Ornette: Made in America Page #3

in the band

who worked so very hard.

I'd like to thank our sound crew

from the Port Authority,

World Trade Center,

who sponsor these concerts;

The recording industry;

Most of all I'd like to thank you

for coming on your lunch.

I hope you enjoyed it.

Go, Denardo.

That's all the way down

in the World Trade Center?

Yeah.

It's synchronized

with up here, right?

Yes.

Did you ever see anything

like this before?

Nu

No, I haven't.

Do you think

it's pretty weird?

Oh, I think it's great.

When musicians can get together

without being together

and playing together,

I think it's fantastic.

So what do you think

about this television/music stuff?

All right,

It's all right?

Yeah.

You still play the drums,

and now you're the manager.

How do you feel

about that responsibility'?

Well, I think

it works out pretty nice

because what we're doing

and what he's kind of doing

business-wise,

things that have happened

to have been kind of unusual,

as the music is kind of unusual.

It's a different situation

that somebody who's managing

and doing the business

has to be aware of

and sensitive to.

And since I've seen

so many people come and go

that played that role

that didn't know

quite how to work it out

One place called

the California Club

in the late fifties,

and I think his music

was so powerful at that time

that they were very puzzled,

confused, and embarrassed,

and, of course,

them being next to him,

sort of it made their music

a little off balance

or a little weaker,

and their attitudes

were really a drag.

I mean, they looked at him like,

"What is this guy doing?"

And they would look

at the audience

like, "God, isn't this a drag?"

And of course they put him

off the stand.

Well, the so-called

Ornette mystique-

It's like when he first

started playing, like...

people would break

his instrument.

Well, like when I first met him

in Los Angeles,

I walked into a place

one Wednesday night,

and the entire rhythm section,

they just got up

and left the stand, you know,

and left the saxophone player

up there playing.

So I came to a quick conclusion

this has got to be

Ornette Coleman, you know,

and true, it was.

Ornette has always been

different.

He has always been different

from anybody else.

He wanted to invent things

for himself.

He's an inventor.

He wasn't accepted at all.

He's had times when

he walked on the bandstand

and the musicians walked off.

And he has come back home

on several occasions.

Then he went to New York

and went into the Five Spot,

and he had the same band

that had been with Ornette

about 10 or 15 years,

and when he got to New York,

he hit it.

And suddenly Ornette Coleman,

up on the bandstand

in the Five Spot

during a blizzard

started to play the blues

like Charlie Parker,

and I have never heard

anyone else

other than Charlie Parker

do that that way,

and Charlie Parker

has had many followers,

and he has also had

many imitators,

and there's a big difference.

None of them has come near this.

Ornetle had the attack

on the reed right.

He was doing it

like late Parker, too-

the more virtuoso period

of Parker's short career.

He was absolutely uncanny,

and he went on and on doing it.

And I said, man, why don't you

do this more often?

Why don't you do this

on a record

to show people that you really

do know what you're doing-

those that won't listen to you

and learn it that way?

And Ornette said something like,

"Oh, I like to do that

every now and then for fun,"

or something like that,

and dismissed it that way.

A symphony orchestra musician

is trained to be

extremely precise,

to meld with everyone else

in the orchestra,

where Ornette's whole philosophy

is totally contrary to that.

He wants the freedom

of expression

between, among all the musicians

in the orchestra.

He wants people to feel free to

express themselves at any time

within the confines

of the structure

that he has designated.

I see the connection

between the jazz

and the symphony orchestra

in a very interesting way.

To me it's like

two different forces

juxtaposed against one another,

and it's almost, to me,

it's almost like

two sources of language.

And in Ornette's playing

and in the entire group,

Prime Time group,

I hear elements

of very early jazz,

even dating back to Dixieland.

I think there was a feeling of-

for me, to be absolutely honest-

a feeling of apprehension,

a feeling of being...

threatened by this...

mind of yours.

And I probably was,

along with just about

everybody else.

We had an inkling

of what would come.

So when I finally met you in 1959

at the School of Jazz in Lenox,

the worse dreams came true.

I heard your music

and knew that here was the music

that was frightening

in its implications,

that they would have to learn

new disciplines.

And I think in that sense

you influenced

everybody, you know.

Obviously the initial impact

of free jazz

was kind of chaotic.

Everybody was running off

in the early sixties

and doing everything

they could think of doing,

and whereas it made sense

in a kind of instinctual way

for Ornetle to do it,

it didn't always make sense for

some of his imitators to do it.

But Ornette was always

one step ahead of them

because he was moving on

to something else

while they were still imitating

his earlier phases.

His current phase,

it seems to me,

really got going

in the early seventies

when he went to Morocco,

when he started picking up

in a lot of ways

on different kinds

of Third World music.

Any kind of music

encounters resistance

from the mainstream audiences

if it's particularly dissonant

or particularly jagged rhythmically

or off-putting in that kind of way,

and this is a problem

that's been faced by everything

from modernist classical music

to free jazz to punk rock.

Ornetle, to his credit,

has not sold out,

if you want to put it

in the basic terms.

He has pursued

what he wants to do.

This got him branded as

an eccentric when he was young.

It gets him branded

as a genius when he's old.

Well, I've been working

on this dream

for about 20 years now,

and it seems as if it's getting

closer and closer to a reality.

And what I intend to do with

this space here on Rivington

is to make

a multiple expression center

which involves space, artists,

dramatics, and science.

I had to migrate to California,

then to Europe,

then to New York,

and to go through lots of things

just to get to this normal state

that I'm trying to achieve now.

So I do believe

that the belief system,

the concept of what is called

the emotional state

of human beings

and their desire to do things

in their own time

is an endless cycle in what

is called the human cycle,

and I would like to,

in my cycle,

making a contribution

to that cycle.

There were

two very bad incidents

that happened in this building.

The first was in September 1982.

I got a call about? A.m.

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