The jazz heritage of I.M. Terrell

It took me 44 years to get to I.M. Terrell High School.

In the fall of 1975, when I was about to drop out of the State University of New York at Albany, my roommate and I used to go over to the university library and listen to a couple of records there. One of them was an Ornette Coleman album called Crisis!, recorded in New York in 1969.

I didn’t know then that Ornette and his bandmate Dewey Redman were both I.M. Terrell alumni. I just knew that this music had what I perceived to be a more human sound than all the other jazz I’d heard up till then – the earlier swing and bebop styles, as well as the rock-influenced fusion that was prevalent at the time. To this day I still find the sound of Ornette’s alto saxophone to be both the happiest and the saddest music I can imagine. Listen to the nursery rhyme-like “Theme from a Symphony” from his 1977 album Dancing In Your Head or the cry of lamentation in “Lonely Woman” from his 1959 album The Shape of Jazz To Come and you’ll hear what I mean.

Ornette was a pure product of Fort Worth. The city resonates in his compositions “Una Muy Bonita” and “Latin Genetics,” with their mariachi echoes, and the gutbucket blues at the heart of “Ramblin’” and “Blues Connotation.” It was fitting and proper that Mayor Bob Bolen awarded Ornette the key to the city when he returned here from his adopted home in New York to open the nightclub Caravan of Dreams in 1983 – an occasion when John Giordano and the Fort Worth Symphony performed Ornette’s Skies of America (and half the subscribers walked out).

Doing some reading back in ‘75, I learned that Ornette’s music was called “free jazz,” a term he’d used as the title of a 1961 album. Ornette and his musicians took a more open approach to tonality than earlier jazz players, ignoring the advanced harmony of bebop or even the focus on scales and modes that Miles Davis and John Coltrane were pioneering around the same time.

Sixty years ago, in November 1959, Ornette and his first quartet traveled from Los Angeles – where he’d gone after failing to find an outlet for his approach in his hometown – to New York City to begin a residency at the Five Spot nightclub that would set the jazz world on its ear. (A book about the engagement, published a decade ago, was titled The Battle of the Five Spot.) Some musicians thought that Ornette was jiving and called him a charlatan, but others with bigger ears and eyes fixed on the future rather than the past – including Miles Davis, Charles Mingus, and Sonny Rollins – visited the club night after night to listen and learn.

Ornette continued defying convention throughout his career: hiring his ten-year-old son to play drums, performing on instruments (trumpet and violin) on which he possessed no conventional technique, composing classical pieces, dispensing with conventional jazz instrumentation in favor of a funk-flavored electric band called Prime Time.

When Dancing In Your Head, the first Ornette album with Prime Time, dropped in 1977, it hit my house like an atomic bomb: two chattering electric guitars, over which a constantly soloing electric bass provided a countermelody to Ornette’s alto, and who was that four-handed drummer, anyway? It seemed like chaos at first, but I just didn’t understand the music’s system of simultaneous improvisation, which Ornette called “harmolodics.” (A promised treatise never materialized.) Now, of course, it sounds like heartbeat.

“That drummer” was another I.M. Terrell alumnus, Ronald Shannon Jackson, a percussion innovator who played the drum kit from the bass drum up, unlike most jazz drummers, who keep time on the ride cymbal. When I had the pleasure of interviewing Shannon for Fort Worth Weekly in 2002, he made me aware of the role I.M. Terrell music teacher G.A. Baxter – a perfectionist who had students playing Sousa marches during football season and Wagner in the orchestra come spring -- played in fostering his generation of young musicians. Baxter let students use the Terrell auditorium, which also served as the band room, to rehearse their own combos. His colleague Adelaide Tresvant, taught music theory as well as directing the choir and glee club. You can hear echoes of the famous Terrell drum line in Shannon’s cadences. After leaving Ornette, he’d distinguish himself as a composer and bandleader in his own right.

Shannon grew up servicing jukeboxes for his father’s record store, dreaming of African rhythms he’d apply to music he heard on the radio. He followed a circuitous route from Terrell to New York in the early ‘60s, first attending college in Missouri with fellow Terrell alums Julius Hemphill and Thomas Reese (a pianist who’d given Shannon his first taste of jazz via an Art Blakey record).

Hemphill was an alto saxophonist and composer who settled in St. Louis, where he became affiliated with the Black Artists Group, an arts collective that included dancers, theater and visual artists, and writers as well as musicians. In New York in the ‘70s, he’d establish himself as a nonpareil writer of horn polyphony, owner of his own independent record label, founder of the World Saxophone Quartet and later, the all-horn Julius Hemphill Sextet. He taught and mentored younger musicians, including saxophonist Tim Berne, who currently tours with an outfit called Broken Shadows (named for an Ornette tune) that plays a repertoire of material by Ornette, Hemphill, and Dewey Redman. Hemphill continued to create even after he was stricken with diabetes and heart disease that left him unable to play.

