by Stephen Rush (Music 781.65 Coleman)
Ornette Coleman is widely regarded as a key figure in modern jazz music, and his work laid the foundation for generations of players who moved toward forms of improvisation that don’t stay tightly linked to a harmonic foundation, often called “free jazz” or “free improvisation.” All was not completely free in Ornette’s world, however: his work generally exemplified his own “Harmolodic Theory,” or “harmolodics,” in which harmony, melody, and rhythm take on unique moment-to-moment relationships approaching a unique kind of conceptual unity. Ornette used harmolodics compositionally, and lacking any kind of formal text (a book was planned in the 1970s but never completed), he and his band’s adventurous improvisations serve as both the textbook and the application of the idea.
Lots of music made by Ornette and his circle over the last 50 years employs harmolodic concepts, but lacking much written explanation, the idea remains misunderstood by many musicians and much of the listening public.
Enter Stephen Rush, whose recent Free Jazz, Harmolodics and Ornette Coleman makes great strides toward representing and clarifying the underlying concepts in this approach to music. Rush, a music professor at the University of Michigan, has taught a class on harmolodics for thirty years, and composes and improvises fluently within a harmolodic framework with his own bands. Using detailed analysis of music samples, and through extensive conversations with Ornette Coleman himself, Rush has written an essential book that addresses technical, philosophical, and social implications of harmolodics.
Although the book is formatted into three parts, it’s less formally divided into two main parts, with the “official” part 1 serving as more of a brief historical introduction. The first half of the book focuses on a series of interviews Rush conducted with Coleman in 2011, which explore harmolodics from multiple perspectives as the conversations flow into different subject areas. The range of topics covered is wide, from philosophy to aural semiotics to civil rights. When read through the historical context provided in the introduction, it becomes clear that Ornette’s feelings about unity between harmonic and melodic contexts in music are inspired by and contribute to the stages of the civil rights movement.
The second half of the book is more technical in nature, offering transcriptions and detailed analysis of ten representative Ornette recordings throughout his career. If you’re a practicing musician with an understanding of conventional jazz harmony, this section will be especially illuminating, as Rush digs deep and breaks down the sophisticated (but very much present) harmonic shifts that happen in Ornette’s music, both melodically and among band members. But even if you’re not a musician, I’d recommend reading through this section, too — you might not understand some of the theory talk, but I think you will come away with a fundamental understanding of how harmolodics seems to work best through the deployment and manipulation of relatively short, memorable musical phrases. This music is “free jazz” relative to the melodic/harmonic lockstep music the preceded it, but it’s also fundamentally a socially-focused music, and the conversations that happen within melodies and around the bandstand ultimately turn phrases into transcendent narratives.
If you’re into Ornette, or you feel like you’re close to “getting” his music but not quite there, this is the book for you. Come on up to the Polley Music Library and check it out!
[If you enjoy this, you may also wish to try Experiencing Ornette Coleman : A Listener’s Companion by Michael Stephans, Ornette Coleman: The Territory and the Adventure by Maria Golia or This is Our Music: Free Jazz, the Sixties, and American Culture, by Iain Anderson.]
[ publisher’s official Free Jazz book page ] | [ official Stephen J. Rush web site ]
Recommended
by Scott S.
Polley Music Library
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