OC and FZ

They just don't make avant-gardists like they used to.

In today's musical marketplace, that reductionist world where artists are better off if they only have one idea (just like political candidates; easier to stay "on message" without a lot of subtlety or complexity to muddy the waters), where how you look (advantage: cute) is as important -- maybe more so -- than how you sound, where "traditional" jazz, always a minority taste, is holding on by the skin of its teeth and purveyors of Beatlesque pop are hailed as the great innovators of "modern rock" -- in such an environment, it's hard to imagine someone like Ornette Coleman or Frank Zappa being able to get a recording contract. While there's an element of DIY in both of these musicians' latter-day approaches (mainly in how they set themselves up as cottage industries, the better to reap the rewards of their labors), it would have been impossible for either man to have made the impact that he did in terms of influence and perceived importance among Those Who Know without the kind of visibility that only a major label can provide.

Ornette Coleman's musical career might have started out with a fundamental misunderstanding about the tuning of his chosen instrument, the alto saxophone, but whether you love him or hate him, he's undeniably the creator of a bona fide original approach, maybe the last one to appear in jazz, and he's been able to continue producing his art for half a century with less compromise than almost anyone else you can name. Born in 1930, Ornette grew up in Fort Worth, listening to bebop out of one ear and rhythm and blues out the other (and perhaps, one could say, Mexican music out of his third ear). Talk to anyone who knew him then and they'll tell you that 1) he always "played like Ornette" (stories of him "playing like Bird" that appeared in the press around the time of his late-'50s apotheosis are, I think, fabrications, designed to make it appear that he was "legit" by the standards of the time, when in reality what he was proposing was something Entirely Other) and 2) that he was thrown out of every band he ever played with, before he skipped town, a fully-formed man of 25, to travel to L.A., where he did menial work before somehow managing to find other musicians -- older, established guys like Shelly Manne and John Lewis, as well as younger cats like Paul Bley, Don Cherry, Charlie Haden, and Billy Higgins -- who were able to hear his particular song.

The instant Ornette-worship that attended his 1959 arrival (with quartet) in New York City probably had as much to do with the fervor with which the jazz cognoscenti were wishing, praying, hoping for the Next Big Thing to follow the rhythmic and harmonic innovations of Charlie Parker as they did with the actual merit of what he was doing. While Ornette's approach (which at the time sounded like a simulacrum of bebop's metrical form, minus the chord changes) might have led eminences like Louis Armstrong and Miles Davis (as well as tons of lesser lights who'd invested years in studying Parker's methodology) to dismiss him as a charlatan who "couldn't play," forward-looking colleagues like Charles Mingus (who used to take the members of his then-current Jazz Workshop down to the Five Spot where Coleman and Co. were holding forth and ask them, "Why can't you play like that?") as well as the collective Noo Yawk hipoisie (including New York Philharmonic musical director Leonard Bernstein in his pre-Black Panther cocktail party-hosting days) were paying close attention.

It didn't help that Ornette's rap, filled with oblique abstractions, was as impenetrable to uninitiates as his music -- maybe even more so. (For an operational definition of "disturbing," see Shirley Clark's Ornette documentary Made in America, specifically the bit where he talks about wanting to be castrated. I'm not making this up.) He wasn't good at explaining himself, and the text on his "harmolodic theory" that he claimed to be writing 30 years ago still hasn't materialized. In spite of all this, Ornette -- who defines himself as "a composer who improvises" rather than "an improvisor who composes," an important distinction -- has managed over the years to transfer his process to a host of talented collaborators: world-traveling trumpeter Don Cherry and the other linchpin of the "classic" Coleman quartet, bassist Charlie Haden, a bluegrass-warbling Missouri toddler turned revolutionary firebrand and closet romantic; New Orleans master drummer Ed Blackwell, whose work demonstrates better than anyone else's the linkages between Africa, Congo Square, and 48th Street; fellow I.M. Terrell High School alumnus Dewey Redman, a tenor saxophonist who was a mainstay of late-'60s/early-'70s Coleman groups; and two musicians who accompanied Ornette in his initial mid-'70s forays into electric music, the gritty South Carolina-born guitarist-singer James "Blood" Ulmer and the majestic and magesterial drummer-composer Ronald Shannon Jackson, another Fort Worth expatriate who signed on with Ornette's Prime Time band as a hired gun while Denardo Coleman was off attending business school in preparation for a career as his father's manager. (When I was first getting into Ornette, back around the Bicentennial year, there was a radio station in Connecticut that used to play four hours of music by Ornette and his various sidemen every Sunday. Today, that seems like, well, science fiction.)

