MAO legendary albums | ORNETTE COLEMAN: SOMETHING ELSE

MAO Legendary Albums | Ornette Coleman: Something Else

When the Memphis-born Coleman moved to Los Angeles, a loose circle formed around him, including drummer Billy Higgins, who brought his trumpeter friend Don Cherry with him. A seminal record of the youthful experimentation, featuring Walter Norris on piano and Don Payne on bass, was released in 1959 as Something Else!!!!, thanks to producer Lester Koenig at the Contemporary label. Contemporary music was greeted with scepticism, not everyone understood the essence of the new direction, which the saxophonist himself felt he had not yet really found: 'I think the time will come when the music will be much freer,' he noted in the album's cover lyrics. Indeed, from the perspective of the Free Jazz (1961) programmatically titled album, and after all these decades, this material certainly doesn't seem wildly trappy, with dissonances and surprises that don't explode the form. They were attracted by an experiment in new form, not formlessness. Coleman's white plastic alto saxophone, with its opalescent sound, especially Don Cherry's pocket trumpet, with which they seemed not quite in tune, was unusual, while the rhythm section was even more associated with them in a traditional bebop perception. But let them be told, Coleman's compositions were challenging enough that the traditional and the innovative perceptions blended interestingly in the playing of the quintet as a whole. Over time, this material has lost none of its interest.