The Shape of Jazz to Come

Puzzling that anyone claiming to be a jazz devotee would allow so much as a syllable of disparagement... How anyone who would not acknowledge Ornette among the most important postwar artists- right up there with Miles, Monk, Coltrane, et al, defies understanding...

I have only started listening to jazz music in the past 10 years. This is one of the first jazz albums that really got to me. The opening track, “Lonely Woman” is amazing; I love the sound of Don Cherry on coronet combined with Coleman’s alto sax.

What strikes me as unacceptable is my feeling that Coleman just didn’t know his way around his horn. Honking and squeezing and playing random notes in some kind of pattern against some kind of rhythm is not my idea of good music. You can call it art if you like, but it’s bad art. Kind of like the Jackson Pollack of music. Spatter music.

Jazz lost one of its greatest innovators today.

Saw this album listed in the top ten of the 50 Greatest Jazz Albums of all time. I like Jazz. I don't like this. I guess you have to be high on something and then it will satisfy. I'm not. I prefer Brubeck, Basie, Oscar Peterson, Zoot and a host of others, but not this plaintive amalgamation of random dissonance.

Well, what are ya gonna do? This album and Ornette himself were truly revolutionary. Personally, I don't dig it. As technically "good' as these guys may be, their rebelliously-original ideas are incomplete and far too strange for my harmony and rhythm-based ears. They need piano or guitar or anything more to provide chordal foundation at some point. Chet Baker and Gerry Mulligan had their smooth little jam "Walkin' Shoes" which likely set the tone for Ornette's vibe to come. The nice thing about Walkin Shoes is the melody AND solos imply chords and rather clearly point to harmonic directions. Coleman Hawkins' "Picasso" achieved the same effect earlier and when you hear other marvelous legends like Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Clifford Brown, or even the much over-worshipped John Coltrane play solo without harmonic accompaniment, you can sense the overall harmonic context underlying their playing. When I listen to crazy soloists like Albert Ayler, Eric Dolphy, and Ornette, I don't sense any harmonic inflection and I think that's intentional. This is why these players are distasteful soloists much of the time with their wild honks, squeals, and fast lines that sound like crap. This album could have been more like "The shape of sound effects from horns to come".

'Focus on Sanity' is well named. It's surprisingly relaxing and lets one escape a little of life's inevitable madness into the sanity of dreams.

@llikesound no need to apologize for not being smart enough to like this album. It's quite clear that you lack a bit of intelligence judging by how you spelled "like", "apologies", "discernible" and "rhythm" wrong. Oh, and this album does indeed have "discernible" rhythm/melodies, it appears the issue is you just don't like how it's aesthetically presented to you. Perhaps you just prefer conventional bebop/hardbop jazz, and thats okay. Different strokes for different folks i guess. Moving on to the very brief review here: The Pure soul, feeling and excitement of the album is still as fresh as i remember hearing it back in 2001, and its as fresh to my father as he first heard this back in 1977. Overall, i'm like everyone else here who loves this record and Ornette Coleman for similar reasons. My personal highlights are Lonely Woman (obviously), Congeniality and Chronology. If you want to hear something more bold and daring than your average bebop/cool jazz album, pick this up, along with Change Of The Century and This Is Our Music. Looking up any Ornette Coleman album after that would be stepping more further into the more hardcore avant-garde territory, and you can do that at your own risk haha 5 Stars!

I'm not smart enough for this. I need discernable rythm/ melodies.

I've only been listening to jazz and studying it since I started my first year in college but when I heard this album I fell in love with it instantly. My sax teacher recommended it to me and I would highly recommend it to anyone.