Listening to Ornette's "classic" Atlantic recordings today, it's hard to figure what all the fuss was about. Notwithstanding the absence of '20s and '30s pop-song forms, tunes like "Lonely Woman," "Congeniality," "Ramblin'," and "Free" sound familiar as a heartbeat, and they reveal how Ornette's early music both influenced the mainstream and was reflective of trends that already existed within it -- how easily Miles' '60s quintet was able to assimilate devices like "Lonely Woman"'s dirge-like head over fast rhythm, f'rinstance, or how Haden's countryish solo on "Ramblin'" echoed the use of folkloric elements in some of Mingus' solos (another strongly rhythmic bassplayer with a big, deep sound). While eschewing the harmonic complexity of Bird, Ornette's alto had the same human cry that's also present in Armstrong and Parker's sounds. "Bluesy" doesn't even begin to cover it; depending on the piece, Ornette's song can be playful and joyous, or the most lonely and desolate sound imaginable. His epochal 35-minute "Free Jazz" (which gave a name to the movement that followed in his wake) echoes both the cacophony of New Orleans-born collective improvisation and the severity of modern classical music (the fanfares that punctuate the solo sections) as well as bebop (the rhythm section's sound and one of the recurring composed themes). When Ornette reunited with the "classic" Cherry/Haden/Higgins quartet and distilled their distinctive essence down to discrete two-and-three-minute snippets for 1987's In All Languages, it would have been impossible to deny that music's accessability, if anybody had been listening.

Back in 1961, as his original heroin-addicted quartet was fragmenting, Ornette continued to grow and mature as an improvisor, taking more time and space to develop his themes. His playing on the recording of his 1962 Town Hall concert is a far cry from his groundbreaking 1959 work -- less rhythmically constrained, more fluid. The rhythm section of classical bassist David Izenzon and Fort Worth drummer Charles Moffett seemed to follow him intuitively, shifting their accompaniment in response to his every improvisational tangent. That event also marked the first public performance of Ornette's music by a classical ensemble and an R&B group. After that, he disappeared from the scene for a couple of years to teach himself a highly, um, idiosyncratic approach to the trumpet and violin, re-emerging to tour Europe to great acclaim in 1965. In 1966, he released the album The Empty Foxhole on Blue Note, with his 10-year-old son Denardo on drums. This is where he lost a lot of people, I think; when I heard the Legendary Stardust Cowboy's blatting bugle with drums-being-dropped-down-the-stairs while working on a story last year, I was reminded of nothing so much as The Empty Foxhole. The powers that be at Blue Note must have had the same impression; Ornette's next two albums for the label teamed him and Dewey Redman with a bassplayer and drummer best known for their work with John Coltrane. (Kind of like the album of standards Thelonious Monk recorded for Riverside at the peak of his compositional creativity, just to show he could.)

Since then, as the jazz mainstream has slowly but inexorably regressed back to approximately where it was when he arrived on the scene, Ornette has continued to challenge his audience's expectations at every turn by doing whatever the hell he wanted, whether that meant composing symphonic works ("Forms and Sounds," "Saints and Soldiers," "Space Flight," and especially "Skies of America," where his writing for strings gives the orchestra a sound akin to the cry of his alto), performing with his electrified combo Prime Time (which essayed the nursery-rhyme simplicity of "Theme for a Symphony" -- a piece that started its life as a quartet item called "Happy House" and resurfaced as "The Good Life" on Skies of America -- at extreme length on the 1977 album Dancing in Your Head), or presenting onstage body-piercing exhibitions at his concerts in the late '90s. Now there's talk of luring him to Fort Worth for the annual Jazz By the Boulevard fest on a bill with Dewey Redman (who's matured over the years into a crowd-pleasing festival performer, a phenomenon which I prefer to attribute to Dewey's genuine enjoyment of playing ballads, blues, and bebop than to any sort of commercial arm-twisting) and Shannon Jackson (a reclusive character of late, but one whose Decoding Society was the most viscerally accessible manifestation of harmolodics in its heyday). While arguments could be made that 1) it's been done already -- the mayor of Fort Worth presented Ornette with a key to the city and declared "Ornette Coleman Day" in conjunction with the opening of the late, lamented Caravan of Dreams, way back in 1983 -- and 2) Ornette and his fellows aren't exactly household names, although they're already in the history books, one hopes that the festival organizers will seize the opportunity to render props to these sons of Fort Worth while they're still drawing breath.

