Ornette Coleman: The Territory and the Adventure By Maria Golia. London: Reaktion Books, 2020.

Abstract

Ornette Coleman (1930–2015) and seven other musicians participated in a recording session on a cold December day in 1960 for Atlantic Records that was released as Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation. That album title and the experimental, heterophonic group improvisation that comprised the nearly 38-minute performance, became the metonym for Coleman’s entire creative practice—and that of other experimentalists—for decades to come, forever casting him and subsequent “free jazz” musicians as abdicators of stylistic conventions and harmonic rules. Coleman, and what music journalists in the 1960s called “the new thing,” are now understood by students of jazz history as either an alternative branch or a break away from the jazz tradition. That purported “break,” however, was created in a fraught political moment. When Coleman moved in 1959 from Los Angeles to New York City (where his professional career took off), protests were erupting all around the country to demand full citizenship and civil rights for African Americans— a cause that overlapped with a burgeoning youth-led movement against the status quo. He arrived in town for an infamous weeks-long run at the Five Spot Café, a well-known club in Manhattan’s East Village, and it was that string of gigs (effectively a residency) that attracted influential figures in the New York music industry, from Leonard Bernstein to Miles Davis. The music he played there was experimental, and the sound of his piano-less quartet and white plastic alto saxophone convinced local journalists that a “new thing” in jazz had indeed arrived, but not that it—or Coleman himself—were “serious,” or capable musicians. Nevertheless, he became an emblem of the jazz avant-garde in the 1960s and, as the decade progressed, some music journalists suspected that this more experimental improvised sound was a kind of protest music. Though he did not have the same angry Black musician reputation as Cecil Taylor or Archie Shepp, the almost exclusively white-male field of music journalism in the 1960s debated Coleman’s unique instrumental tone and improvisational style, and some critics and musicians openly doubted whether he and those in his groups were legitimate players. However, after succeeding in Europe and receiving a Guggenheim grant in 1967, Ornette Coleman became regarded worldwide as an eccentric—probably genius—and unmistakably idiosyncratic musical force. Maria Golia’s recent monograph of Coleman makes a subtle yet powerful intervention into the reputation of eccentricity and subversion that follows his legacy today, 7 years after his death. He is an iconoclast to be sure, but one who was more of an explorer than an insurgent; someone committed to a journey of musical imagination and possibility that took him to the far reaches of his own creative vision and also into the grasp of unsuspecting and uninitiated listeners. For Golia, Coleman the artist cannot be separated from Coleman the Texan, so the narrative arc of her book begins and ends in his hometown of Fort Worth, Texas. Golia, an independent researcher and engaging writer whose previous books cover the history of photography in Egypt, profile the city of Cairo, and investigate the cultural impact of meteorites, seeks to capture in prose the times and places that influenced Coleman’s music and creative visions. To contextualize Coleman’s childhood, for instance, Golia spends the first ten pages of Part 1 providing a gloss of the city’s history from the mid-nineteenth century to