David Izenzon brought a major advance in jazz bass playing and in the structure of the jazz ensemble. Izenzon was born in 1932 in Pittsburgh and did not even begin to study bass until he was twenty-three years old; he became Coleman’s bassist five years later. Traditionally the bass’s role in jazz had been to ground the ensemble pulse; even LaFaroe, though he chafed at the role, did not find an alternative. But Izenzon was as likely to provide the melodic line as pulse, avoiding direct rhythmic reference, contradicting his partner’s tempos, and playing arco at least as often as he played pizzicato. The genius of Izenzon’s music is that he did not become an independent voice in the trio; his fine sensitivity created ensemble tension so that in a discursive peformance such as „The Ark,“ with shifting tempos and problematic drumming, Izenzon becomes a source of unity. When Coleman plays hard alto trills, Izenzon fiddles wildly in double stops; when drums and sax separate in fast tempos, the bass separates further with a slow, plucked line. In the middle he plays a shimmering note that begins a continuous melodic line, a characteristic solo: brief, compact, a complete statement utterly free of ornamentation. After the self-dramatizing of Mingus and LaFaro, it’s a paradox that Izenzon, the most active of bass virtuosos, sounds so completely effortless. You’re not overwhelmed at his speed; his music flows so naturally and lyrically, without excess, that even his blurring of pitch does not sound extreme. Izenzon was especially devoted to bass sound. At a time when electronic amplificatoin was becoming standard for jazz bassists, he didn’t use an amplifier even though he played softly; ealso, his experience in both jazz and contemporary classical techniques gave him a broad expressive range. (S. 49f.)
[…]
In contrast with the increasing stylization of his alto soloing, there’s his violin and trumpet work of the sixties. He had no teachers or guides to playing these instruments; he purposely avoided learning standard techniques, for his objective was to play „without memory“ and to create as spontaneously as possible. He had jammed with Albert Ayler in 1963; Ayler’s concept of sound, especially his deliberate imprecision of pitch, certainly coincides with Coleman’s point view: „I’m very sympathetic to non-tempered instruments. They seem to be able to arouse an emotion that isn’t Western music. I mean, I think that European music is very beautiful, but the people that’s playing it don’t always get their chance to express it that way because they have spent most of their energy perfecting the unisons of playing together by saying, ‚You’re a little flat,‘ or ‚… a little sharp.‘ … A tempered note is like eating with a fork, where that if you don’t have a fork the food isn’t going to taste any different.“
Despite a unique sound, Coleman’s trumpet phrasing at first tends to sound like blurred, flighty abstracts of his sax phrasing; a lifetime’s habit of breathing is retained on the new wind instrument. But the violin is a stringed instrument, so Coleman could create lines without the necessity to regulate phrasing and breath; his nontempered violin improvisations sound indeed like music without the distortion of will. The admiring critic Max Harrison considered them „an indeterminacy as drastic as John Cage’s.“ In „Falling Stars“ and „Snowflakes and Sunshine“ Coleman and Izenzon together create thick forests of string textures, sustained by kinetic energy. The most extensive and varied example of Coleman’s trumpet playing is in one of his rare appearances as a sideman on altoist Jackie McLean’s New and Old Gospel. The trumpet phrases glitter through the many collective improvisations; Coleman sustains a delicate tension of sound and space in „Vernzone“; the trumpet lines become sober against the bronze, beautiful alto tones in „The Inevitable End.“ McLean’s raw, powerful sound and accenting are gothic next to the airborne, mostly muted Coleman; this altoist, too, vividly and naturally plays sharp or flat „in tune.“
Charles Moffett, Coleman’s regular drummer, was a master of many styles and among the most sophisticated of percussion technicians. There could be no greater contrast than Coleman’s ten-year-old son, Denardo, who is the drummerin The Empty Foxhole (1966), without style or more than rudimentary technique, but with a welcome spontaneity, a further setp in the direction of indeterminacy. The Crisis concert (1969) is a major recording, a reunion with Don Cherry that introduces new compositions (including „Broken Shadows“) into the Ornette Coleman repertoire. Is Denardo Coleman’s presence, his spontaneity, in some degree an inspiration for the insene immediacy of Crisis? One glittering statement is unaccompanied: Ornette’s powerful melodic structure that begins his „Song for Che“ alto solo. (S. 50-52)
[…]
After he had returned to America in mid-1966, he again slowed down his performance schedule. He was disgusted with the way the music business treated musicians, and he said, „I don’t feel healthy about the performing world anymore at all. I think it’s an egotistical world; it’s about clothes and money, not about music. I’d like to get out of it, but I don’t have the financial situtation to do so. I have come to enjoy writing music because you don’t have that performing image. … I don’t want to be a puppet and be told what to do and what not to do. …“ (S. 52f.)
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aus: John Litweiler, The Freedom Principle: Jazz After 1958, New York, 1984, Chapter 2: Ornette Coleman: The Birth of Freedom, S. 31-58
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"Don't play what the public want. You play what you want and let the public pick up on what you doin' -- even if it take them fifteen, twenty years." (Thelonious Monk) | Meine Sendungen auf Radio StoneFM: gypsy goes jazz, #151: Neuheiten aus dem Archiv – 09.04., 22:00 | Slow Drive to South Africa, #8: tba | No Problem Saloon, #30: tba