417. Ornette Coleman, "The Shape of Jazz to Come"

 


My Mom loved art and going to art museums, but, being a "child of the Depression" as she reminded us whenever we asked for something extravagant like name-brand bread, she really was only interested in figurative art.  She was befuddled and maybe angered by abstract act, and, although she had taken art history classes and been to the finest art museums in the world, would say stupid shit like "I don't understand this.  Anybody could do this" when looking at anything that wasn't an Impressionist or whatever.

That's me with this album.  I am a dumb idiot who knows nothing, and I mean, nothing about jazz.  As far as I know, this is the second jazz album I have listened to all the way through in my entire life, the first being Miles Davis' "Kind of Blue" which I got in my 20's to put on at dinner parties to seem grown up.  And while it was recognizable to me as "jazz," I have no vocabulary for it, no base of knowledge to use to evaluate it.  A lot of the early songs sound like random sax notes skittering around like a nervous mosquito.  There are bloops and honks and runs but it doesn't sound like anything at all to me.  Go ahead and roast me mercilessly for my musical hillbillyism.  

I'm thinking here specifically about "Eventually," which someone who's forgotten more about jazz than I will ever know called "the frantic-tempoed 'Eventually,' with Coleman’s squawking solo living up to the quip about avant-garde jazz sounding like an 'atom bomb falling on a chicken coop.'"  OK then!  

So what I will take away from this is that there's something to this jazz thing that the kids are crazy for, but I'll be damned if I understand it.

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