Recording of the Week, Ornette Coleman, 'Genesis of Genius: The Contemporary Recordings'

Photo credit: Sam Falk

Genesis of Genius: The Contemporary Recordings comprises free-jazz innovator and saxophonist Ornette Coleman’s first two studio releases, 1958’s Something Else!!!! and 1959’s Tomorrow Is the Question! – both controversial releases at the time but ones that saw Coleman’s challenging music quickly embraced by some of his more astute contemporaries. Released by Craft Recordings as a celebration of Contemporary Records’ 70th anniversary, these albums ended up being incredibly transformative for Coleman, taking him from a somewhat unknown jazz composer to one of the more boundary-pushing artists of the post-bop era – especially when you consider that his seminal work The Shape of Jazz to Come was released mere months after Tomorrow Is the Question!.

It was whilst working in Los Angeles that Ornette Coleman started to assemble a group to tackle his new jazz compositions, initially recruiting cornetist Don Cherry, bassist Charlie Haden, and drummers Ed Blackwell and Billy Higgins. Interestingly, Coleman was originally planning on selling his charts to Contemporary Records producer Lester Koenig, but after the music proved too tough for the hired musicians to handle, Coleman was invited back to record the music himself with his own quintet. Under his record contract Coleman was obliged to record Something Else!!!! with a pianist – Walter Norris – but immediately opted for a chord-less ensemble going forward from Tomorrow Is the Question!, a sound we’d more often associate with Coleman’s music. This more conventional bebop lineup is something of an outlier in Coleman’s discography, and the difference between the feel of both recordings here is quite surprising. Recorded roughly a year apart from each other, the line-ups for both recordings differ completely, save for Coleman’s right-hand man Don Cherry, who would have only been in his early 20s at the time – the birth of a longstanding relationship between the two which would help in exposing Cherry’s playing to a much wider audience.

Don Cherry (left) & Ornette Coleman (right), photo credit: Lee Friedlander

Perhaps it’s a testament to Coleman’s forward-thinking attitude that the music on Genesis of Genius doesn’t sound all that strange today – as far as jazz is concerned, at least. For sure it’s unconventional; Coleman’s compositions even now blur the lines between jazz song structure and improvisation, with melodies that sound like Coleman and Cherry soloing in unison, and it’s fascinating to hear too how an unshackled Ornette sounds once the keys are taken away on Tomorrow Is the Question!. Even so, let’s not forget that Coleman’s music is also highly tuneful, and it’s perhaps thanks to this careful straddling of the avant-garde and the traditional that – bar a handful of naysayers – these early works managed to find an audience.

Pianist Ethan Iverson, something of a Coleman scholar, once wrote that the choice of sidemen on these early releases somewhat hampered his creative vision – in that they couldn’t keep up with the music he was giving them. With the benefit of hindsight I’m not so sure that criticism holds up, as there’s plenty of choice - finger-snappin’ Coleman’s on display here, especially ‘Giggin’ which features one of his infectious long form melodies that stayed in his repertoire for decades. These early Coleman works obviously aren’t as radical as releases like Free Jazz later in 1961, instead expanding on the well-established vocabulary of bebop – sometimes more extreme than others. But if you’re looking to hear Coleman on the cusp of the most exciting point in his career, look no further than this collection, and when you’re done be sure you fully digest Free Jazz and of course the game-changing The Shape of Jazz to Come and the equally potent Change of the Century.