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Ornette Coleman Quartet

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Ornette Coleman

Lonely Woman (1959)

  *Incase anyone hasn't caught on yet I take articles and bold what I think is interesting.

  "Best known for a series of highly experimental albums and performances in the late 1950s and early 1960s, saxophonist and composer Ornette Coleman has been recognized as one of modern jazz's great innovators, a man who has pushed his music to extremes where even other highly progressive musicians refused to follow. Coleman's pioneering work in what would later be called Free Jazz polarized the musical community, between those who thought his work represented Jazz's future and those who considered him a musical con man who didn't know his chords and couldn't stay in tune. Despite considerable resistance from the jazz establishment, Coleman has carved out a durable career through sheer persistence and belief in his own unique artistic vision, one that now affords him the accolades reserved for jazz's most revered elder statesmen.

Taught Himself to Play the Saxophone

Coleman told Howard Reich in the Chicago Tribune that it took him "three or four years" saving money from shining shoes to get his first saxophone. Because his family did not have money for lessons, he taught himself to play along with the songs he heard on the radio. This self-education process may have been the key to Coleman's experimental view of jazz. "I could play and sound like Charlie Parker note-for-note, but I was only playing it from method," he told Robert Tynan Down Beat in 1960. "So I tried to figure out where to go from there."

Was an Outsider in the World of Jazz

Coleman signed on with a traveling carnival show band (he was later fired for trying to push the group's music in a more modern direction), kept playing rhythm and blues, and finally made his way to Los Angeles, where he was so poor that he reached the brink of starvation. His mother kept him going by sending him loaves of bread in the mail.

Finally Coleman landed a job as an elevator operator and began reading music theory texts during slack moments. In the evenings, plastic saxophone in hand, he began to experiment with a radical new brand of jazz that rejected the traditional idea of improvising on a tune, in favor of free responses to what the musician felt was the tune's mood or essence. In the process, such jazz basics as harmony and chord progressions might be partially or completely disregarded. Coleman antagonized even cutting-edge musicians like saxophonist Sonny Rollins and drummer Max Roach, who walked off the stage when Coleman began playing during a jam session they were leading.

Fistfights Occurred at Performances

The results were controversial, even by the contentious standards of modern jazz culture. Coleman was alternately hailed as a genius (by New York Philharmonic conductor Leonard Bernstein, among others) and denounced as a fraud. Coleman seemed to shred tunes—when they were recognizable at all—with unpredictable melodic leaps, dissonant harmonies, squawks and growls. Coleman's rhythm section did not provide a beat in the conventional sense, but operated with as much freedom as the rest of the band. In a sense, Coleman had returned African-American music to its earliest roots, redefining jazz as an ensemble music where individuals had their own distinct voices within a larger whole, rather than as a vehicle for virtuoso display. To some ears, the result sounded like atonal chaos, but many critics noted that no matter how advanced the musical idiom Coleman adopted, his playing retained a raw quality evocative of the honky-tonk blues that he performed at the beginning of his career.

On a few occasions fistfights broke out between Coleman's admirers and detractors. Roach was alleged to have punched Coleman in the mouth after one performance in New York City, and an angry crowd in Baton Rouge stormed the stage and destroyed his sax after one of Coleman's solos brought activity on the dance floor to a screeching halt. The controversy his music generated fueled sales of his albums the first of which,Something Else!, was released in 1958. That album, and others such as 1959's The Shape of Jazz to Come,are considered classics today.

  If you want to read more just click the article and it'll take you to the full version

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I dont know this guy ^ but he seems like the man.

I post this album all the time, but fuck you

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Sarah Vaughan (1946)

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Sarah Vaughan (1964)

Misty

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Gerry Mulligan (1953)

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Gerry Mulligan with The Pianoless Quartet at Carnegie Hall

"While arranging for Kenton, Mulligan began performing on off-nights at The Haig, a small jazz club on Wilshire Boulevard at Kenmore Street. During the Monday night jam sessions, a young trumpeter named Chet Baker began sitting in with Mulligan. Mulligan and Baker began recording together, although they were unsatisfied with the results. 

