How Ornette Coleman’s Free Jazz Freed Rock and Roll

It’s said that James Brown’s great innovation, one drawn deeply from African-American musical tradition, was that every instrument in a band could be a drum. Likewise, Coleman saw that every instrument in a band could be a human voice, the drum’s longtime companion—singing, but also chattering, yelling, moaning, crying. And while Coleman was never the kind of Black Power firebrand many of his successors were, his insight did come with a political subtext: Because they are human, all those voices should be equal and free.

Bassist Jack Bruce of Cream, who had a jazz background, told the Independent in 1992 that by the late 1960s the group that did “Sunshine of Your Love” and “White Room” was secretly “an Ornette Coleman band, with Eric [Clapton] not knowing he was Ornette Coleman, Ginger [Baker] and me not telling him. But there he was, doing these unaccompanied solos for 20 minutes, incredible stuff.”

—Carl Wilson writing at Slate about the way avant-garde jazz musician Ornette Coleman influenced everyone from the Velvet Underground to MC5 to to Patti Smith. Coleman died on June 18th, 2015.
Read the story

from Longreads Blog » Longreads Blog http://blog.longreads.com/2015/07/03/how-ornette-colemans-free-jazz-freed-rock-and-roll/