Listen Cloze: "Lonely Woman" by Ornette Coleman

"...on a job application
for a position i never got
i once put down "ornette coleman"
as "kin to notify" because of that song
he made: "lonely woman"
tho i'm sure he stole those sound-tears
from someone he had hurt, made cry--
cause
no man
has ever
really felt
like that"
- Kalamu ya Salaam

"FOR REAL JAZZ MUSIC LOVERS ONLY. ENJOY THE ART."
- injunction on the video for Zorn's cover, below

There's so much hippy chat cloaking jazz. (Tales of the otherworldly and interworldly.) Too often it's a druggy and emptily radical space. This spooks a lot of people away. (Dizzy Gillespie called it "mess" music.) But the cosmic pseudo-philosophy is the least interesting thing about it.

There's so much scary technicality around jazz. (Tales of the diatonic and atonic.) This spooks a lot of people away. (Dizzy Gillespie called it "mess" music.) This is probably overcompensation; scar tissue from classical music's racist rejection of the intensely new, clever, black musics. But jazz has kept its jargon simply because snobbishness is loads and loads of fun.

Jazz is thus both Continental and Analytic. Few capture the hard clear mist as well as Ornette Coleman did. This is the first cut on his world-messing Shape of Jazz To Come - frenetic, melody mutating, haunting. Cherry (the trumpeter) & Coleman (saxist) are preternatural together, dueting madly. "Lonely Woman" is all kinds of things - repetitive and frozen, scarcely developing.

I think I'm right in saying nobody did improvised chord structure before this. As if the word was "We'll do chord changes on the fly" - as if he simply didn't have time because there is no such thing or some shit. Harmony on the run, if you like, as you like it. Rhythm section loose enough to manoeuvre past all the erratic shit that's flying about.

Have a look if you have the eyes: http://www.freejazzinstitute.org/showposts.php?dept=transcriptions&topic=20081120044407_HalfNelson

This is what musical freedom amounts to, then: deciding what you're going to do as you do it, and to hell with tonal centers; we can always make more. (Later on he wouldn't bother with new ones.)

"State your themes, young man!"
"...Yeah, but then what?"

"Lonely Woman" doesn't sound so harsh now, screamlike bits and drum solos aside. Not quite ready to dance to it, though.

*********************************************************

But never mind that, never mind any of the gubbins and tubes underneath; what does it feel like? What's feminine about it?

A man trying to sympathise with a glimpsed stranger? An awed pathos descending on him, for once? It'd be a strange mind that had both this ratatat hihat and this plaintive swung horn! (Harmony as her subconscious, melody as her stream of consciousness? Does that work?)

*****************************************************

Covers by

-- Radka Toneff (Norwegian doing a vocal setting. The lyrics are painful and lose the wit of the instrumental, but it's nice enough.)



-- Diamanda Galas' one(!) is something else, lyricless; dementing over one single nasty piano pedal chord.



-- Dave Liebman (Recorder is striking at first, but the whole thing gets laboured pretty soon, so full of itself it could shit limbs)



-- Allen/Orr/Smith is avant as you like - "skilful" - but it never develops above knee-level in its quest for consistent weirdness.

-- Mark Kostabi,
(Boring solo piano with "Over the Rainbow" and other cheap disquotes)



--Maria Faust,
(slow, smoothened out, catching a little fire midway but remaining a negative jam)

-- Joe Lovano (his clarinet version is great on record, but you'll have to settle for this unsteady cut:)



-- John Zorn, (raucous and dutty, but robbed of senstivity and wit)




-- Joshua Redman (nujazz reimagining, all vague blips and indifference. Actually starts at 2:35, at which point it becomes an ok emulation.)

What these have in common is their failure to find anything like the original's godly pairing of sax and trumpet. Even Coleman apparently never did, after Cherry died. The real lonely woman was never alone; she had two voices ringing out for her, was two voices, trying to balance in the night.