The Shape Of Jazz To Come

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Of all the striking jazz innovations that coalesced in the year 1959, Ornette Coleman’s was the most radical. Miles Davis streamlined chord progressions and carved out room for melodic space on <i>Kind of Blue</i>. John Coltrane raised the bar on virtuosity with the relentless tempo and leaping key changes of <i>Giant Steps</i>. But Texas-born alto saxophonist Ornette Coleman eschewed conventional harmony and form altogether. And with <i>The Shape of Jazz to Come</i>, he began a stint with Atlantic Records that remains one of jazz’s grandest achievement. (The Atlantic years are compiled on <i>Beauty Is a Rare Thing</i>.) He also debuted one of the most expressive and atypical jazz quartets of all time, with Don Cherry on pocket trumpet, Charlie Haden on ba, and Billy Higgins on drum. “Coleman and Cherry may relate to the emotion, the pitch, the rhythm, the melody of a theme, without relating to ‘chords’ or bar division,” wrote the late critic Martin Williams in his liner note. The alert 4/4 meter and walking bass of modern mainstream jazz was still often present, but during solos there might be no form at all—just interplay and creative exchange in the moment, a modality that later came to be called “time, no change.” Framing these improvisations were Coleman’s inescapably singable melodie, from the captivating wail of the opening “Lonely Woman” to the quizzical calm of “Peace.” The melodie, or “heads” in jazz parlance, were usually voiced in unison: alto sax and trumpet, in the bebop manner. But the attack was rawer, the articulation more gestural and imperfect, the phrases wildly unpredictable (listen to the disorienting stop-start structures of “Focus on Sanity” and “Congeniality,” for instance). .

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