Remarks

Wynton Marsalis

As a more than remarkable composer and a more than remarkable saxophonist, Ornette Coleman is a musician who has achieved the highest station that any artist can ever achieve. Ornette Coleman has become a man of universal value. That is because he has created a body of work that is of universal value. By universal value I mean that there is something so perfectly human and so pure in its content that Ornette Coleman’s art can touch and inspire people from any background whatsoever. It is beyond race or class or point of national origin. An American can be touched by the artistry of Ornette Coleman. An African can be touched by the artistry of Ornette Coleman. The music of Ornette Coleman is so deep that it is beyond boundaries and is appreciated every place in this world where one can find people in pursuit of the human depths that art can provide.

In fact, one can be sure that, along with the nations already mentioned, somewhere in Russia, in China, in Australia, in Latin and South America, in Canada and the various island communities around the globe, something is going on that is connected to the subject of this talk. At least one person, at this very instant, is listening to the music of Ornette Coleman.

Every second, minute, and hour the force of Ornette Coleman is being experienced by listeners who might know nothing of this man’s life, understand little about America, do not speak the English language, cannot read an American newspaper or spell the name of the American president.

The beauty of this, however, is that all one needs to be in order to appreciate Ornette Coleman is founded in a truth as direct as his sound. One is asked on to be no more than a human being. Human. Being. Being human. There it is. That’s it. Humanity is the whole point and is the only point. Humanity is that most vast and mysterious realm of experience, memory, and imagination. Humanity is always the target of the artist. It has to be because art as we understand the term cannot be comprehended by other forms of life. Very little comprehension. There is, of course, the raised ear of a dog, the momentary curiosity of a cat, the temporary engagement of some birds. The meaning of our existence as expressed through art has only one serious audience. Ourselves. What constitutes humanity, however, is the ability to empathize, to identify with others vastly different than ourselves. I am sure that one of the things that communicates most deeply is the sound of compassion stripped of all obstacles, of all things that would obscure the substance of its meaning. There is, it seems to me, a profound compassion not only for other people, but for life itself, and that sound of profound compassion is in the blues cry so basic to the sound of Ornette Coleman’s alto saxophone.

That sound, that cry, that freedom from words and from sentence structures, even from familiar forms is the musical thing so central to the universality of Ornette Coleman. That cry is the embodiment of the double consciousness so indispensable to jazz music, that mixing together of sorrow and joy. To be more precise, it is the expression of an inevitable ache as well as an aspiration that refuses to be diminished. The big and little horrors of life are brought together with the hope of life in the blues cry of Ornette Coleman. In it we hear the fraternal emotions of life, the twins of being. It must be that way because it would not otherwise be honest. On one side that cry expresses the pain of life but it also sings out the dream of life. That dream is the sound of compassion for life itself. It can be heard in all music and in all human places because it is perhaps the most profound comment on the meaning of life that any people anywhere ever discover. That most profound quality of sound assumes that civilization achieves itself most thoroughly when compassion is a central element, when caring for others, as opposed to fearing them, is the basis for the laws and the policies that determine the nature of the society.

That is where, as Ralph Ellison says of jazz, we must think about “the relationship between this most vital art and the broader aspects of American social life.” In the music of Ornette Coleman we get a stunning variation on the basics of jazz and the basic meanings and implication of this American art. The greatest achievement of jazz is that it is a democratic art in which everyone is important and in which everyone has come together in terms of a fundamental agreement. That agreement is to help each other as one writer says. A band can never sound good unless everyone on the bandstand learns how to express himself while helping others, by making choices that display one’s individuality while supporting the individuality of everyone else. When that very difficult task is achieved in jazz, we call it a groove. That is the point at which everyone seems to almost magically make the right decision. Ornette Coleman has said of such moments that “the freedom is so great it becomes impersonal.” Individual expression and the emotion of support, of help, become one. At such moments jazz goes beyond being democratic. It uses democratic methods to achieve the utopian. Perhaps, following Duke Ellington, we might call those points of complete recognition, complete personal expression, and complete support by a name perfect for something that arrives from the world of jazz: that name is blutopia. Did you say blutopia? Yep. What is blutopia you might ask. I’ll tell you. Blutopia is utopia painted in the many hues of blue found in the enormous skies of America. Yes, blutopia. Ornette Coleman may well have been born and reared in Texas but he is definitely one of the greatest representatives of blutopia.

