Category cutting

Threadgill and Ornette Coleman have made careers of sounding only like themselves. Threadgill refuses to categorize his music at all, especially not as jazz. Ornette has invented his own term, "harmolodic," to describe not only his music but a way of being. ("You can think harmolodically, you can write fiction and poetry in harmolodic," he has said.) Coleman's new Tone Dialing is his first album for a major domestic label since 1988's Virgin Beauty on CBS; it's on his own Harmolodic imprint within Verve/PolyGram. Threadgill's Makin' a Move is his second album for Columbia.

Both defy category. Threadgill flirts with the modern western classical tradition (read: Bartók) on a couple of pieces for acoustic chamber ensemble, but he seems mostly himself, and coincidentally most like Coleman, when he fronts his "electric" band, Very Very Circus, on four of the seven tracks here, with its French horn, two electric guitars, two tubas, drummer, and Threadgill's own alto saxophone. The snaky, cyclical guitar figures, like Coleman's, seem drawn from Afro guitar pop, Sunny Adé's jouk music, and the soukous of Senegal. In fact, it's likely that Virgin Beauty, with its guest spots by Jerry Garcia, was a direct influence on Threadgill's formation of Very Very Circus, which began recording in 1990.

Both new albums are typically bold for these artists. They're worlds apart from the jazz practiced and preached by Wynton Marsalis. Whatever Marsalis's achievements (and they are considerable), he defines jazz from a narrow perspective that's unthinkable to Threadgill and Coleman. Until recently, jazz has always been naturally expansive, assimilating more and more traditions. Jelly Roll Morton had all of the Caribbean at his New Orleans doorstep ("the Spanish tinge," he called one influence). Ellington's "swing" big band was also a jazz orchestra, with international flavors. Now European improvisers and avant-gardists have mixed with the likes of Steve Lacy, Muhal Richard Abrams, and Threadgill.

Of the two new albums, Ornette's is the toughest to get into. In the beginning, Ornette challenged traditional tonality, and he gained notoriety for writing songs without chord changes. But his piano-less acoustic quartet was clearly in the jazz tradition. The timekeeping has firm roots with Charlie Haden's rich bass and the drumming of Billy Higgins and Ed Blackwell (the latter, especially, with his pronounced New Orleans grooves). Admirers noted the tight interplay of the group, the folk-like themes and aching ballad melodies, and Ornette's vocal alto style and strong sense of the blues. In the meantime, Ornette also composed for string ensembles and symphony orchestras, though these works were not as frequently performed.

Electric Ornette has been another matter. In 1975 he started playing with Prime Time -- his electric guitar and bass band -- and the word harmolodic began to appear. Harmolodic has been defined only by example, but in general it's a musical theory of egalitarianism. All instruments play in their "natural" key, so horns don't transpose in order to be consonant with keyboards, etc. It does away with conventional harmonic structures. Instruments may play a melody in unison but in different keys. For Ornette, the consonance, or "unisons," his music describes comes not from patterns of agreed-upon chord changes but from each musician's focusing naturally on the melody. Ensemble harmony evolves through the natural flow of the piece, a natural confluence, not through chordal cues. "The pattern for the tune will be forgotten and the tune itself will be the pattern" is Ornette's famous phrase. "In the harmolodic concept," Ornette's former bandmate Don Cherry said, "you're reaching to the point to make every note sound like a tonic." Ornette described "harmolodic modulation" in the liner notes to his Skies of America as "meaning to modulate in range without changing keys." It's also been said that in harmolodics, melody, harmony, and rhythms are all equals.

To me, Prime Time's "Voice Poetry," from Body Meta (Artists House, 1978), was a harmolodic primer. Drummer Ronald Shannon Jackson begins the piece with a simple thumpa-thump Bo Diddley beat. One of the guitarists follows with appropriate "chanka-chanka" chording. When the second guitar line comes in, it sounds to be playing a blues, very cleanly picked and with a nice ringing tone -- but completely out of tune with the first guitar. Jamaaladeen Tacuma's bass line runs busy counterlines with the second guitar. The single-note lead guitar lines build intensity to some aggressive chording, Jackson's drumming gets busier but still accenting those strong beats, the first guitar still holding down the "chank" chording. When Ornette's alto sax enters after several minutes, it appears to be in yet a third key! But the basic blues, and the basic rhythm of the piece, hold it together. (What's more, Ornette, as is his wont, plays his ass off.)

