R.I.P. ORNETTE COLEMAN

By request, the Guatemalan garage psych album "Electronicos La Fuente" is back.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

There's talented, there's influential, there's great...and then there are those at the top of Mt. Olympus whose cultural thunderbolts sent down from on high just change everything. And so it was with Ornette Coleman, who just died at age 85.

His 1960 album "Free Jazz" gave an entire genre of music it's name - how many other people can claim that? And that album (I'm listening to it now) is still thrilling, all these decades later.

Lou Reed said it was artists like Ornette that inspired "Sister Ray," which led to Sonic Youth and noise rock in general. Much of the '80s SST Records catalog - mainstays of college radio - owed a debt to Ornette.

Free jazz, especially in the hands of masters like Ornette, is not random noise. There is a method to the madness, as should be readily apparent here:

Orenette, et al. "Endangered Species" (Google Drive)
 
Ornette, et al. "Endangered Species" (The Box)


 
13 minutes from the "Song X" album that I first heard on the radio as an impressionable youth upon its release in 1986. It completely rewired my brain. And I thought I didn't like jazz. But I thought, "Well, this is kinda interesting," so I didn't turn it off. Then I turned the volume up a bit...and then some more. By the end of the track I was sitting up, blasting it, jaw dropped. 

Coleman recorded it with Pat Methany, then mainly known for his "smooth jazz." A friend of mine who worked at Tower Records says confused Methany fans would return the album back to the store, expressing their disgruntlement. Ha! Methany did amazing things on that album, making his guitar sound like an exploding synthesizer. 

The great bassist Charlie Haden, Ornette's right hand man for decades, died last year. I have plenty of his albums, too. Really dig his L.A. noir stuff with Quartet West.