“I don’t think of a composer as being any more special than his relationship to the society he is living in. He has to work hard like a man that is digging a ditch to get the things he wants out of life — which I haven’t found out how to do yet. […] To me, human life has a goal and that is trying to achieve something good. Anybody that is doing less than that has got to be mixed up. Everybody is trying to improve. When I’m playing I’m just interested in one thing — how good can it get?”
- Ornette Coleman, April 1967
After recording six acclaimed and controversial LPs for Atlantic Records at sessions from May 1959 to March 1961, Ornette Coleman (b. Forth Worth TX March 9, 1930; d. New York City June 11, 2015) found himself as a 31-year-old father of a five-year-old boy, one of the most talked-about musicians in America while being unable to earn enough to live. He dissolved the quartet he’d been working with, walked away from Atlantic and his management, and tried to figure out how to make his way in the world as a musician. He later said of the period that followed:
“I retreated in America, because I was mad about [hearing that] I was selling like three thousand records, and I’d be evicted the next month, you see? And it didn’t make any sense for me to be what I thought I was that they had made me what I thought I wasn’t. You know? So, I just said, ‘OK. I grew up hungry, so I can be hungry now. It’s not gonna be any difference.’ That’s when I started trying to not worry about whether what I was doing had any value or whether it was good or bad but to DO it.” Coleman later told interviewer Chris Albertson that around that time, he once came home to find himself evicted and all of his possessions out on the sidewalk.
The last two Atlantic LPs were released in 1962. At the end of that year, Coleman self-produced a concert at Town Hall in New York with his new trio with bassist David Izenzon (b. Pittsburgh PA 1932; d. NYC 1979) and Coleman’s old friend, drummer Charles Moffett (b. Ft. Worth TX 1929; d 1997). Both Blue Note and Impulse Records ultimately passed on releasing the tape of the concert. In need of money, Coleman handed the tape and the rights in exchange for a flat fee to Bernard Stollman whose ESP-Disk label released it in 1965, and has reissued it many times since. Coleman rarely, if, ever mentioned the LP’s existence, and when he was asked about Stollman’s business practices later, Coleman called him an “assassin.” It included his first composition for strings, a through-composed nine-minute quartet titled “Dedication to Poets and Writers.”
The conventional line that Coleman made no public appearances for two years is not strictly accurate. In fact, in April 1963 his band worked at the Cabaret Room in Austin, Texas, a few hours from his native Fort Worth. In July of that year the San Francisco Examiner ran a single line stating that, “Believe it or not, Ornette Coleman is writing a book, tentatively titled A Theory of Music for the Listener and Performer.” That work evolved into his theory of Hamolodics, a word he didn’t start using publicly until 1972. He continued to work on the theory book for decades but it remains unpublished. A brief syndicated piece in April 1964 announced that Coleman was learning to play violin. That year his ten-year marriage to poet Jayne Cortez ended. In July 1964 the first hometown-boy-done-good article ran in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. That piece and periodic mentions of his activities in the Fort Worth paper over the next several years are likely attributable to his older sister Truvenza Coleman Leach (b. Rio Vista TX 1920 in Rio Vista; d. Oct. 2, 1994) who was a local M.C. and blues singer who appeared under the name Trudy Coleman. She made only one record herself, released in 1962 on the small Manco label in Fort Worth, comprised of two original blues compositions. Trudy was immensely proud and supportive of her little brother.
Coleman’s reemergence in New York came with a two-week job at the Village Vanguard in January 1965. Features in both Time and Newsweek appeared that month, but Coleman’s next job was at Princeton University’s McCarter Theatre from March 18 to April 10 performing his original compositions as accompaniment to a production of the comedic play “As You Desire Me,” written by Luigi Pirandello. Playing jazz clubs felt wrong to Coleman. He was looking for concert stages that would have him. Coleman made a trip to Montana where he had a spiritual epiphany. “When I saw the American Indians praying, doing their purity ritual, they looked like their bodies were transparent. All of a sudden, I saw the American Indian and the sky as the same people. It taught me something about religion, race, wealth, poverty, commerce. I said, 'Oh, I’m to go over to the other side. I only want to be on the side of the consciousness that comes to people naturally.’” Meanwhile, on June 6, 1965 jazz critic Ralph Gleason reported in his column that Coleman “is turning down concert and recording dates, preferring to remain in New York.”