When Of Human Feeling (Antilles/Island) came along in 1982, I thought Ornette and Prime Time were about to have their big commercial breakthrough. It was a yet-tighter sound, and Coleman drove himself furiously off the band's rhythms and his own still-fetching melodic ideas. The band's hard edge and deep grooves seemed perfectly in keeping with the post-punk and funk sounds of the era. But nothing happened. (It doesn't help that Coleman's live performances are rare.) Virgin Beauty followed the double album In All Languages (Caravan of Dreams, now out of print) with a more diffuse sound, but still wonderful moments -- the typically Ornette-like mantra repetition of the theme on "Wishes," the C&W hiccupping dual guitars of "Happy Hour," the evocative chimes and dragging synth figures of "Desert Players," the humorous bass-guitar chases on "Spelling the Alphabet," Ornette's lovely, lamenting a cappella intro to "Unknown Artist," and Garcia's unsurprisingly appropriate contributions.

Tone Dialing, though, leaves me in its dust. On the surface, this is not inaccessible music. "Search for Life" uses multiple rappers, as much for sound as sense, and the preaching female voices move in synch with the tune's deep hip-hop groove. "Guadalupe" is a pretty calypso, and "La Capella" also plays affectingly with Latin-Caribbean ideas. Bradley Jones's rich melodic bass introduces "When Will I See You Again." And there are still some beautiful, long-line unison themes ("If I Knew As Much About You" and the now standard "Kathelin Gray"). What's more, Coleman's music remains supremely playful. Working the melodies, the band chases themes around like a basketful of puppies after a rubber ball ("The tune itself will be the pattern").

But with the rhythmically free Denardo Coleman handling drums and effects, and the emphasis on melodic interaction, the music is all top and no bottom. (The busy tablas of Badal Roy don't exactly ground anything either.) There's no glue, and at times Ornette sounds as if he were playing in another room. Like Schoenberg before him, Ornette has been trying to destroy musical hierarchies ("Make every note sound like a tonic"). And he's a true visionary. The social implications run throughout the album, in the titles and in the music. The playfulness makes the album pretty, but it's not compelling.

Threadgill has also been working to break down hierarchies -- in his case, the distinctions among rhythm, lead, and harmony players. His early trio Air was a spare, elegant unit that worked with space, angular themes, and a keen rhythmic and dynamic sense. His Sextett (seven players) used cello and bass as a string section. Very Very Circus gets its lift from its dual tubas, usually matched with a "lead" French horn. This outfit is almost all bottom, but Threadgill floats it like a giant dirigible. Tempos are often fast. With guitar and sax lines swirling around them, one tuba might hold down a taut ostinato while the other counters with rapid cyclical arpeggios. Makin' a Move opens with "Noisy Flowers," a piece for piano and four acoustic guitars, tempoless impressionistic piano rumblings and spare chromatic plucking. The textures gradually open to more extended guitar lines, some staccato exchanges among instruments, and driving chords, ending on a plunked, low piano note. The harmonic movement is accessible. It's a wholly attractive piece, both in development and ensemble coherence, and in the various guitars (nylon-string soprano, steel-string soprano, steel-string acoustic, and conventional classical) conjuring other musics full of dulcimers and ouds and banjos.

"Like It Feels" follows with the dramatic opening pop and thump of Pheeroan akLaff's drums. Then a quick three-note call and response between tubas and Very Very Circus is off. There's a long-lined theme stated by the brass with punctuation from the guitars and the snip-snip of Pheeroan's cymbals, and then a soaring rock-guitar solo. Chords mass and rise in the background, sometimes stated by the brass, sometimes implied by guitars. Threadgill's pieces always move. They unfold like delicate lyrics ("Noisy Flowers") or grand narratives; Threadgill's alto doesn't enter until six minutes into the 11-minute "Like It Feels." It begins with light backing textures from the band and builds into tart, bracing exclamations with orchestral movement behind him. He ends on a final, exultant statement of the theme.

Here, and on pieces like "Official Silence," with its idiosyncratic melodic theme and the integral use of the tubas to mark both harmonic structure and the piece's halting rhythms, Threadgill is making music entirely of his own voice, no matter what else has been appropriated: blues guitar, "western" concepts of atonal composition, Indian strings, jazz phrasing. It's jazz (at least as I call it) looking at the great world again. And making great art.