Faced with a dilemma of what to do for a rhythm section, Mulligan decided to build on earlier experiments and perform as a pianoless quartet with Baker on trumpet, Bob Whitlock on bass and Chico Hamilton on drums (later Mulligan himself would occasionally double on piano). Baker's melodic style fit well with Mulligan's, leading them to create improvised contrapuntal textures free from the rigid confines of a piano-enforced chordal structure. While novel at the time in sound and style, this ethos of contrapuntal group improvisation hearkened back to the formative days of jazz. Despite their very different backgrounds, Mulligan a classically-trained New Yorker and Baker from Oklahoma and a much more instinctive player, they had an almost psychic rapport and Mulligan later remarked that, "I had never experienced anything like that before and not really since." Their dates at the Haig became sell-outs and the recordings they made in the fall of 1952 became major sellers that led to significant acclaim for Mulligan and Baker.

This fortuitous collaboration came to an abrupt end with Mulligan's arrest on narcotics charges in mid-1953 that led to six months at Sheriff's Honor Farm. Both Mulligan and Baker had, like their peers, become heroin addicts. However, while Mulligan was in prison, Baker transformed his lyrical trumpet style, gentle tenor voice and matinee-idol looks into independent stardom. Thus when upon his release Mulligan attempted to rehire Baker, the trumpeter declined the offer for financial reasons. They did briefly reunite at the 1955 Newport Jazz Festival and would occasionally get together for performances and recordings up through a 1974 performance at Carnegie Hall. But in later years their relationship became strained as Mulligan, with considerable effort, would manage to kick his habit, while Baker's addiction would bedevil him professionally and personally almost constantly until his death in 1988.[3]"

Gerry Mulligan, Chet Baker, Chico Hamilton and Bob Whitlock (1974)

Bernie's Tune

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Chico Hamilton, Gerry Mulligan, Chet Baker and Bob Whitlock as the "Pianoless Quartet" 

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Chico Hamilton playing with his quintet including Eric Dolphy from Jazz on a Summer's Day. (1960) One of my favorites from the film. Don't just listen to this one, watch it too.

Chico Hamilton Quintet (1960)

Blue Sands

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Jazz on a Summer's Day (1960)

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Great film. I highly recommend it if your supposed to be doing something else right now.

"Jazz on a Summer's Day (1960) is a documentary film set at the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival in Rhode Island, filmed and directed by commercial and fashion photographer Bert Stern and director Aram Avakian, who also edited the movie.

The film mixes images of water and the city with the performers and audience at the festival. It also features scenes of the 1958 America's Cup yacht races. The film is largely without dialog or narration (except for periodic announcements by emceeWillis Conover).

The film features performances by Jimmy Giuffre, Thelonious Monk, Sonny Stitt, Anita O'Day, Dinah Washington, Gerry Mulligan, Chuck Berry, Louis Armstrong, and Jack Teagarden. Also appearing are Buck Clayton, Jo Jones, Armando Peraza, and Eli's Chosen Six, the Yale College student ensemble that included trombonist Roswell Rudd, shown driving around Newport in a convertible jalopy, playing Dixieland.[1]"

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Fats Waller

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If you don't like Fats Waller your numb

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The Universal Mind of Bill Evans

This talented asshole named Bill speaking and playing the truth.

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Chet Baker

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Chet Baker

I Get Along Without You Very Well

                                                                                                                                                  I found the documentary Lets Get Lost on youtube. It mostly covers his decline and his later years but its still worth watching if your interested. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUdGjrIZVH4

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"Strange Fruit" was a poem written by Abel Meeropol, a Jewish high-school teacher from the Bronx, about the lynching of two black men."

"Barney Josephson, the founder of Cafe Society in Greenwich Village, New York's first integrated nightclub, heard the song and introduced it to Billie Holiday. Holiday first performed the song at Cafe Society in 1939. She said that singing it made her fearful of retaliation, but because its imagery reminded her of her father, she continued to sing it. She made the piece a regular part of her live performances. Because of the poignancy of the song, Josephson drew up some rules: Holiday would close with it; second, the waiters would stop all service in advance; the room would be in darkness except for a spotlight on Holiday's face; and there would be no encore."

"In time, it became Holiday's biggest-selling record. Though the song became a staple of her live performances, Holiday's accompanist Bobby Tucker recalled that Holiday would break down every time after she sang it."

Billie Holiday

Strange Fruit