On June 15, 16, and 17, Coleman brought his trio to a studio in New York to record material for the pet project of an heir to the Avon cosmetics fortune, Conrad Rooks (b. Kansas City MO 1934; d. 2011.) Rooks had become addicted to alcohol and narcotics as a teenager and married a Russian aristocrat before getting sober and inheriting a three-million-dollar lump sum in the early ‘60s. A dictionary definition Beat Generation hipster, he poured money into a meandering experimental movie on the subject of his recovery, paying a who’s-who cast of intellectuals including William Burroughs, Moondog, Bryon Gysin, Harry Smith, the Fugs, Robert Frank, and Allen Ginsberg to contribute to it. For its soundtrack, he selected and convinced Coleman, paying him “five figures” according to Matt Levelle’s 2019 Rutgers thesis “Ornette Coleman and Harmolodics.” ($10,000 in 1965 is more than $100,000 today.) For his money, Rooks received tapes of new music recorded by Coleman, but Rooks declined to use any of it, saying it was “too beautiful” (or potentially too distractingly powerful in relation to his rather weak film). The material that emerged from the recordings weren’t short cues to be edited into scenes of the film but long, complex pieces. Did Coleman expect Rooks to cut out any sections that he liked for the film? Instead, Rooks commissioned Ravi Shankar, who was not yet a household name in the U.S. to produced the final soundtrack. The still-unknown twenty-eight-year-old composer Phillip Glass worked on the arrangements. (Coincidentally, Rooks was the first person to buy the film rights to William Burroughs' Naked Lunch. When a film of it was finally made by David Cronenberg in 1991, Coleman was commissioned to record the soundtrack.)
Coleman’s discography is fraught as a result of his difficulty in maintaining relationships at record companies who saw him as both prestigious and a poor seller and by Coleman’s sense that they will swindle you if they can. His son later wrote: "He always felt taken advantage of by managers, promoters, record companies [...] The music business was out of sync with him, and he was out of sync with it." Peter Niklas Wilson’s Ornette Coleman: His Life and Music reported that in the early ‘70s, while negotiating a contract with a major label, Coleman asked for an advance of $300,000. He told them he arrived at the number by noticing that there are about 100 countries on earth and that it should be possible to sell an average of 3,000 copies in each country. That is their job, after all, isn’t it?
Even so, the release of the Chappaqua material is one of the oddest entries in his discography. Levelle describes the 1966 two-LP set that emerged in France as “unauthorized and edited.” In 1967, it was also issued in the UK, Italy, and Japan. It has, in fact, never been released in the United States, it has remained out of print anywhere in the world for nearly a decade, and its mono mix (presented here) has been out of print since 1967. Little is known or written about it, although it is along with Free Jazz and the Skies of America an instance of Coleman’s making the most of an opportunity to create something ambitious, but like many other big projects (including, for instance, a 3-LP set of his recordings with the Master Musicians of Jajouka slated for release by Columbia in the early ‘70s), it never panned out like it was supposed to. What might have been a major statement eventually just drizzled out into the world.
The sessions included an 11-piece section of classical studio performers under the direction of cellist Joseph Tekula (b. New Jersey 1920), a Julliard graduate who taught at Baylor University in Texas, had played in symphony orchestras in Pittsburgh and New York and the Beaux Arts String Quartet, and frequently performed Max Bruch’s 1880 “Kol Nidrei.” From 1959-63 Tekula had worked on recordings by John Lewis and the Modern Jazz Quartet and Gary McFarland, and so was au currant with the Third Stream of jazz-classical hybridism of the time. Among those sessions was a 1960 appearance on John Lewis LP for Atlantic LP conducted by Gunther Schuller titled Jazz Abstractions on which Coleman also performed. The extent of Tekula’s contribution to the Chappaqua session is unclear, but the blocks of chords through much of the recordings are one of the key characteristics of the album and the ensemble’s parallel playing with Coleman’s band prefigures his 1972 symphony Skies of America.
Another element specific only to the Chappaqua album among Coleman’s recordings was the brief inclusion of the struggling, young tenor saxophonist Pharoah Sanders (b. Little Rock AR 1940; d. 2022) who doesn't appear until thirteen-and-a-half minutes into side 4. As a new arrival to New York, Sanders had been close with drummer Billy Higgins who played with Coleman during the Atlantic period. Sanders’ first recording sessions were with Coleman’s bandmates David Izenzon and Don Cherry on January 6, 1963, before recording in 1964 with Paul Bley and the Sun Ra Arkestra. Only two weeks after the Chappaqua sessions with Coleman, Sanders participated in a majestic 11-piece group recording of John Coltrane’s released as Ascension, which led to his sitting in Coltrane’s band for a string of gigs in Seattle and then joining the band full-time by the end of the year. Decades later, Coleman said that “If there’s anyone who has that quality of freedom, it’s Pharaoh. He’s probably the best tenor player in the world.”
The month after the Chappaqua recording sessions, Coleman returned to Fort Worth to visit his sister and mother Rosa before departing in August for what turned out to be 10 productive months in England with side trips to the continent — his first trip to Europe at the age of 35. His debut concert in London on Sunday, August 29, 1965 at the Fairfield Hall in Croydon was announced as his “only British concert.” It was met with a protest from the UK Musicians Union who objected to Coleman having been designated a “concert artist” rather than a “jazz musician” on his paperwork. (An agreement between the UK and US unions stipulated that a jazz musician would have had to have a return concert in the U.S. booked.) The concert went ahead, but to justify his status as a “concert” performer Coleman quickly composed “Forms and Sounds” for wind quintet, a piece bearing significant timbral and structural similarities to sections of the wind ensemble on the Chappaqua sessions. The recording of the concert including both the quintet as well as the performance by the trio of Coleman, Izenzon, and Moffett was released in Europe in 1967 as An Evening with Ornette Coleman and then in the U.S. in 1975 as The Great London Concert.
