Ornette Coleman, Starring as Himself

Jazz at Lincoln Center opened its fall season on Saturday night with a repertory tribute to Ornette Coleman.

Not that this sold-out concert, at the Rose Theater, was presented that way: there was no organized script, no resident orchestra, no Wynton Marsalis. The idea, instead, was that Mr. Coleman — the famously inscrutable alto saxophonist, composer and free-jazz pioneer — would make his Jazz at Lincoln Center debut on his own bold terms. He did just that, superbly, but in a way that compressed his musical history, with an emphasis on songs.


Mr. Coleman, 79, has been celebrated for the last 50 years as a paragon of progressivism: in 1959 Atlantic released “The Shape of Jazz to Come,” a shot across the bow of modern-jazz orthodoxy and the album that marked him as a sharply ascendant force. To those who view Jazz at Lincoln Center, incompletely, as a repository of the past, his inclusion might have seemed a benevolent gesture from a reluctant institution. But that’s plainly unfair to both parties, and in any case the evening was a win all around.

For the better part of this decade Mr. Coleman has led a ruggedly dynamic small group with multiple bassists, and with his son Denardo Coleman on drums. Its current iteration features the acoustic bowing and pizzicato of Tony Falanga and the guitarlike electric fretboard work of Al MacDowell. This same personnel played Town Hall last year, tackling much of the same music: fast-scrambling newer pieces like “Following the Sound,” as well as cherished older fare like “Lonely Woman.” Here, in a more acoustically favorable room, they sounded invigorated and smartly blended, especially after the first third of a roughly 90-minute stand.

Mr. Coleman was the sonic center of the group, the axis around which every vigorous action revolved. In a bright and imploring tone he formed terse elaborations on his themes, phrasing in concrete, epigrammatic bursts. He often removed himself from the textural churn of the band, soaring high before plunging back in, like a diving cormorant. And at times he toggled between melodies: the Stephen Foster ballad “Beautiful Dreamer” surfaced momentarily in “Turnaround,” a vintage original. And twice during “The Sphinx,” from Mr. Coleman’s first album, he quoted at length from “School Work,” which dates to his funk output of the 1970s. (That scrap of melody, which also figures in his symphonic work “Skies of America,” received its full due later in the set.)

There were two separate encores, a sublimely imploring “Lonely Woman” and a briskly exultant “Jordan.” And by that point, the scope of Mr. Coleman’s retrospective was clear. By claiming the broad sweep of his music as the product of a slippery but focused ideal, he was laying out a body of work. And despite being one of only two jazz musicians to have received a Pulitzer Prize for music — the other being Mr. Marsalis — he seemed humbled by the roar of the audience at concert’s end. He didn’t need the validation, but there it was.
By NATE CHINEN

Photo: Hiroyuki Ito
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/28/arts/music/28orne.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss