Album: The Shape of Jazz to Come
The Shape of Jazz to Come is the third album by jazz musician Ornette Coleman. Released on Atlantic Records in 1959, it was his first album featuring the quartet with trumpeter Don Cherry, bassist Charlie Haden, and drummer Billy Higgins. The recording session for the album took place on May 22, 1959, at Radio Recorders in Hollywood, California.
From 1948 to 1958, Coleman moved among New Orleans, Fort Worth, and Los Angeles, working various jobs and developing his own unique sound that was often not appreciated. Coleman's big break came in Los Angeles when he caught the attention of bassist Percy Heath and pianist John Lewis of the Modern Jazz Quartet. Lewis encouraged Coleman and his trumpeter, Don Cherry, to attend the Lenox School of Jazz (a seminal summer jazz education program) in Massachusetts in 1959, at which Lewis was the director. Lewis also secured Coleman a deal with Atlantic Records, which paid his tuition at the Lenox School of Jazz.
After his stint at the Lenox School of Jazz, Coleman was booked by Lewis to play at the 1959 Monterey Jazz Festival in California. These were all pivotal events in Coleman's career, who in June 1959 suggested to Nesuhi Ertegun, who handled Atlantic's jazz recordings, that he was considering abandoning music in order to study religion. Ertegun, confident of Coleman's potential, urged him to reconsider.
Coleman's quartet, like Gerry Mulligan's, was unusual in that it did not employ a chordal instrument such as a piano or guitar. Each composition contains a brief thematic statement, then several minutes of free improvisation, followed by a repetition of the main theme. While this resembles the conventional head-solo-head structure of bebop, it abandons the use of chord structures.
One prominent feature of Coleman's signature sound was that he played a plastic Grafton saxophone, which some feel contributed to the harshness of his timbre. He coined the term "harmolodic", a combination of harmony, movement, and melody, to describe his philosophy of improvisation which heavily emphasized melody rather than harmony.
On The Shape of Jazz to Come, Coleman dispensied with harmonic accompaniment and focussed instead on improvised melodies and variations on themes and motifs. Coleman had a unique approach to pitch as well. His use of microtonal intervals was central to his sound, and he even went as far as to suggest that the same pitch should sound different when played in different contexts. The album was a breakthrough, and helped to establish the free jazz movement. Later avant-garde jazz was often very different from this, but the work helped to lay the foundation upon which much subsequent avant-garde and free jazz would be built.
The Track List is Lonely Woman, Eventually, Peace, Focus on Sanity, Congeniality, and Chronology.
This page contains affiliate links, and I earn a commission if you make a purchase through one of the links, at no cost to you. As an Amazon associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.
This content was excerpted from the Wikipedia article, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shape_of_Jazz_to_Come, which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/).
The Shape of Jazz to Come - 1959