Things we like: Joe Nick Patoski's "The Ballad of Robert Ealey and the Five Careless Lovers," Maria Golia's "Ornette Coleman: The Territory and the Adventure"

I wasn't born in Fort Worth, Texas, but I got here as fast as I could. A buddy who just moved to Austin told me that folks he meets down there say they'd never live here; too conservative, and it's true -- Tarrant County is the last red urban county in the Lone Star State. But demographics are shifting, and this election may surprise some folks. We'll see. In the meantime, a couple of new books have arrived to remind me of some of the underappreciated richness of this city's musical culture.

I grew up in New York and became a blues fan after investigating the songwriting credits on my British Invasion LPs, but all the Black people I knew there hated blues, and all the white people I knew thought Led Zeppelin was blues. I moved to Texas in June 1978, saw the Fabulous Thunderbirds, and thought they were The Thing Itself. But when I came to Fort Worth to open a record store on Camp Bowie Blvd that fall, I got introduced to something even more authentic. The New Bluebird Night Club at Horne and Wellesley in the predominantly Black Como neighborhood was as close to Utopia as I will experience in this life. Besides neighborhood folks, you got gassed-back-hair-and-soul-patch sporting white blues fans, hipis, punks, TCU frat and sorority kids, and those kids' parents, who used to go see chitlin' circuit stars like Jimmy Reed, Howlin' Wolf, and Bobby Bland play at the Skyline Ballroom. 

Singer-drummer Robert Ealey bossed the Bluebird back then, fronting the house band with his big, booming voice, his indecipherable diction, and his vocal harmonica imitations. The Juke Jumpers were the band I saw there most often, a white band with a guitar player, Sumter Bruton, who had clearly heard some T-Bone Walker. During the week, you could find Sumter behind the counter at Record Town across from the TCU campus, an enterprise his father -- a big band drummer from New Jersey -- had founded in 1957. I got a lot of free guitar lessons from behind that counter, and also a copy of a privately released LP (the cover was a sheet of paper stuck to the plain white sleeve) entitled Robert Ealey and His Five Careless Lovers Live at the New Blue Bird Nite Club.

The Five Careless Lovers were Sumter, guitarist Freddie Cisneros, bassist (and future SRV sideman) Jackie Newhouse, drummer Mike Buck (who was already a Fabulous Thunderbird by the time I encountered him), and keyboardist Ralph Owen. They existed for about five years in the early '70s, when there was still a vital Black club scene in Fort Worth and racially mixed bands were still a novelty in this segregated town. Veteran Texas scribe Joe Nick Patoski recently self-published (under the Horne & Wellesley Publishers imprint) a slim volume of oral history, drawn from the testimony of all the surviving band members (Ealey passed in 2001, Owen in 2006), and it's a welcome memento of a cherished scene, replete with great photos in an appealing layout. If you were there, you've gotta have one. And it sets the table for the projected re-release by Record Town's new management of the Five Careless Lovers record.

I first caught wind of Maria Golia's new Ornette Coleman biography last fall, when I was one of the speakers for the Jazz Bike Tour of Fort Worth organized by Tammy Melody Gomez and Laney Yarber. (I got to speak at I.M. Terrell High School; the spiel I penned for the occasion is here.) Golia's a journalist based in Egypt who's written extensively on non-musical subjects, but from 1985 to 1992 she managed Caravan of Dreams, the late, lamented arts center in the heart of downtown Fort Worth which Ornette opened in 1983 and where, in its heyday, he and musicians from his orbit like Ronald Shannon Jackson and James "Blood" Ulmer regularly performed. (When I met Mike Watt at SXSW 2001 and told him I was from Fort Worth, his face lit up and he beamed, "Caravan of Dreams!" I had to tell him that the wonderful room with its perfect sightlines and immaculate sound system was gone, replaced by a restaurant the name of which I'll still not utter, but to which Golia pays a bittersweet visit in her epilogue.) She'd met Ornette back then, but was preoccupied with management tasks and admits that she didn't connect with his music until years later.

So what, then, could she add to the story already told (from a music critic's perspective) by John Litweiler in his Ornette Coleman: A Harmolodic Life or (from a musician's perspective) by Peter Niklas Wilson in his Ornette Coleman: His Life and Music? Well, plenty. First, no one else can match her in chronicling Ornette's early years in Fort Worth and placing him in the milieu he inhabited (including the church, I.M. Terrell, and the aforementioned club scene). She's an ace researcher, drawing on interviews with Coleman familiars not previously heard from (like the late Fort Worth educator Marjorie Crenshaw), as well as published material. She brings the Fort Worth where Ornette grew up to vibrant life and fleshes out legendary characters like two of Ornette's formative musical influences, saxophonists Buster Smith and Red Conner. 

Her prose really pops. She pulled me in from the very first page of her introduction with this: "He was unassuming and soft-spoken; he lisped and wore shirts that looked like painters' drop cloths, but he was tougher than he looked. Self-taught and proud, Ornette had a nonconformist approach to music that attracted ridicule and censure." Or this: "Now that so much contact occurs at a sterile, screen-mediated distance, it's worth recalling the spontaneous complicity of jazz, the palpable exchange of energy that occurs within an ensemble and its audience." Her description of New York jazz clubs captures the ethos and ambience of those storied rooms with the insight of one who knows. 

Her section on Coleman's years in Los Angeles and New York places him in the context not only of musical contemporaries but also writers (besides William Burroughs and Brion Gysin, Ornette's wife, Jayne Cortez, was a formidable force in her own right), theatrical and visual artists. Her account of Ornette's triumphal return to Fort Worth in 1983 is also a celebration of Caravan from an insider's perspective. She surpasses all previous Coleman biographers in her approach to his thoughts and philosophy, and his harmolodic theory of music in particular. Ornette's verbal communication could be oblique, but Golia avoids the bemused or patronizing tone other writers have taken in discussing this dimension of his art. Her empathy allows the interested reader to gain a better understanding of Ornette's creative intelligence.

Fort Worth and America have changed a lot since Ornette Coleman "closed his eyes" on June 11, 2015. September 29, 2023, will mark the 40th anniversary of "Ornette Coleman Day," when Mayor Bob Bolen presented Ornette the key to the city and the Fort Worth Symphony performed Ornette's symphony Skies of America. It would seem an appropriate milestone for the city to commemorate. I'm not betting on it. But I'd be delighted to be wrong.