On a purely selfish level, I'm hoping that they pull it off, if only because I've never seen Ornette in person. I had a ticket to a 1977 Prime Time performance at Avery Fisher Hall that was cancelled, and I saw the Ornette alumni band Old and New Dreams open for Arthur Blythe at Town Hall on my first trip back to New York after moving to Texas in 1979. Now, Frank Zappa is another matter. Between 1974 and 1978, I saw more Zappa more times than I've seen any other "name" performer.

To his Noo Yawk fans' great delight, Frank used to mount Big Apple extravaganzas every Halloween and New Year's Eve, originally at the Academy of Music at 3rd Avenue and 14th Street, later (as his popularity increased) moving uptown a bit to the Felt Forum at Madison Square Garden. Older fans could boast of having seen Zappa and the Mothers at the Fillmore East or even earlier, in the storied run at the Garrick Theater in Greenwich Village, but my cohort had mostly discovered Frank's music through popular albums like Overnite Sensation and Apostrophe ('), where astonishing music shared space with loads of low-grade humor. Now, I like stupid-funny stuff as much as the next person, and I realize that Frank was able to keep the lights on and finance his more, um, challenging work by spending months on the road playing songs like "Dyna-Moe Humm" and "Disco Boy" for crowds of stoned kids who probably dug Cheech and Chong as much (and for the same reasons) as they did Zappa. In the film Baby Snakes (which documents a typical New York show from around 1977), you can see a crowd that's pretty representative of what I'm talking about: a bunch of kids from Long Island with blow-dried hair, acting "crazy" and "weird" because that's what they think they're supposed to be doing at a Zappa concert, talking about how they dig Frank because he's "a pissaaaah." In the argot of the time, he was "outrageous."

I think Frank was fine with that -- I think he genuinely liked being able to play his music in front of large audiences. In a different way than Ornette, he did whatever the hell he wanted to for pretty much his entire career, including breaking his contract with Warner Bros. in '77 by playing an entire six-record set they didn't want to release according to his specifications over the radio and encouraging fans to tape it. (This is the material that was released on CD as Lather a few years ago.) He maintained until his death in December 1993 -- of cancer, a couple of weeks before his 53rd birthday -- that he believed humor did, indeed, belong in music, and if his fans could get a laff out of the same stoopid shit he did, then why not?

So, you might ask, how can I justify calling a popular performer who made lots of money playing material that appealed to the lowest common denominator an "avant-gardist?" Lester Bangs dismissed him as "a competent arranger" and pastiche artist, preferring the music of Frank's high school buddy Don Van Vliet (aka Captain Beefheart) as more "authentic" -- ignoring the fact that Don's music was as derivative of Howlin' Wolf and Ornette as Frank's was of Varese, Stravinsky, and the Penguins. Like Ornette, who was a decade older, Frank considered himself a composer first, grew up in a backwater (in his case, the desert town of Lancaster, California, where his scientist father settled the Zappa family when Frank was a teenager), and harbored a genuine affection for both modern classical music (he bought his first Varese album because he thought the composer looked "like a mad scientist") and rhythm and blues (he and original Mothers of Invention frontman Ray Collins -- who'd later berate the resolutely drug-free Zappa, telling him that "You need to do acid with someone who believes in God" -- penned a no-fooling doo-wop hit, "Memories of El Monte," for the Penguins). Following his example, loads of art-creeps tried to shoehorn "serious" music influences into rock, with an earnestness that made their efforts a lot harder to listen to than Frank's aural crazy quilt.

Always, Frank's specialty was kloodging together whatever disparate elements suited his fancy -- doo-wop harmonies, Varese-influenced percussion, bits of musique concrete, Stravinskian orchestral themes, social commentary and prurient humor, his trademark coruscating psychedelic stinkfinger guitar -- into a dense, dizzying melange. His best records worked that way, too; they were more audio collages than anybody's conventional idea of a "rock album." While the critique of Americulture on the early MOI records hasn't held up any better than most period social commentary, some of it -- particularly "Who Are the Brain Police?," "Help, I'm a Rock," "It Can't Happen Here," and the protest anthem "Trouble Coming Every Day," all from his 1966 debut Freak Out! -- remains relevant, and he gets points for being the first rock'n'roller to point out (in 1967's We're Only In It for the Money) the rot at the core of hippie utopianism. He was still pretty brutal on "youth culture" as late as '81, penning lines like "Free is when you don't have to pay for nothin' or do nothin' / I wanna be free, free as the wind" (from You Are What You Is' "Teenage Wind"), but then again, he had plenty of spleen left for televangelists, the PMRC, and any number of other institutional stupidities. An equal-opportunity shit-slinger.