Before Ornette Coleman, the guidelines of jazz were more obvious. The forms were the 12 and 16-bar blues, the 16 and 32-bar song. There were exceptions, but those were the forms that everyone had agreed upon. They had agreed upon the harmonic structures of those forms or they had changed the harmonies to fit what they heard inside of the song. A stupendous amount of great music was achieved through those agreements.

Ornette Coleman did not change that body of agreements nor did he advance them. He proposed another path that was possible and that path has become one of the options we now respect. That is all that ever happens in art. Options are added; they are never subtracted. The options Ornette Coleman offered were as shocking as they were simple. But, as in the case of all great innovators, what we call simple is better described by that word we have used since the beginning of this talk: profound.

Ornette Coleman said, in essence, let’s do away with all of those familiar forms and all of those familiar roles and let’s improvise on our themes while inventing fresh relationships to one another. This meant that the horns were free to invent their phrases and move in and out of keys at will. This meant that the bass could invent its own chords or it could create a linear relationship to the horns. The drums could either play straight time or they could engage in an overt dialogue with the rest of the band. At first, this seemed like just so much noise to those unsympathetic to what Ornette Coleman had in mind. They were wrong. Ornette Coleman was not interested in chaos; he was interested in another sort of order that demanded as much skill and as much concern with the collective expression of the ensemble as any other style.

The supreme force in Ornette Coleman’s music has always been melody, both in written and improvised composition. Melody might well be the most mysterious element of music because it is almost impossible to explain how one will arrive before the fact. It was his high level of melodic improvisation that separated Ornette Coleman from the charlatans that attend any innovation and it remains one of the most marvelous achievements at this very moment. Melody. Pure, pure melody.

Melody with every kind of feeling. Part of the greatness of Ornette Coleman is that he has neither avoided nor left behind the romance, the tenderness, the dreaminess, the intimate elements of erotic engagement as has so much modern music. The human soul is always at the center of his work and it always arrives in his written and improvised melodies. The melody of Ornette has always been informed, as has all of his music, by the blues. There we are again. Blues. Blutopia. By blues I do not mean unhappiness because the blues is, actually a philosophical music in which the joys and sorrows, the hopes and the dreams of the species are evaluated, sometimes by autobiography, sometimes by observation. In the music of Ornette Coleman we hear every element that has been essential to jazz. There is the feeling of New Orleans polyphony, of New Orleans dirges, of what Jelly Roll Morton called “the Spanish tinge,” the high quality riff, the easy romantic power so familiar to us from the great ballad players, the powerful melodic imaginings of Charlie Parker. We also hear the process through which all of the work songs, gospel tunes, and children’s songs were remade into jazz. In his more open form of improvisation, Ornette Coleman helped us understand the importance of improvisation a bit better, especially when he once said that one improvised in order to avail himself of the chance to make something up that would sound better than what he had already written. So improvisation exists as a form of improvement. But it is a form of improvement; jazz brought something of very great and very fresh sophistication into western music. Jazz makes us rethink what we understand about the musical masterpiece because no improvised masterpiece supplants an already existing improvised masterpiece that has become part of the public record through recording. This is a very important addition to western musical performance. In formal western concert music, freshness arrives through inspired interpretation of stationary material. Pacing, nuance, and inflection give it life and make it seem as though this is the very first time that these notes have ever been played. In other words, great concert musicians, like great actors create the feeling that the material is arriving at the very same time that it appears. In an inspired jazz performance, the notes are actually arriving as they appear.

Consequently, improvisation gives the present a range of possibilities that form a different order of musical importance. The consequence is that the masterpiece, which is something a bit beyond a superb performance, might take form right on the spot and reverse everything we think about musical masterpieces written by great geniuses like Bach, Hayden, Mozart, and Beethoven, as quick examples.

On an extraordinary night or day, one has the chance to witness a masterpiece arrive on the moment, every bit of it coming into being through the efforts of a group of jazz players who have chosen to help each other.

It is through these things that Ornette Coleman has achieved his great originality and made our world richer through his contribution. That is why, right now, as I said earlier, people are listening to his music on every continent on this globe. His blues cry and his melody have taken on universal value and will remain of universal value as long as there are listeners of every color, class, and culture ready for Ornette Coleman’s guided tour of blutopia. I thank you and we all thank Ornette Coleman.