14. Sadness

Ornette Coleman: Town Hall, 1962 (ESP-Disk’, 1962);
composed by Ornette Coleman

More than half of my college thesis was about Ornette, notwithstanding that my major was literature, not music. So I can offer no technical analysis of how his Harmolodic system worked, and you might also get a perplexed look if you asked any of his musicians about it. The closest we get is “harmony, melody, speed, rhythm, time and phrases all have equal position in the results that come from the placing and spacing of ideas.” What has been endlessly useful to me is how far he took Buckminster Fuller’s maxim that space has no up or down. He effectively codified this principle – it is where he lived, anyway - and the proof is in the listening. Free jazz is not necessarily free improvisation; Ornette could do that, but even Free Jazz had a tune, and Ornette wrote tunes most of the time. “Sadness” is entirely as advertised: an astonishing four-minute dirge on alto sax accompanied by David Izenzohn’s bowed bass and Charles Moffett’s brushes. The mournful theme rises, circles back, seemingly comes to term with itself as if it had resolved something only to then raise the whole argument on a different scale. Inconsolable - both thematically and structurally.

Note: 25 secular essays about 25 songs, each one exactly 200 words long, appearing one per day (on average) during Advent (or the moral equivalent).