Occasional Jazz Conjectures

On Ornette Coleman’s Pulitzer Prize
Life is full of surprises. Suppose I told you that the best way to understand the wild music of avant-garde saxophonist-composer Ornette Coleman begins with an appreciation of beloved French Impressionist Claude Monet. You might call me mad.

I’d be in good company. Both the painter and the free-jazz musician faced decades of sanity-questioning critical catcalls (lambasted as “jive,” “rotten anarchists,” purveyors of “garbage . . . moral decay” . . . and formless monstrosity) before ridicule was replaced by recognition.

While Monet recast the tools of color and the play of light using familiar touchstones of leisure (water, boating, picnics), Coleman’s “free jazz” made its case by tapping into the more palpable, visceral elements of jazz — an infectious sense of swing, popcorn-like rhythms and moody, evocative dynamics—as it rejected more predictable melodic or harmonic avenues.

Throughout their respective careers, they touched the hearts of many and infuriated gaggles of critics and contemporaries with fresh and original visions. Both reveled in a different way of seeing; both promoted an art of immediacy and movement that enthusiastically affirmed modern life.

For Monet and the Impressionists, the official stamp of approval came in a matter of 20 years. For Coleman, the wait has been going on 50 years.

Now, at the age of 77, he’s received this year’s Pulitzer Prize for music for his recording “Sound Grammar.”

Coleman has always had his champions: He has received a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, a Guggenheim, induction into the American Academy of Arts and Letters and, also this year, a Grammy for lifetime achievement. But the Pulitzer was an unexpected and welcome surprise, validating a half-century commitment to what jazz critic Francis Davis has called a “permanent revolution” in jazz.

Ornette Coleman was born in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1930 and came of age during the late 1940s, at the crossroads of high modernist bebop (exemplified by Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk and Dizzy Gillespie, among others) and the saxophone-drenched R&B popularized by Bull Moose Jackson, Big Jay McNeely and others.

Never truly comfortable in either idiom, Coleman gravitated to Los Angeles in the 1950s, then created waves of controversy when he stormed Manhattan in 1959. Like the Parisian Impressionist insurgency, Coleman’s two-month-long Salon des Refuses at the Five Spot polarized both artists and audiences — and attracted a laundry list of Manhattan art-world and cafe society jazz mavens as diverse as painters Larry Rivers and Robert Rauschenberg, columnist Dorothy Kilgallen and composer/conductor Leonard Bernstein (who “sat in” on piano).

Hailed as “the only really new thing in jazz since Charlie Parker in the mid-40s” by the Modern Jazz Quartet’s John Lewis, Coleman was seen as either a genius or a snake-oil salesman.

Coleman’s taking of Manhattan in 1959 wasn’t the twilight or jazz apocalypse that many feared, but a much-needed fireworks display that distracted and refigured our expectations of this thing called jazz. He offered a buoyantly swinging vision of the music that was shot through with celebration, drop-kicked joy and exuberance.

On an album of the same name released that year, Coleman’s “Shape of Jazz to Come” revealed an artistry bursting at the seams. Self-effacing and gentle of spirit, his music embraced kernels of the blues (a primal cry and wail, the poetry of call-and-response that evoked qualities of the human voice), bebop’s keening swing and space-traveling sense of velocity, and a collective improvisation that recalled the conversational all-at-once-ness of Dixieland. But it declined, with a firm I-would-prefer-not-to, conventional ideas of form or harmony.

From the get-go, the enigmatic Coleman has been interested in “removing the caste system from sound.” The result is a body of work that mirrors the accelerated pace of midcentury big-city whirl and bustle.

As with seminal jazz artists such as Louis Armstrong and Charlie Parker, you hear in Coleman’s work life’s celebration, pain, sorrow, uplift, beauty and humor — gaining a vital, rich understanding of the past while embracing its future possibilities. Critic Howard Mandel notes that the music “seems jaunty and penetrating, but seldom chaotic or raucous. Yet (nearly 50) years ago, some jazz veterans were outraged.”

For well on a half-century, Coleman has been reconfiguring jazz travel, with standard harmony, melody and rhythm becoming peripheral points along the median instead of the pavement. From Cubist jazz in the 1950s to symphonies, string quartets and fractured, electric funk in the 1970s and ’80s, Coleman continues to expand on his reflexive musical language with each project. While it may never take hold as jazz’s lingua franca, his vivid “sound grammar” contributes to a subversive dialect and infectiously swinging, hipster patois that’s been embraced by artists as far afield as Jerry Garcia, Pat Metheny, Joe Henry, Yoko Ono, Lou Reed, and Kurt Masur and the New York Philharmonic.

The timing of this year’s award (the first for a strictly jazz recording—Wynton Marsalis won in 1997 for his epic oratorio, “Blood on the Fields”) — signals a brave new turn for the once mustily conservative awards panel. The Pulitzer for music was established in 1943 and generally has been skewed toward more Eurocentric classical composition. With a mandate to take a more “broad view of serious music,” the Pulitzer (which infamously refused the prize to Duke Ellington in 1965) is coming to grips with the richness of American musical tradition in all its grit and glory.

The music on Coleman’s “Sound Grammar” reminds us that jazz is indeed a “tradition,” but one that doesn’t sit still and won’t be contained under glass or in a suspended state. While it might recall the blues of a Sippie Wallace or Ethel Waters in high lament, or the humor and rapid-fire curveball logic of a Mack Sennett Chaplin short, it also has a fierce Modernism that is streamlined ’50s in its curves and velocity but uncomfortably daring with its unbridled, flinty bits of melody. It is music that is as uniquely American and as boldly independent as the art of Walt Whitman, Jackson Pollock or Merce Cunningham.

“There are as many unisons as there are stars in the sky,” Coleman once said, and in a way the Pulitzer is one step toward acknowledging that wide compass. Ornette Coleman continues to produce a body of work that makes a deep, lasting impression—the kind of impression that would have made Claude Monet proud.

Published originally in The Oregonian