Beyond that, he was a motherfucker guitarist, and he had great bands.

When I was on the road with Nathan Brown and Dave Karnes last year, a little girl in Atlanta (or maybe it was Columbia, SC; they all kind of run together in memory) paid me an ultimate compliment of sorts. After we were done playing, she came up and asked me who my three favorite guitarists were. I mumbled something about Jeff Beck, Buddy Guy, and Eddie Hazel, before she asked me if I'd ever listened to Zappa. I told her I'd been a big fan back in the day, and she said she could tell. When I asked her how (since it seemed a highly unlikely observation, based on the music I was playing with Nathan, which basically consisted of the notes he told me to play and no others), she told me that her father had been a guitarist. It made my night, even though I know I don't have a thimbleful of what Frank had, guitar-wise. His inspiration came from West Coast/Texas blues guys like Johnny "Guitar" Watson, Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown, and Eddie Jones (aka Guitar Slim), but with his composer's melodic imagination, he took blues rifferama to some very wild and abstract places. His solos were always played over a drone, one or two chords against static rhythm, but within that realm, he was amazingly inventive. When I saw him at the Academy of Music shows that were recorded for the Zappa in New York album, he made my hair stand on end. No lie.

About his bands: the original Mothers started out as a bar R&B outfit called the Soul Giants, but evolved under Frank's leadership into a unit that was equal parts SoCal bar-band vets (the rhythm boys, Roy Estrada and Jimmy Carl Black, "the Indian of the group"), dyed-in-the-wool avant-gardists (keyboardist Don Preston and any number of horn-playing Gardner brothers), and conservatory-trained sophisto musos (ex-symphony percussionist Artie Tripp and multi-instrumentalist Ian Underwood) that could go in any of those directions and often did so in the course of a single song, cued by their leader's hand signals. That lineup was heard to best advantage on the albums Uncle Meat, Burnt Weenie Sandwich, and Weasels Ripped My Flesh, which Frank assembled from miscellaneous live and studio recordings after breaking up the band when he could no longer afford to pay them (they were on salary, even when they didn't work -- an untenable situation, but not one that was easily understood by the bandmembers; for documentary evidence, see "If We'd All Been Living in California..." on Uncle Meat).

Next came a series of bands built around the British drummer Aynsley Dunbar. The first was fronted by Howard Kaylan and Mark Volman, aka Flo and Eddie (for contractual reasons), who'd previously been in an L.A. folk-rock band called the Turtles. The Flo and Eddie band is the one that appeared in the film 200 Motels, by which time Frank had delegated much of the responsibility for lyrics and stage business to the ex-Turtles. This meant that most lyrics from that period dealt with the, um, sociological observations of a musician in a touring rock band, which are either hilarious or tedious, depending on your perspective. That ended when a demented fan knocked Frank off the stage at the Rainbow Theater in London, breaking his leg and crushing his larynx. While confined to a wheelchair through most of 1972, he recorded two jazzy albums, Waka/Jawaka and The Grand Wazoo, that featured a horn section and keyboardist George Duke. While some of the horn charts sound like college lab band exercises, the title track on Waka/Jawaka features a nifty harmonization of a Zappa guitar solo played by the brass section.

After that, Frank put together what some fans (this one included) consider his best band, with Duke on keys and vocals, Napoleon Murphy Brock on sax and vocals, the Fowler brothers (Tom, who'd played with the San Francisco hippie band It's a Beautiful Day -- anybody remember "White Bird"? -- on bass, Bruce on trombone), Ruth Underwood on percussion, and Chester Thompson on drums. This is the basic unit that appeared on Roxy and Elsewhere, recorded shortly before Frank got too popular to appear in clubs, and The Helsinki Concert, probably the best of the sprawling You Can't Do That Onstage Anymore series. With the substitution of Terry Bozzio for Thompson on drums, it's also the crew that backed Zappa and Captain Beefheart on their "reunion" tour in 1975 (documented on the album Bongo Fury). Bozzio was an unabashed exhibitionist and infinitely more interesting that some of the more "technical" drummers who came after him. In later years, he'd admit that he was probably better off donning a devil mask to sing "Titties 'n' Beer" with Frank than he was playing po-faced prog rock with UK or insipid '80s pop with his own band Missing Persons. (In the trade, this is known as "Mick Taylor's syndrome.") His playing and persona provide some of the best moments in the Baby Snakes film.

