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OK, Stranger Than Paradise<\/em>, right? Jim Jarmusch? 1984? That one. See it soon, if you haven\u2019t yet. Holds up pretty well.<\/p>\n That\u2019s not the main reason I\u2019m calling this meeting, but anyway\u2026<\/p>\n Remember how Screamin\u2019 Jay Hawkins original 1956 recording of \u201cI Put A Spell On You\u201d was a recurring motif because it was the only record that Eva (Eszter Balint), the movie\u2019s truculent teen-aged Hungarian \u00e9migr\u00e9, wanted to listen to? Now remember, also, when Eva gets into a car with Eddie (John Lurie), her lizard-cool cousin from the Lower East Side, and his not-quite-as-cool sidekick Eddie (Richard Edson) for a New York-to-Cleveland road trip and she insists they put on her Screamin\u2019 Jay tape. And even though Willie\u2019s borderline-sick of the tune, Eddie\u2019s really into it.<\/p>\n \u201cThis,\u201d Eddie proclaims, \u201cis driving<\/em> music!\u201d<\/p>\n Well now\u2026<\/p>\n Last Friday afternoon, I drove from Bloomfield, Connecticut to Brooklyn, New York, a three-and-a-half-hour trip that ended up being more like five hours. (I did mention it was a Friday afternoon.) And in tribute to Ornette Coleman, who had joined the ancestors the day before, I had my IPod patched into my car speakers and locked throughout on Total Ornette Shuffle, covering the gamut from his 1958 Something Else<\/em> Pacific Jazz sessions<\/a> through the groundbreaking Atlantic sides including The Shape of Jazz to Come,<\/a> Free Jazz<\/a> <\/em>and This Is Our Music<\/em>, <\/a>and the funky electro-boogie of his Prime Time band<\/a> all the way to his 2007 live concert disc Sound Museum<\/em> that helped him win a Pulitzer Prize.<\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n By the time I crawled off the Van Wyck and squeezed myself onto the Jackie Robinson Parkway, I was struck dumb by the following revelation: Ornette Coleman is kickass driving music!<\/em> It doesn\u2019t matter whether you\u2019re cruising through the woods or mired in gridlock. Coleman\u2019s music in all his varied settings, even on his inflammatory -at-the-time tenor album from 1962,<\/a> can transfix you into a state that\u2019s somehow both chillaxed and vigilant. In some quadrants, it\u2019s called being Very Much Alive To Your Moment. Whatever you call it, it\u2019s odd (but not really) that I\u2019m somehow more attentive to Coleman while in motion than when sitting still, either when watching him live or listening to his records.<\/p>\n Indeed, I was fond of telling city folk of varying ages claiming they could not, or would not ever engage Ornette Coleman\u2019s compulsively renegade art that in the era of digital-portable music being piped inside one\u2019s head, there were rewards and maybe even illumination to be found in letting, say, \u201cLonely Woman.\u201d \u201cChange of the Century,\u201d or \u201cSong X\u201d weave through the beautiful mosaic of ambient urban sound. Whether your day needed added propulsion or a demilitarized zone, the music, at any tempo or tone, could provide both. To think that there are people who remember when all this music was able to do was make people mad — even those who should have known better, and eventually did.<\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Did anybody take me up on it? Don\u2019t know, don\u2019t care, because I kept at it even though I knew what I was up against: Trying to explain \u201charmolodics.\u201d It was Coleman\u2019s own term for his aesthetic principles, and while there is no altogether satisfying definition for the word, it may be characterized in part as organic music that invents and re-invents itself off improvisation itself and not on chords. Even though his music has been around for at least a couple generations, there are those who still have trouble with the harmolodic concept, however much the music associated with it evokes powerful strains of both bebop and the blues at full cry.<\/p>\n Listen to that saxophone! I would say to the hardheads. If a singer made those sounds, you\u2019d be swooning, swaying and even rocking with it. Those sounds over time did make my point, and then some. I\u2019m hardly the first to insist that, however much Coleman\u2019s ringing, vibrating tone was associated with all things modern and abstract, there was also something about his phrasing that was deep-rooted, even embryonic. But then there was the music\u2019s relationship with its rhythm section. What was there to hold onto? the hardheads complained. I insisted that were always beats you could not only ride, but also dance to, if you bothered to look for them.. The problem (I always added mostly for their benefit) was that the dancing that went along with those beats hadn\u2019t been invented yet.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n That last part, of course, is so very wrong. Lost of people I knew did dance to Coleman\u2019s music; sometimes spontaneously, even organically off the improvisations as the music mandated; and sometimes, as they did at Lincoln Center in the summer of 1997 to the jams laid down by that aforementioned Prime Time band. This was at the climax of a weeklong tribute to All Things Ornette, whose sundry participants included the New York Philharmonic and the downtown power company known as Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson. I reviewed that festival for Newsday, concluding somewhat cheekily that we\u2019d all been living in Coleman\u2019s world for decades now, only we\u2019re now beginning to notice it.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n I\u2019d still like to believe that, especially given the play given last week to Coleman\u2019s passing in major news outlets. Yet there somehow seemed greater attention paid in mass-market precincts to Christopher Lee, the venerable British character actor and horror-movie cult star, whose death was reported the same day. I\u2019m as much in thrall to movie cults as any dork, but there\u2019s a very big difference between being a reliably accomplished bogeyman and changing the furniture in people\u2019s heads.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Yet the deep sadness that reverberates among those who do appreciate Coleman\u2019s significance over his death comes from two places. One is the belief that, even at 85, he was ready and able to keep working in public. (There was at least one scheduled tour date for later this year, in Paris.)<\/a> The other, more complicated, resides in a melancholy suspicion that with Ornette Coleman\u2019s departure, we\u2019re also saying goodbye to the future; or perhaps more to the point, a belief in the future\u2019s possibilities. The risks he took back in the fifties embodied jazz\u2019s last great modernist convulsion. As long as he was around, it was possible to imagine him still leading the charge for further discovery.<\/p>\n But as long as there remain multitudes out there who still don\u2019t quite \u201cget\u201d what Coleman was up to, the future he mapped out will always be with us, indoctrinating new enlistees in the harmolodic cause, tempting fresh crops of painters, poets, dancers and, of course, musicians in all marketing categories to think organically \u2013 or think different, at least. As I wrote 18 years ago, it\u2019s still Ornette\u2019s world, no matter how long it takes for the rest of that world to figure it out.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n