Shannon got his first record date in the Apple via another Terrell alumnus, Charles Moffett, who was drumming for Ornette then. One night in 1978, I was standing outside the Recovery Room on Lemmon Avenue in Dallas, where sometimes Red Garland, Miles Davis’ ‘50s pianist, would spell Thomas Reese at the piano during tenor saxophonist Marchel Ivery’s gigs. A van pulled up in the parking lot, emblazoned with the legend “Moffett Family – Fort Worth, Texas.” Charles got out, along with three of his sons. The band was taking a break, so the Moffett brothers – Charles Jr. on tenor, Charnett on bass, and Codaryl on drums – took over the stage and proceeded to raise the roof with an eruption of ‘60s style free-jazz “energy music.” Before the audience knew what hit them, the Moffetts were out the door, back into the van, and headed back to Fort Worth. Now that was a night!

Before Ornette, Shannon played with another free jazz innovator, saxophonist Albert Ayler, whom Shannon said was “the first leader who let me play the way I did in Fort Worth when I wasn’t playing for other people.” Like a lot of musicians, Shannon was devastated by the death in 1967 of his idol, John Coltrane, and struggled with drug addiction before a fellow musician introduced him to Buddhism and vegetarianism.

Shannon was ready to play again when Ornette called and asked him to join Prime Time for four years while Denardo Coleman – who’d been playing with his dad since he was ten – attended college. With Shannon, Prime Time cut two trailblazing records – the aforementioned Dancing In Your Head and Body Meta – and made a memorable Saturday Night Live appearance, which features Shannon prominently although he said Ornette didn’t want him on screen.

During a lull in Ornette’s touring schedule, Shannon joined the monumental free jazz pianist Cecil Taylor’s Unit for a European tour and four albums (two studio, two live) in which he dared to put a backbeat behind Taylor’s shifting tectonic plates of sound. Crucially, Ornette had encouraged Shannon to compose, so after his stint with Taylor was up, the drummer was ready to enter the next phase of his career, enjoying critical and popular acclaim through the ‘80s with the all-star aggregations Power Tools and Last Exit as well as his own Decoding Society.

Shannon moved back to Fort Worth in 1996 and spent the rest of his life in his family’s house on North Judkins Street near Riverside Drive, surrounded by artwork, books and records, instruments and memorabilia of his career (a selection of which is on display this month at the Ella Mae Shamblee Public Library), a couple of TVs that were always on. He ate well from his organic garden, had a cat named Where You At, and wrote music till the end of his life. Saxophonist Rachella Parks-Washington, whom you’ll meet today at the Scat Jazz Lounge, played in some of his last bands. Local musicians Curtis Heath and Britt Robisheaux worked with Shannon on archiving his library of unreleased recordings.

Shannon played his last concert at the Kessler Theater in Oak Cliff in July 2012. When the band Living Colour, whose guitarist Vernon Reid was an original Decoding Society member, played the same venue a year later, Curtis, Britt, and I were able to tell Vernon that his old mentor was undergoing treatment for leukemia at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. When the band’s tour ended and they returned to New York, Reid managed to contact pretty much everyone Shannon knew in the city, and his last hospital stay was a cavalcade of reunions.

I met Dewey Redman in 2003, when he was in town to headline the short-lived Jazz by the Boulevard festival. After a detour to hone his chops in San Francisco, Dewey joined Ornette in New York in 1967 and played with him until 1971. He went on to perform with pianist Keith Jarrett’s "American quartet," longtime Ornette bassist Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra, the Ornette alumni band Old and New Dreams, and guitarist Pat Metheny’s 80/81 band.

On his own, Dewey was the kind of versatile player who does well at festivals. He craved acceptance in his hometown more than any of his I.M. Terrell contemporaries appeared to, so the Jazz by the Boulevard booking was a welcome one. He said he was writing an autobiography, which thus far has not appeared. One of my abiding regrets is passing on the opportunity to interview him for the Fort Worth Public Library’s oral history program. I had just started a new job, and I was busy. The next time I heard from the library man was when he emailed me Dewey’s New York Times obituary. Carpe diem.

When I interviewed them, both Shannon and Dewey told stories of life in segregated Fort Worth, and the hostility and violence they encountered growing up here. These things remain part of our reality today. I.M. Terrell’s heritage is one of accomplishment in the face of structural discrimination. The school is a focal point of community pride and history that must not be forgotten as those with living memory of G.A. Baxter, Ornette Coleman, Shannon Jackson, Julius Hemphill, Dewey Redman and the rest pass on. And here’s hoping that this city can create an atmosphere where the next generation of I.M. Terrell creatives won’t feel they need to leave home to make their impact.