In the '80s, Frank's bands grew progressively (play on words) more virtuosic and simultaneously less interesting, populated with guys who'd signed on to get their tickets punched enroute (or so they hoped) to sophisto muso megastardom. By the 1988 tour (which produced not one, not two, but three, count 'em, three massive double CD sets: Broadway the Hard Way, The Best Band You Never Heard In Your Life, and Make a Jazz Noise Here), Frank was confronted with the phenomenon of musicians approaching him covertly, behind the others' backs, to try and convince their leader to pay them at a higher rate than the other guys in the band. He'd had similarly dispiriting results with classical musicians on those occasions when he was able to arrange performances or recordings of his symphonic works. Classical musicians, he found, were unionized hacks who could give a rat's ass about performing challenging work by a living composer. (All of this is detailed at great length in The Real Frank Zappa Book.) As a result, Frank withdrew from public performance to spend the rest of his life sequestered in his basement studio, creating music with his Synclavier and compiling archival tapes for release.

As luck would have it, in the last year of his life, Frank connected with a European classical group, the Ensemble Modern, and was finally able to hear his "serious" music performed properly. The results were released as The Yellow Shark a few months after his death. His last "new" work, Civilization Phaze III, consisted of music realized on the Synclavier, interspersed with tapes of people's voices recorded inside a grand piano for the 1968 Lumpy Gravy album, along with some Ensemble Modern performances and new "piano people" recordings. It's in these last couple of projects, perhaps, that Zappa finally found his true voice. That he had to wait until so late in his career to do so says a lot, I think, about the relationship between art and commerce in our society.

I've argued with my friend Irv, who has the best taste in music of anyone I know, about the dearth of innovation in jazz these last 30 years or so. He says I'm not listening to the right stuff; I say there's a difference between making good records and pushing back boundaries, which jazz fans of a certain stripe used to expect almost as an article of faith. Personally I blame the neocons (Wynton Marsalis and his ilk) for creating the current climate, where tradition dukes it out with baldfaced commercialism (forget about any "avant-garde") for survival. If the guys being promoted as the cutting edge of the art form 20 years ago had aspired to something more than imitating the '60s Miles band, perhaps things today would be different. Perhaps not. In any event, when I told Irv that I'd heard Ornette got paid 60 grand for a recent performance in Austin, he responded, "If he didn't make at least a hundred, then jazz is dead." More recently, I heard that Ornette's going price for a concert is now $30,000. Sorry, pal.

I know that I contribute to the devaluation of the artist's currency every time I buy a dubious Italian reissue at Half Price Books for four bucks rather than ponying up full price for the officially sanctioned release, but whatthehell. At this writing, Ornette's Harmolodic imprint (distributed by Verve) is still active and most of his major works remain in catalog, but it'd be foolish to assume that's a permanent condition. One reason why Ornette didn't work a lot in the late '60s was that he had "priced himself out of the market," but perhaps that strategy (and the subsequent scarcity of his appearances) is the reason why he remains so well-paid today. (Face it, nobody who plays real music is making what they did in the '80s today; only reality TV stars get that much to perform.)

Go to the official Zappa website and I'm pretty sure you can still see a broadside from the Zappa Family Trust, blasting Rykodisc, the label with the rights to Frank's catalog, for slashing their prices on Zappa product. So, if you like, you can pay Frank's estate twice what you'd pay in a regular retail outlet and almost three times what you'd pay a discounter for the same fine recording. In life, Frank took a lot of shit from folks in the counterculture, basically for being a small businessman trying to make a living instead of a starry-eyed utopian or a walking pharmaceutical laboratory. As savvy as he was, I figure he'd understand it's all about supply and demand, what the market will allow.

I just don't want to have to imagine a world in which it's no longer possible to hear the work of artists like Ornette and Frank or more importantly, younger people who are motivated by the same kinds of impulses they were. And honestly, I have an uneasy feeling that it's closer than I'd like to admit.