Change of the Century: Ornette Coleman

It didn’t take genius to flash on fashion as a suitably unorthodox topic to throw on Ornette Coleman: his visual style has long commanded more than a passing mention. In Four Lives in the Bebop Business, A. B. Spellman dotes on the “funny little waistcoats” Coleman designed for his quartet’s New York debut and the leader’s own eye-popping use of a white plastic alto.

The Coleman dress code can vary from wry accessories to exotic-hued monochrome suits, from subtle, many-colored thread-weaves to casual collegiate ensembles. The day we met, he wouldn’t have been out of place as a croupier, his silver silk shirt draped by a black vest with muted paisley backing. For all that, I’m ’shamed to admit our conversation didn’t stay on the fashion track long. Getting Ornette’s pants and jacket measurements proved as fas. cinating as listening to the man whittle away on wisps of cosmo-logical whimsy. Per his dictum that “a unison can be made of anything,” everything Ornette says fits; i.e., fashion equals faith, freedom equals Ornette’s democratic music system, harmolodics. “When you say music, that’s a different sound. When sound is music, then we’re talking about a different world. When music is a set territory, a set race, and a set pattern, then it just functions like shoes or anything else. I think sound is what gave the meaning to words and music is what gave feeling to hearing but I think categories is what has limited all of that. Taken the feeling out of hearing.

“I think feeling is really sacred. I learned that from the American Indians when I went on a reservation, that feeling is sacred itself. Feeling is symbolic to human beings of what God meant by putting breath in human beings.”

Deal with it: Ornette Coleman is a conceptman, a man of ideas, one with his own oblique way with a phrase, granted, and therefore a philosopher, even if your mama might label him more a philosophizer, a Southern-bred shaman jes’ a mite on the garrulous side. The originality of his syntax has often rendered Ornette indecipherable to some and sagacious to others, at times even both. One young pianist recalls an encounter that left him feeling that, even if he didn’t understand Ornette, he was certain the man was a poet and that whatever he was saying, it was deep. Because Ornette is the kind of person with an answer or an anecdote for all queries; it might be thought that the reach of his philosophy far exceeds his grasp of the Western harmonic and harmolodic musical systems. You tell me: in a recent interview, Ornette was asked about the Heisenberg uncertainty principle as it related to music’s effect on the human organism and instructed the interviewer that he was “no longer talking chemistry but alchemy” as succinct a summary of the difference between the Newtonian and Einsteinian universes as you’ll find outside of Lao Tzu. To some extent, Ornette reads like a crackpot genius, his discursive mind sweeping through its mental attic in search of the fabric connecting the cosmic and the mundane. At 57, Ornette holds his own not only in the African-American music pantheon, but among the ranks of all the free thinkers who’ve ever shaken us up by showing our prejudices and presumptions about class, culture, and the cosmos to be nothing but the emperor’s new clothes.

Fashion figures into Ornette’s ecumenical program as a way of seducing folk into getting on board his version of the freedom train. Ornette views even his sense of style as an extension of his humanist impulses. His interest in fashion extends to his designing his own duds, but he ain’t no glamour boy.

“For me, clothes have always been a way of designing a setting so that by the time a person observes how you look, all of their attention is on what you’re playing. Most people that play music, whether it’s pop, rock, or classical, have a certain kind of uniform so they don’t have to tell you what you’re listening at. I always thought that if that was the case, why wouldn’t I try to design from the standpoint of the opposite of that? Have the person see what you have on and have no idea what you were going to play. I’m not playing to represent what I’m wearing, and I’m not dressing to represent what I play. In Western society most successful public images have to do with how people want you to see them. A rich person goes around in jeans because he knows he’s wealthy. Well, I don’t dress to represent wealth, race, music, or nothing. It’s more like religion, really. I would rather play in a setting that’s going to allow the person that’s listening to get into himself by distracting him from how I look in relationship to what he’s hearing on stage. I don’t want to go on a bandstand and have people try to imitate what I have on to get them closer to me. Like I don’t try to see what kind of music they like to get them closer to me, I try not to think about either one of those things. Yet for some reason it has made people more interested in me. They say, ’Wow, those are some funny looking clothes, how did you come by those?’ But I think that, in a world where I’m seeking to have an identity related to the universal person, my clothes have a universal appeal. “I think the music is healing on many levels, whereas the clothes make the performer feel stronger before he even gets to the stage. The clothes enlighten the person to feel good. And with the playing and the music they both have this good positive effect on people. “I heard that silk has something to do with making you less evil. I think it has something to do with light. I think from the time people began reading about human behavior in the Bible that someone had to invent fabric to cover all this evil up. But there is a light that is not related to electricity. If the sun didn’t exist or if you took all the stars out of the sky that doesn’t mean you wouldn’t have light. It says in the Bible that in the beginning God created light, it doesn’t say God created the sun, right? Maybe human beings are the real true light. Silk could be symbolic of that. There is something that flows in human beings that is close to what people call the truth, like when people say, ’See the truth in the light.’ For some reason, in the Western world, though, silk has been related to pimps and preachers, people of high social imagery who manipulate people.

“The only time I’d seen black people dress up was going to church. Otherwise everybody looked like they just got out of a sandstorm or something. It made the male population appear to look sluggish, like they weren’t interested in nothing. They had overalls and jeans, country stuff. Dressing up always seemed to me to have something to do with city living rather than country living and it’s still that way. If you go somewhere dressed up and you’re a black person, they usually don’t tell you to take the package around to somewhere. Dressing up has a lot to do with not looking like your stereotyped black person that’s looking for a job and can’t do this and can’t do that.

“When I see white kids walking the streets with their knees and their ass out, I wonder, do they want to be called bums? That’s the style of clothes they wear, but they don’t want to be called bums. But if they see a nonwhite person doing like that they call him a bum. If they do it it’s called style.

“When a black person gets educated, such as myself, we have to find other territories to survive in. We can’t survive in the territories we grew up in. If a young white kid decides he wants to play Chinese music in his apartment and finds something creative about it, he doesn’t have to go to China to be successful. He can stay right there. But if a black person does that he has to change his environment and sometimes his attitude and be called Uncle Tom, but that’s only because of the difference of being an individual person and being a racial person. I’m already black. I don’t have to prove to anybody that I’m black and I don’t have to act a certain way to get someone to like me because I’m black. I got a review in down beat by this guy who was listening to the Prime Time band as if it was just some black guys playing rhythm and blues. That’s what he thought we were playing because we happened to be black and he heard some rhythm. But whatever problem a person has with the music they’re playing has more to do with the results they want from it than the judgment of how they’re being criticized. What I want from the music I perform is exactly the result I’m getting, no more, no less. And that result is for everyone to leave feeling themselves more of an individual.”

Though Ornette has neither sought nor been granted the musical messiah-status bestowed on Coltrane, his characterization of his performance wardrobe as near-religious articles certainly intimates holy-man pretensions. But at Ornette’s core is a notion of human salvation that seems to derive from both Jesus and Thomas Jefferson. It’s a vision that considers self-expression synonymous with social responsibility, and individuality synonymous with spirituality-hence Ornette’s belief that his personal style can service humanity. In discussing his harmolodics music system, where every player is free to take the lead at any time, Ornette poses it not just as a liberating paradigm for jazz performers, but for everybody.

“Everyone making their contribution in perfect unison. That is the most radical thing that has to do with human expression, not only in music, but clothes, cars, all things where you can bring your personal idea, see it making something better while everyone else is making theirs better. That has to be an advance.”