E-Mail This Article to a Friend School days Studying Ornette Coleman with Ran Blake BY JON GARELICK

The basement room is cozy but crowded, and a little warm, since the air conditioner has been off for about a half-hour (too noisy!) and the late afternoon still hasn’t cooled from the day’s typical 2003-Boston-summer high of 85 to 90 degrees. But the nine people sitting in a rough circle around the room are intent on the music. On the stereo, the quartet recording — saxophone, trumpet, bass, drums — is blasting away, a jaunty, blues-inflected melody, and a student, sitting on the edge of his seat, has his hand in the air, index finger pointed skyward. Right . . . the music charges from a skittering fanfare into straight time and then . . . there! The hand comes down in a slash. "That was the hook for me," says the student, Dan, a 57-year-old electrical engineer and guitar player. The "hook" is a downward bent note that comes about seven bars into Ornette Coleman’s theme on his 1960 recording of "Blues Connotation." For Dan, Coleman’s notoriously knotty music had been elusive until that bent note. To a guitarist, the bent note — a note that begins on a pure pitch and then sustains and bends upward or down — is the sound of the blues, and a device particular to the guitar, especially the electric guitar, with its powers of volume and sustain. And it was Dan’s road into the music of Ornette Coleman.

The nine people here have come to listen to and talk about the music of Ornette Coleman for 15 hours — five three-hour sessions over consecutive weekdays, with a weekend break. In addition to Dan, there’s a singer and tap-dancer named Patrice (the only female in the group), two Brookline High School students, a Berklee transfer student, and a couple of teaching assistants.

And the teacher himself. Sixty-eight-year-old Ran Blake is a winner of a MacArthur fellowship and has been teaching at New England Conservatory since 1967, many of those years as chairman of the Third Stream department created by the NEC’s former president, composer Gunther Schuller. Third Stream was originally described as a blending of jazz and classical procedures of composition, but in Blake’s hands, it’s expanded. His early, precocious claim to fame was a 1961 duet recording with the vocalist Jeanne Lee, The Newest Sound Around (RCA), a mix of originals and unusual standards on which critic Ben Ratliff called his playing "a dream world of film noir, gospel music, early-twentieth-century French composers, and jazz." Blake’s NEC classes have been noted for their focus on ear training and solfeggio rather than those other time-honored procedures of the jazz academy, transcription and performance. They’ve sometimes been called "spice box": students would compare pieces from around the world, looking for particular elements that caught Blake’s fancy — the idea being to sharpen their listening skills and take musical genres out of whatever boxes they had kept them in previously.

Blake’s intensive summer sessions have over the years been all over the map — Sarah Vaughan, Al Green, Bill Evans, George Russell. He’s announced that next year’s topic will be gospel great Mahalia Jackson. In that sense, Ornette is the perfect topic. Coleman has been out of the box since he made his first big splash, at the New York’s Five Spot in 1959, and listeners have been arguing about him ever since. His supporters — Schuller, John Lewis, Leonard Bernstein — have extolled his naturalness and freedom, his original sense of melody and form. His detractors — Miles Davis, Maynard Ferguson, even the otherwise congenial Dizzy Gillespie — have said that his music had no form, that he and his bandmates played out of tune, and that he had no control of his instrument and no real understanding of basic musical principles.

And Coleman has never given his listeners a chance to get used to him. As the work of the original quartet gained acceptance for, if nothing else, the original melodies and the swinging rhythm section, Ornette moved onto a new trio. By the time listeners got used to his saxophone sound, he started playing trumpet and violin. Just as you got used to his idea of jazz, he produced a long piece for symphony orchestra. And then he started a "rock" band, Prime Time, that employed two electric guitars, two basses, and two drummers but wandered around notions of tonality and time signatures as no self-respecting rock band would. Captain Beefheart talked about Ornette Coleman, but few rock fans listened to him.

On the first day of class in his basement apartment, Blake makes the point that he’s not going to work his way incrementally through the chronology of Coleman’s career. Instead, the class will take forward and backward leaps. The pieces he plays on the first day, and comes back to again and again, are "Lonely Woman," from the epochal 1959 Atlantic LP The Shape of Jazz To Come (Atlantic); "Space Church," and "Today, Yesterday, and Tomorrow," both from 1987’s In All Languages (Verve), the former with the original quartet, the latter with Prime Time; and "Bourgeois Boogie," also with Prime Time from In All Languages. And, only a little less frequently, Ran keeps returning to "Love Life" and portions of Skies of America, the symphonic work that was recorded for Columbia Records in 1972.

