape of Jazz to Come is prophetic in its title. This album would immensely influence John Coltrane, Eric Dolphy and countless other musicians, both within and outside of jazz. And its verberations can still be felt in jazz. John Zorn has taken much from Coleman. Pat Methany has worked alongside Coleman.

With this debut, Coleman paved the way not just for avant-garde jazz, but for free jazz as well. Such a possibility must have been unforeseeable in 1959. The Shape of Jazz to Come established a path for those seeking a new take on jazz to follow. In this way, the album served as an exodus, the music contained within serving as aural guideposts to jazz's new land.

There is a story that details how Ornette Coleman performed a show in front of a crowd to whom he was a relative unknown. Halfway through Coleman's performance, the crowd, unable to process the new jazz they were listening to, chased Coleman off the stage, seized his plastic horn, and destroyed it. I imagine The Shape of Jazz to Come elicited the same dangerous reaction from others.

A necessary reaction.

In 1959, jazz was having its foundation shaken. An upstart musician, composer and theorist who recorded a couple uneven LPs in Los Angeles had moved to New York and shook the ideas upon which jazz was built-- ideas like chord changes being the framework for improvisation, ideas about how rhythm should sound, ideas about when playing in key is not good. Blowing on a white plastic alto saxophone, Ornette Coleman polarized the jazz world-- musicians, critics, fans, in a manner reminiscent to Charlie Parker's arrival on the scene. To this day, he continues to do so, particularly in the face of discussions of what is "pure" jazz, and yet the influence of Ornette Coleman is felt far and wide in the music-- certainly many contemporary jazz legends picked up pointers from him, even if they were inclined to deny it-- recordings by Sonny Rollins ("Our Man in Jazz"), John Coltrane (just about anything), Charles Mingus ("Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus"), and Miles Davis ("ESP", "On the Corner") in the time after Coleman's arrival all bore his unmistakable influence, and artists as diverse as Pat Metheny, Jason Moran, Branford Marsalis and John Zorn all claim him as an influence or have paid homage to him. And in many ways, it all started with this album, titled "The Shape of Jazz to Come". Truer words were rarely spoken.

Coleman's music, codefied abstractly as "harmolodics"-- a system that gets more and more difficult to understand every time Coleman discusses it-- is based on one large essential difference to most music at the time-- conceptually, the soloist determines the direction of the piece. The form relies on head-improv-head structures so common in bebop, but there are no chord changes-- if the soloist decides he wants to change keys, change tempos, wail off key, whatever, he does it. There are some rules to it, clearly, or it would sound like a disorganized mess, but rather than the structure being in place, that is improvised as well. In many ways, I've often suspected this is the reason pianos are so rarely heard in Coleman's music-- they are a chord-oriented instrument, and without changes, they'd have a much more difficult time (Coleman must have found a way to get it through to pianists though as his most recent recordings feature piano). The music is often described as difficult, but this is a bit naive-- the music is different, and certainly anyone unfamiliar with jazz will find it difficult, but the reality is, it's highly accessible, it swings, it's firmly rooted in the blues, and it even has traces of the "Spanish Tinge". What makes it seem "difficult" is the lack of piano (a touchstone of jazz) and the more open structure. But even casual listening will reveal memorable themes and great playing, certainly enough for good music. Critics dismiss his theories as having been developed simply to get around his own lack of understanding of transposition-- this may be the case, but it doesn't matter. His music is what it is, and sometimes innovation comes about because of misunderstanding.

On "The Shape of Jazz to Come", Coleman assembled a group of musicians sympathetic to his playing who would be associated with him for the remainder of their careers-- trumpeter Don Cherry, bassist Charlie Haden and drummer Billy Higgins. The band runs through six pieces composed by the leader, and in many ways this is the album Coleman's reputation is built on. All six pieces are superb-- be they mournful ballads (the superb "Lonely Woman", featuring an alto 'cry' from Coleman during the theme that could not happen playing conventionally in key), gentle, keening ballads ("Peace") or explosive pyrotechnics ("Focus on Sanity"). Throughout the playing is top notch, with Coleman soloing superbly on many pieces-- digging in and putting forth a human expression on his sax rarely heard in music (his fluid and ecstatic solo on "Eventually", passion and grace on "Peace"). For his part, Cherry offers counterpoint to his leader nicely-- his technical limitations are more than compensated for by inventiveness, lack of cliche, and cleverness in his soloing ("Chronology"), as well as the ability to pour his heart into his horn and match Coleman's grace, dignity and beauty ("Peace"). Haden and Higgins provide a sympathetic rhythm section who move with the horns and provide a tight swing-- check their playing on "Focus on Sanity" after Haden's brief, abstracted solo and underneath Coleman or on "Congeniality" and "Chronology", clearly the two of them are rooted deep in swing traditions but still find their way to sustain Coleman's viewpoint.

In reality, "The Shape of Jazz to Come" is one of those classic and essential albums of the genre. It should be in everyone's collection, even if you don't think it'll be your thing, it's worth checking out. Highly recommended.

It seems scarcely believable now that anyone could have regarded Ornette Coleman as an impostor. He was widely misunderstood when he came on the scene, often booed offstage and denied club dates by ignorant and insensitive promoters. Even seasoned musicians walked out on him.

