'Entropy' ...Bird Lives [or, rather, Ornette lives]

[Michael Perez]

Mutualcode quoted:
"Rotarian. But it occurred to me, in one of these flashes of insight,
that if that first quartet of Mulligan's had no piano, it could only
mean one thing.""No chords," said Paco, the baby-faced bass.

"What he is trying to say," Duke said, "is no root chords. Nothing to
listen to while you blow a horizontal line. What one does in such a
case is, one thinks the roots."

A horrified awareness was dawning on Meatball. 'And the next logical
extension," he said.

"Is to think everything," Duke announced with simple dignity. "Roots,
line, everything."

------------------------------

>From _Ornette Coleman:  A Harmolodic Life_ by John Litweiler (Da Capo,
1994), regarding the sessions for _Something Else! . . ._ which
occurred during February and March 1958:

On the recording, then, pianist Norris attends to the chord changes
that Ornette and the group selected; in solo, however, [trumpet player
Don] Cherry and Ornette and the group can escape the changes to play
freely.  (Bobby Bradford comments, "I remember Walter Norris saying to
me, 'Ornette doesn't seem to know his own tunes.'  What he meant was 
that HE got all the correct changes, but Ornette's horn didn't fit the
changes."  Ornette told [Nat] Hentoff, "I would prefer it if musicians
played my my tunes with different changes as they take a new chorus so
that there'd be all the more varietyin the performances . . ."  Hearing
Ornette's subsequent recordings, it becomes clear that the piano is an
inhibiting factor in _Something Else!_  There are passages in "Jayne,"
"The Sphinx," and three blues solos in which Ornette's alto lines move
freely amid the rhythm section's bop. [p. 57]

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