In November and December 1965, the trio played in Lugano, Switzerland; Copenhagen, Denmark (widely bootlegged); and Stockholm, Sweden where the concerts were recorded and released by Blue Note as two LPs called At the Golden Circle Stockholm in January 1966. The band had month-long residencies at Ronnie Scott’s jazz club in London in January and April of 1966. In between, they traveled to Paris to work on another film soundtrack, this time for Thomas White’s only feature film Who’s Crazy? starring members of New York’s Living Theater. Who’s Crazy? was screened only once at the May 1966 Cannes Film Festival and then was lost until 2016, but a twenty-eight-minute monochrome cinema verite documentary directed by Dick Fontaine of the band recording its soundtrack was been widely available for decades and stands as one of the definitive documents of Coleman, Izenzon, and Moffett if not all of ‘60s jazz. (Those recordings were not released on LP until the early ‘80s, only in Europe, and then on CD in the ‘90s only in Japan.) Back in Forth Worth, when Trudy got the news that Marianne Faithful had been recorded singing Ornette’s song “Sadness” for the soundtrack, she quickly placed a notice in the newspaper mentioning that she had helped Ornette write the melody. Around the U.S. a syndicated piece said that while Coleman could only make $200 a week in New York City, he was earning $2000 a week in Europe.
From May 10-14,1966, the band played a string of one-nighters around England: Liverpool, Birmingham, Croydon, Newcastle, and Manchester. (Bob Dylan's famous 1966 "judas" show took place at the Manchester Free Trade Hall three days after Coleman's show there.) By the following month, they were back in New York for a gig on June 19th at Philharmonic Hall, then a show the next day (booked, promoted, and M.C.d by Trudy) at Forth Worth’s 3,000-seat Will Rogers Auditorium, and then the following day in San Francisco to begin a two-week residency playing Tuesdays and Sunday at the Both/And club (where Archie Shepp had recorded his Live in San Francisco album five months earlier). After a show at the Los Angeles Country Museum of Art in July, they went back to New York. Coleman’s first studio session since recording the Chappaqua and Who’s Crazy? soundtracks was a session with his ten-year-old son Denardo, from whom he’d been separated for a year, playing drums, and his old friend and bandmate Charlie Haden on bass on September 9, the same week that the movie Chappaqua debuted at the 27th Venice International Film Festival. The resulting album The Empty Foxhole was released as the first of a series of LPs for Blue Note around the same time that the Chappaqua Suite appeared for sale, apparently without Coleman’s participation, in Europe.
The album as it was issued included no titles for the compositions, did not name the studio at which it was recorded, did not credit the ensemble players, and lacked any composer, publishing, or copyright credits. It had a photo of Coleman on the front panel but was otherwise covered in images from the film in which it was not included. In other words, it looked and sounded like an Ornette Coleman record but, ultimately, was not. It seems reasonable to assume that Conrad Rooks saw an opportunity to recoup some of the “five figures” he’d paid Coleman for the tapes. (The Ravi Shankar soundtrack came out on the same label at the same time but was released worldwide, including the U.S.) The primary difference between the stereo and mono mixes of Chappaqua Suite is the dense punchiness of the mono mix in comparison to the clarity and spaciousness of the stereo. There are slight timing differences, most significantly one as the result of an inexcusably sloppy edit at the end of “Part II” in the mono mix.
In 1966 Coleman won both Jazzman of the Year in Downbeat and Musician of the Year in Melody Maker. In December of 1966, Coleman’s band played in Ithaca, New York, at MIT in Boston, and finally at the Village Theater on a split bill with John Coltrane’s group. Early in 1967 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for composition. In mid-1966, Coleman had told the press that he was “writing new pieces for a concert in New York’s Lincoln Center.” That concert didn’t happen, but in March 1967 the Philadelphia Woodwind Quartet and the Philadelphia String Quartet recorded the first full album of Coleman’s through-composed work including a new version of “Forms and Sounds,” released later that year by RCA Victor’s Red Seal classical series as The Music of Ornette Coleman. (The mono mix of that one has been unavailable since 1968, too.)
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When I ran a record store twenty years ago, there was a guy in his 70s who used to come by and sell me jazz 78s he found at estate sales here in Baltimore — a lot of Erskine Hawkins and Billy Strayhorn. He'd been a bebop drummer when he was young. I liked him a lot. One day when he came in, I was listening to Ornette Coleman. We got to talking, and he said that he'd gone to see the Coleman/ Cherry/ Blackwell/ Haden quartet in New York in 1960. I was impressed and asked him what it was like.
"Man," he said, "afterward, when it was done, I walked out on the street, and it was like the wind was blowing right THROUGH me. I was that far open. You know what I mean?"
I knew exactly what he meant.
