The New Thing Meets Rock

The New York Times: August 9, 1970    
“The New Thing Meets Rock” by Carman Moore

The avant-garde corner turn that jazz took a little over a decade ago was christened “the New Thing” by many, and to most 1970’s listeners it remains just that—a thing, new, opaque and forbidding.

But when in rapid succession, in 1959, Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Eric Dolphy, and John Coltrane brought in the New Thing, it absolutely took flight, orbited awhile, and spaced out, taking along at least a few passengers. A funny thing happened, however, on the way to the galaxies. The New Thing met with other, sympathetic far-out styles, notably avant-garde classical elements show forth quite obviously in the fabric of this new music. And after a few years of grumbling and snobbery, jazz musicians have begun to experiment with rock-R&B rhythms.

Now, a decade after his revolutionary New Thing recording Shape of Jazz to Come (Atlantic S-1317), Ornette Coleman, violinist and saxophonist, presents his new album Friends and Neighbors (Flying Dutchman FDS-123), and its five works offer many stylistic surprises. Surprise number one: the title piece. The approach is heavily rock ‘n’ soul (that term to comfort semantic racial nitpickers). At once musically substantial as jazz and infectiously danceable as pop, the number sends the brilliant Charlie Haden’s acoustic bass line thundering off after the feet while Ornette’s furious barrage of violin sawing assaults the mind and spirit. Another surprise: in “Long Time No See,” “Forgotten Songs” and “Tomorrow” Coleman steps back to some stone bebop stretches haunted by Charlie Parker. Fleet, brittle, impetuous unison lines on  “Long Time” and the opening to “Tomorrow” says 50’s, but the Coleman magic opens it all up to spray forth the fine, free complexity of the New Thing at its best. Certain stretches are incredibly beautiful and intelligent within the manly raucousness of the approach—for example, the passage of ensemble ripples and counterpointings at the end of “Forgotten Songs.”

Also excellent and more accessible than “Emergency,” his intriguing first album, is Turn It Over (Polydor 24-4021) by Tony Williams’ Lifetime Ensemble, here expanded to include, almost inaudibly, former Cream bassist Jack Bruce. While not a totally astonishing as the “Emergency” album, “Turn It Over” with its longer passages of mainstream, steady jazz beat and rock beat orientations, is more direct and seems more assure. The best cut on the recording, and a most remarkable song, is Tony’s “This Night This Song.” He is not much of a singer, though his Billy Holiday-inflected style is expressive and does grow on you. But it is the song itself, with its strange, loose-limbed harmonic motion and rhythmic asymmetries, which makes one forecast Tony Williams as a force of major promise in 1970’s music.

Less easily defined as to style are recordings by two avant-garde trumpet players from the jazz world. The first, Human Music (Flying Duchman FDS-121), on which New Thing pioneer Don Cherry collaborates with electronic composer Jon Appletion, is fascinating minute-to-minute but in total form is unfocused and lacks tension—with one exception. “OBA,” the only one of the four works on which Cherry plays his trumpet, is one of the most original short stretches of music recorded in many a year—this in spite of its not knowing when to stop. A folkish trumpet tune is alternated rondo-fashion with passages of incredible clarity and energy between electronically-filtered trumpet and electronic synthesizer. The prominent fusion here, as on much of the second disk, youthful black Parisian trumpeter Jacques Coursil’s Way Ahead (Acutel 19), occurs between new jazz and new classical styles.

On the Coursil album, some of the cuts are primitive in terms of New Thing 1970, although his “Fidel” is moving and features a lovely passage of catch-and-hide imitations between Coursil and tenor saxophonist Arthur Jones, soaring and gathering light. The feature of the record, however, is Coursil himself, a brilliant improviser possessing speed and coloristic imagination and the ability to play high notes up to a whistle. He will be heard from, I suspect.

Where Miles Davis goes, jazz goes, has been a relatively safe rule for all but five years out of the last two decades. Recently Miles began to embrace both the New Thing and elements of progressive rock at once. One result is his two-disk Bitches Brew (Columbia GP 26), which must be considered a landmark of recorded music. Instances of subtlety and formal improvisational mastery come thick and fast. It is all so strange and new and yet so comfortable. Anyone who has listened to much jazz, popular and new classical music over the last decade will sense the roots of all that occurs here. But the Miles Davis synthesis is so ingenious and profound as to transform virtually each minute. Always having employed the very best of instrumentalists, Davis calls up the finest sensitivities of such electric pianists as Chick Corea, Khalid Yasin and Joe Zawinul, plus saxophonist Wayne Shorter, and several other top performers.
                       
The cut, “Miles Runs the Voodoo Down” is a sultry, rock-heavy number on which Miles’s trumpet sketches out across the rhythmic swamp-scrape with little asymmetric fragments which congeal, in time, into a longer, common-harmony statement. Corea and Yasin then turn in one breath-taking passage of upward-rushing shadow scales to close the work. The enormous emotional penetration of Davis on the private ballad “Sanctuary” is only one more gem from the multi-jeweled “Bitches Brew.”

Jazz was prayed over several years ago, and perhaps—if you insist—is dead. But whatever it is that is being fused and projected today by Coleman, Davis, Williams, Coursil, and company has every sign of new birth about it. Directional readings for all of instrumental music may be in process of being set by these space rangers.