Art Scatter

I tried to keep up with Ornette Coleman’s onstage conversation Friday with jazz writer/historian Howard Mandel, one of the many Portland Jazz Festival activities this week.

It wasn’t easy. Was what he was saying at any given time actually making sense? Was there a thread to his interview, a philosophy embedded somehow? Was he answering the questions, or questioning the answers? Was he here with us, and if so, could I remember enough of what he said, once I’d figured out what it was, to record it in my notebook? Ornette, you are one tough cookie to convert to print. And the heroic Mandel was by turns bewildered and frustrated as he attempted to corral Ornette’s responses into something the rational mind might contemplate without throwing up its hands.

As I was squeezing the things that made sense out of my notes and reciting them to Marty Hughley, longtime arts writer for The Oregonian (after Ornette’s evening concert but before the SFJazz Collective played Friday night), a music fan behind us piped up: “I can’t believe you got all of that from the talk.” And another friend had earlier described what Ornette had said as “gibberish.” But come on! Ornette Coleman! Even random sonic expressions are going to have meaning! Aren’t they? Yes, they are…

Five life-changing things Ornette said on Friday.

1. “You don’t have to make a sound to hear, right?”

2. “We’re all breathing life, but what is life breathing?”

3. “I don’t think I’m making music. I’m translating something because of what I feel.”

4. “Everything we do is about being better and more precise… We would never exchange creativity for repetition.”

5. Mandel: “Is your music improving?” Ornette: “Every day (emphatically). The only thing I have to do is learn how to play it.”

6. “We cry and we pray because that’s all we know how to do. I cry because of the meaning I can’t express of the quality of the thing that’s making me feel that way.”

OK. I know. That was six. A bonus! It could have been 10. Maybe. Some sentences in my notes started out promisingly but dwindled into nothing as I struggled to make sense of Ornette’s thoughts. We can look at them one by one.

1. “You don’t have to make a sound to hear, right?”

A lot of the interview (and by the way, Ornette’s son, drummer Denardo Coleman, was there, too) had to do with Ornette noodling around the idea that actual sound and how we represent sound, the word sound, are very different and confuse us. He also said, “Sound has no parents,” which I like a lot but have no idea what he meant.

I think Ornette focuses on paradoxes inherent in language to help him play the kind of music he does. It’s useful to unhook his thinking from conventions — in language AND in music. So he talks in language games because it leads him to some genuinely original thoughts. At least for him. So: We forgive him the Delphic riddles and hunt for the expressions that will somehow lever us out of our well-worn troughs of thinking/listening/acting. This makes him a pragmatist in my book, and really, much of what he said had a direct connection to John Dewey-like American pragmatism!

Back in the mid-’50s when Ornette stormed into the hard bop world of Manhattan and threw down microtonality, fragmented melodies and rhythmic irregularities (and I think I’m quoting almost directly from Mandel in the roundtable discussion right after the interview), he was really suggesting a deeply creative approach to sound-making, not a method or technique. And he will do whatever it takes to keep the creativity flowing. He protects himself!

2. “We’re all breathing life, but what is life breathing?”

More language games, maybe, but for a sax player especially, that whole breathing thing is at the heart of things. Watching Ornette Friday night, resplendent in a shiny blue suit, huddled over his sax, spinning himself into sonic worlds that were by turns thrilling, crazy, tiring and profound, it wasn’t hard to imagine that he was taking the measure of what life was breathing, somehow.

3. “I don’t think I’m making music. I’m translating something because of what I feel.”

Maybe the most conventional thing he said during the afternoon conversation. We’ve often heard artists talk like this. But in Ornette’s mouth it comes out a little different. “I’m translating something” is not the same thing as “I’m translating what I feel,” which is how we usually hear it. What is he translating? What’s the something? I don’t think he would name it if he could. And if he did, he would move on. There’s simply no underestimating how fiercely attached to creativity Ornette is…

4. “Everything we do is about being better and more precise… We would never exchange creativity for repetition.”

… which leads to four. One of several utterly pragmatic things Ornette said (such as, “How do we know something? By its title and what it does.”) He believes in “improvement” and has a definition for it that I wasn’t able to transcribe. “Precise” doesn’t come to mind with Ornette, not with wilder yawping his sax (trumpet and violin, too, on Friday night) does. But there it is. In his mind, he’s being very precise at the instant we think he’s anything but.

Here’s John Coltrane on Ornette, from Ben Ratliff’s wonderful “Coltrane: The story of sound”: “I only played with him once in my life, and he asked me to join him. We played two pieces — 12 minutes to be exact — but I know that that was the most intense moment of my life.”

5. Mandel: “Is your music improving?” Ornette: “Every day (emphatically). The only thing I have to do is learn how to play it.”

A thought experiment. Ornette referred to the 12-tone scale (the notes on the piano that make up an octave) once on Friday, something about there being 12 notes you could identify, and then he launched into something that seemed totally unrelated and I lost the thread. Anyway. Ornette doesn’t confine himself to the 12 tones. He’s in between those tones. A lot.

OK. Imagine that between C and C-sharp, say, there are 12 more tones, a whole new octave, with much smaller intervals between the tones. I imagine Ornette playing on that scale. Anything he plays in the space between the original C and C-sharp is going to sound completely different from anything in our original 12-tone scale, even if it’s just “Happy Birthday.”

Stick with me: He takes the space between the C and C-sharp of that knew scale and creates 12 more tones, and he plays another phrase. To us, it’s just a wobble in the vibration, to him it could be a phrase of great complexity and importance. And then he takes the space between THAT C and C-sharp and starts all over again. Forever. All possible sound is lurking in there somewhere, like the great library of Borges contains all possible combinations of letters, from “Hamlet” to utter nonsense (and more of the latter than the former). Music combines the infinities of the library and mathematics. The space between 1 and 2 can be divided infinitely, we know, and then combined infinitely.

There is no evidence whatsoever that Ornette thinks like that. But I do think he courts the infinite somehow. He talked about the “eternal” a lot. And at one point, he said, “There must be human beings who know what it is to be human in relation to God…”

6. “We cry and we pray because that’s all we know how to do. I cry because of the meaning I can’t express of the quality of the thing that’s making me feel that way.”

See? It’s not easy to get your arms around a sentence like that second one. But… I love it. The admission of his own limitation: Ornette can’t express everything. He’s not infinite, even though sound is (and I really believe Ornette thinks that). Onstage he looks fragile, fit but fragile. He’s not forever. The work is hard (”We work hard so we don’t have to work,” he said at one point!). Creativity is a challenge. Failure is everywhere. Repetition is a trap that snares us almost every time. We cry and we pray. And maybe we even look to Ornette to give us some ideas about how to get out of this mess.