Ornette Coleman
The Shape Of Jazz To Come | 45rpm 2LP

Original Recordings Group [ORG] / Atlantic

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About

A TAV Essential Listening Album.

“The Shape of Jazz to Come is the third album by jazz musician Ornette Coleman. Although Coleman initially wished for the album to be titled Focus on Sanity, after one of the songs on the album, it was ultimately titled The Shape of Jazz to Come at the urging of Atlantic producer Nesuhi Ertegun, who felt that the title would give consumers "an idea about the uniqueness of the LP." Released on Atlantic Records in 1959, it was his debut on the label and his first album featuring his working quartet including himself, trumpeter Don Cherry, bassist Charlie Haden, and drummer Billy Higgins. The recording session for the album took place on May 22, 1959, at Radio Recorders in Hollywood, California. Two outtakes from the session, "Monk and the Nun" and "Just for You", would later be released respectively on the 1970s compilations Twins and The Art of the Improvisers. In 2012, the Library of Congress added the album to the National Recording Registry.” - Wiki

“Ornette Coleman's Atlantic debut, The Shape of Jazz to Come, was a watershed event in the genesis of avant-garde jazz, profoundly steering its future course and throwing down a gauntlet that some still haven't come to grips with. The record shattered traditional concepts of harmony in jazz, getting rid of not only the piano player but the whole idea of concretely outlined chord changes. The pieces here follow almost no predetermined harmonic structure, which allows Coleman and partner Don Cherry an unprecedented freedom to take the melodies of their solo lines wherever they felt like going in the moment, regardless of what the piece's tonal center had seemed to be. Plus, this was the first time Coleman recorded with a rhythm section -- bassist Charlie Haden and drummer Billy Higgins -- that was loose and open-eared enough to follow his already controversial conception. Coleman's ideals of freedom in jazz made him a feared radical in some quarters; there was much carping about his music flying off in all directions, with little direct relation to the original theme statements. … Any understanding of jazz's avant-garde should begin here.” – AllMusic

“The Shape Of Jazz To Come in a microcosm, can be heard in "Lonely Woman," a tune so far reaching yet amenable to coverage—by the Modern Jazz Quartet in 1962 on Lonely Woman (Atlantic) and saxophonist John Zorn in 1989 on Naked City (Nonesuch))—that it help ease Coleman's jazz medicine down critically. The rhythm is established by Haden, strumming bass chords, and Higgins, establishing the poly-rhythms of a near Eastern Indian mantra. Coleman and Cherry add their own Eastern flourishes saturated with the blues. It is mournful and searching, with enough dissonance to distract without covering first Coleman's and then Cherry's earthy, nearly down-home solos.

The ballad (if such definitions anymore apply) "Peace" is the most revealing track on the album. It offers Haden duets with the two soloists with appropriately minimal support form Higgins. Coleman and Cherry mix the entire history of jazz into their solos, expressing the results calmly and with purpose. Drawing from all of the genre influences surrounding him, Coleman plotted a course that led to this groundbreaking record, still, oddly, only the beginning of the revolution.” - All About Jazz

Item description:

Artist:

Ornette Coleman

Title:

The Shape Of Jazz To Come

Label:

Original Recordings Group [ORG] / Atlantic

Format:

2 × Vinyl, 12", 45 RPM, Album, Reissue, Remastered, Stereo, 180gram

Pressing:

US

Release Date:

This reissue: 2013 | Original - 1959

Genre:

Jazz

Style:

Free Jazz

Catalog No:

ORGM-1081

Condition:

New