But today, day two, Dan has asked for time out to present his feelings on "Blues Connotation." Early on he had been confounded. It was called "Blues Connotation," and it was 12 bars long, but other than that, it wasn’t a blues. There were no I-IV-V progressions. Instead, it hovered around B7, a dominant chord, and, yeah, a dominant seventh is characteristic of the blues. And so are those minor thirds that keep cropping up — the "blue" notes. But what else was there? Dan has decided that Ornette’s solo, shortly following that first bent note, is a series of short phrases separated by quarter-note rests that amount to a collection of blues licks. The blues refined to an essence. "It’s not a blues," Dan says, "it’s the blues."

Ran nods assent but has problems with Ornette’s solo. "I wanted more vocalisms, more dynamics. By the 12th chorus or so, I was tired." To Dan, the problem of genre, and thereby of form, is crucial. And now Ran asks, "Does it make the piece better if you know it’s a blues?" It’s a question that gets to the heart of what I’ve come to think of as the Ran Blake experience. On the first day of class, Ran had approached ideas of form: blues, AABA, ABAC. But he virtually never refers to form again. Instead, he breaks pieces down into 20- and 30-second fragments of melody. He makes a "scan" compilation of these fragments and is constantly pointing out how hard it is to "hold" these pieces — not to memorize them, exactly, but to feel them, to get a tangible grasp of the relationships from note to note. He asks — seduces, really — everyone into performing, but always to the simplest melodic material. After listening to it any number of times on CD, we hear Ran’s assistant Jared Sims play the simple, powerful "Space Church" (in what I decide is roughly an AABC form) on alto sax. Jared plays it at least once per three-hour session, usually more. On the final day we have a saxophone trio of Jared and our two Brookline High students playing the piece. Even I — a non-musician with only a few theory classes and pre-adolescent piano lessons in my background — am coaxed into playing the first three — and then eight — notes of "Lonely Woman" on Ran’s piano. A high point comes on day three, when Patrice puts on her taps and dances to Ornette’s wonderful tune "The Blessing" accompanied by Jared and Chris, our Berklee man, on piano.

Ran encourages every performance with grunts and applause, and if someone’s especially reticent (okay, me), he’ll whisper sotto voce, "Make a nice juicy mistake." Although students and some of Ran’s guests bring in notations and transcriptions, Ran never does. He asks us to learn everything by ear — to listen to a piece a section at a time until we can "hold" it, and then go to our instruments and try to pick it out. And though he makes mildly critical comments about Ornette’s "Blues Connotation" solo, he also says that, in terms of the class at least, "I don’t think it’s important who prefers what."

There are homework listening exercises as well. For each student, Ran and his assistants (Jonah Kraut, like Jared Sims, is an NEC graduate) have prepared huge loose-leaf binders of discographies and reprinted articles that must be at least 500 pages thick. There’s a 28-track mix CD Ran calls "The Frame" that begins with "Jayne" (1958) and ends with "Don’t You Know by Now" (1996). In addition, he has prepared a "half-speed" CD and an 18-CD lending library of chronological mix CDs. If Blake is a minimalist in some respects, in others he’s clearly a maximalist.

Augmenting the periods of intense listening and performing are selections from the filmmaker Shirley Clarke’s 1985 documentary film Ornette: Made in America. We listen to an old radio interview between Ornette and Gunther Schuller. Ran talks a bit about the legendary Lenox School of Jazz in the Berkshires, where he met Ornette as a fellow student in the late ’50s, though we never hear about the actual meeting. On day four, Monday, we convene at the conservatory itself — a class open to the public. We talk to Ornette biographer John Litweiler and former Ornette bandmate Dewey Redman on separate conference calls and listen to WGBH jazz radio host Steve Schwartz talk about his early encounters with Ornette’s music. There are more performances. And in a bravura presentation, New England Conservatory faculty member Hankus Netsky analyzes the theme of Ornette’s "Ballad," from The Great London Concert (1965, Arista/Freedom). Netsky plays a recording of the piece, sings it as he plays it on the piano, sings it as he notates it on the blackboard. And if there was ever any doubt about what makes Ornette’s saxophone phrasing "blues-like," Netsky’s back-to-back playing of Ornette’s performance of "Ballad" and then an Alan Lomax recording of an a cappella performance by convict Johnny Lee Moore makes it clear.

By the last day, Tuesday, we’re back to Ran’s apartment — more listening and more performances. Dan finally performs on guitar — Ornette’s "Peace." He’s followed Ran’s instructions, avoiding pencil and paper, referring to the half-speed tape, and he explains how he’s learned the piece by breaking it down into small patterns of call-and-response and noting where in the form the pattern transposes down a fourth.

Back on the first day, Ran explained that he wasn’t necessarily interested in technique or correctness, and he referred to an old recording by an untrained Italian singer named Giovanna Daffini. She was in her 80s or early 90s, and her voice, he said, was like a ripe piece of Gorgonzola. Her pitch was way off. And yet, "You could hear all of southern Italy and northern Italy in her voice." Now, he tells me he doesn’t want me to think that New England Conservatory isn’t interested in standards of performance. But I get the idea. How do we hear music before we name it?