It's interesting that albums with such grandiose titles (The Shape of Jazz to Come, Change of the Century, Art of the Improvisers...) should be in many ways so measured and reflective. But what is clear is that this was unashamedly challenging music. Ornette Coleman had invented something he called harmolodics, used to describe an implied harmony that emerges from the melodic line. The Shape of Jazz to Come is a supreme example of this new approach to making jazz. The music this quartet made was quiet, but the revolution it initiated was wholly indiscreet. No-one could be indifferent to Ornette Coleman. People called it "free jazz" and Ornette himself made a now seminal album of that name a few months later (Atlantic probably wanted to exploit the buzzword of the year), attempting to encapsulate the concept.

Free jazz actually developed into something quite different. But there is no question that the sense of freedom evoked by Ornette's visionary juxtaposition of spontaneous improvisation and structured composition is overwhelming, and justifiably caused both artists and critics to rethink the parameters of the music all over again. Shape contains the first recording of Ornette's most well-known composition, "Lonely Woman", and the stirring "Peace".

The title of this review will probably scare the living daylights out of fans who can't stand a whole bunch of dissonant, skronking noise. But, fear not, because this landmark 1959 album by the great Ornette Coleman isn't all that noisy in the least; in fact, I think it's one of the most beautiful pieces of music to be experienced - jazz or otherwise.

Indeed, my guess is this: what lends the "free" title to this album is the notion of implied chords. You see, most jazz records feature instruments like the piano - instruments that are capable of -- and are often -- producing full chords (a "full" chord typically consists of at *least* three notes to be considered as such -- mainly the root, third and fifth.) On this album, there is not a single piano in site, nor is there any other instrument here that can produce a full chord, or at least not in the typical sense. So, instead, these "implied" chords are only hinted at, perhaps by some of the sequencing of notes coming from the lead instruments, and the solos they tend to produce.

But, through all of this, you would expect to hear a bunch of sloppy, nonsensical riff-raff. Not a chance. The way Ornette and the other players comprised of this quartet pull this technique off is nothing short of astounding. What's more amazing? Some of this stuff is absolutely gorgeous. The melodies are a bit unusual, yet somehow hypnotic and entrancing.

Ornette's later albums would become more extreme in the "free" category, and would be hard to approach for the casual fan. But, here, you can get a glimpse of what would be found in some of Ornette's later, more extreme efforts: The supercharged, free-flowing, rapid-fire, yet elegant dueling/soloing between Ornette (sax) and Don Cherry (trumpet) heard on "Eventually" echoes many of the musings found in a lot of his later work; this is the equivalent of Ornette's signature sound. Yet, on here, it doesn't get so extreme, as to become unbearable to sit through.

You'll probably want to add this to your collection alongside such other 1959 classics (e.g. Dave Brubeck's _Time Out_, John Coltrane's _Giant Steps_, Miles Davis' _Kind of Blue_, Charles Mingus' _Mingus Ah Um_.) It comes highly recommended - jazz novice or diehard fan.

I am a person who is ambivalent about "free jazz", but I am not at all ambivalent about this recording. Music politics aside, this record is filled with incredible, emotionally resonant music that will affect just about any listener.

Of course, this record is not truly "free", whatever that means. Nor is this particularly difficult music (although Ornette certainly has that reputation). The tunes are, in fact, quite catchy. As this record has entered "heavy rotation" status, I have found it hard to get this music out of my head.

For the audiophiles, don't be concerned about the lack of "remastered" status for this disc. The sound quality is outstanding; the Atlantic vaults have been very kind to the source material, and this is a very good transfer.

Certainly this is one of the best Ornette Coleman records out there, and it is an ideal starting point Ornette-neophytes.

1959 was probably the biggest year for jazz in history. Out of that year we were introduced to instant classics such as "Kind of Blue", "Giant Steps", "Time Out", "Mingus Ah Um" and of course, Ornette Colemans "Shape of Jazz to Come." It is not surprising Coleman's release was originally criticized by many as the red-headed step child of jazz music. Many were outraged by Coleman's tunes that lacked an explicit form or set of chord changes. However, much of what we listen to now in the contemporary world of jazz has been shaped by this important artistic album.

If one listens to many of the groups that are on the contemporary scene these days such as the Dave Holland Quintet, it is very hard to discern any type of particular form or distinct chord changes that the players are improvising over. The reason you can't tell very easily is because well, there isn't one. We have Ornette Coleman to thank for this innovative concept that has created an entirely different world of jazz for us to enjoy. Many of the contemporary groups today have extracted much from the avant garde concepts that Coleman initiated on this record.

One might be curious, how in the world can players improvise when there is no explicit form or chordal structure? The answer lies in one word: chemistry. The interplay between Charlie Haden (bass) and Billy Higgins (drums) with the soloists (Coleman on sax and Don Cherry on coronet) is amazing. The players are always conscious of what the others are doing at any given second. Because the chemistry between the players is so well-developed, the music has bite, edge and a sort of abrasiveness that rarely if ever sounds racous, out of tune or unmusical. Granted it is abstract and unconventional, but it stays away from being so vaporous that it cannot be comprehended by the untrained ear (an issue that some contemporary musicians err on too much).

The only warning that I have about this album is that it is not intended to be background music of any kind. You can turn on Kind of Blue or Time Out and occupy yourself with something else and be just fine. This is not the case with "Shape of Jazz to Come." Coleman's disc requires a much more attentive and engaged ear to really appreciate it. Many of the people who refer to this album as incoherent abstract garbage probably are not listening to the album the way it was meant to be listened to. Listen closely and you too, may truely appreciate the shape that jazz has taken.