The Passions of Peter Sellars: Staging the Music By Susan McClary. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2019.

Abstract

(established in 1977). “Part 4: Transmission” effectively eulogizes Coleman’s work and ideas on music and the evocative koans he used to express them. It features summaries and direct quotes from Golia’s interviews with musicians who knew and worked with him, including Kenny Wessel (who collaborated with him for over a decade), Bobby Bradford, fine art gallery owners Skoto Aghahowa and Alix du Serech, visual artist Todd Siler, John Snyder, John Giordano, composer and musician Matt Lavelle, and others. Ornette Coleman’s life’s work, the reader learns by the monograph’s end, was indeed recognized and celebrated despite the grumblings by jazz critics early in his career—he won a Grammy lifetime achievement award, a Kennedy Center award, a medal of arts from the Texas Cultural Trust Council, and a Pulitzer Prize for his 2005 live concert album Sound Grammar. Ultimately, it was triumph instead of tragedy for Coleman the proud autodidact, unflinching self-advocate, and sound alchemist. There are moments in the text where Golia provides very specific historical details without any citation in the bibliography, which opens her historiography to critique—a setback that also profoundly impoverished the authority of John Litweiler’s 1992 biography. For instance, when seeking to contextualize Coleman within the subversive counterculture of the mid-1950s, she names writer/poet Allen Ginsburg and photographer Robert Frank, situating the musician within this movement and implying that he was ideologically aligned with it (112). But, without any explicit and direct quotations, Coleman’s specific political beliefs cannot be assumed. Nevertheless, Golia’s monograph is a solid addition to the literature on the artist, one that highlights an original thinker, born and reared in Texas, and shaped by New York and a world’s-worth of travel and collaborations across the globe. Ornette Coleman, Golia insists, held steadfast to his creative vision until the very end.