Billboard : 06/06/1960
Jazz Spotlight Winner

Ornette Coleman, the alto sax man whose style has aroused violent debate, shows on this waxing that he has both imagination and taste, as well as a controversial style. This is the best album he has made to date, and tho there are many pretentious solos, there are also many smart, hip ones that are worth a listen. Coleman has much on the ball when he cares to show it. With the alto man are Don Cherry on trumpet, Charlie Haden on bass and Billy Higgins on drums. Best sides are Ramblin’, and Una Muy Bonita.

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Cashbox : 06/04/1960

Ornette Coleman has started the bitterest and most intriguing controversy in jazz since the advent of bop in the ’40s. It’s a good thing too, for it shows that people are thinking and jazz is moving. In this new date for Atlantic, Coleman’s stated main purpose is for “free group improvisation” – much like original Dixie. The quartet works well together and apparently gains its objective. The selections are all Coleman originals and reflect this “new” thinking. He has many devotees and will find more through this outing.

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Boston Traveler
John McLellan : 09/13/1960

“Oddly enough, the idolization of Bird, people wanting to play just like him, and not make their own soul-search, has finally come to be an impediment to progress in jazz.”

This statement by the young alto-saxophonist Ornette Coleman just about sums up what’s wrong with jazz today. Everyone wants to sound like Charlie (Bird) Parker.

And because they’re afraid to strike out on their own, their playing sounds more and more like endless, meaningless noodling. The same goes for composing.

And, I believe, this applies to the main body of what we call “modern” jazz. It’s not modern. It’s just warmed over from yesterday.

Bird died five years ago. As they say in politics, it’s time for a change.

Today, we are confronted with so much jazz that is just bad music. The insensitive puerility of the vocalists, or the unswinging pretentiousness of the Dixieland revivalists and the big studio swing bands.

But, even in the realm of what the musicians themselves seem to enjoy, there is a great deal that is only momentary value. Music that is just worn out from endless copying.

And what is often called new and exciting is too often artificial or superficial.

Thus, we are constantly exhorted to dig the “soul” sound. Charlie Mingus shouts: “You Gotta Get It In Your Soul.” And all the while, I listen and wonder if it isn’t all too enthusiastic. Just a bit artificial.

And then there’s the enthusiasm which may not be artificial. But it sure seems superficial.

Out on the West Coast, the excitement builds around a piano player named Les McCann. He, we are told, plays “The Truth.”

Well, “one-and-one-makes-two” is the truth, too. But no-one gets very excited about it anymore.

And here’s this piano player making all this nose about “The Truth.” Yet, when you listen to the record, all you hear are the same old gospel music cliches they’re playing back in New York.

It may be the truth. But it’s just not very profound.

All of which brings me to some jazz that I think is new and genuine and sincere and worthwhile.

A selection called Ramblin’ in Ornette Coleman‘s new album, Change of the Century.

This is one of the most exciting pieces of jazz I’ve heard in a long time. And I’m really beginning to wonder if Coleman isn’t going to be the new major influence in jazz.

If you saw “The Jazz Scene” on TV last week, you heard another young alto player, Ken McIntrye, offer the same opinion.

He’s a follower of Coleman in the freedom with which he approaches his horn and his composition.

Some of the pieces, particularly Change of the Century, still show a “watch-my-smoke” kind of immaturity.

But, Ramblin’ is a loose, relaxed, swinging performance of a well-rehearsed, thoroughly familiar tune.

And yet, despite its blues-based, folk-like foundation, its superstructure is as free as tomorrow.

George Russell, in the new book “The Jazz Word,” points to this sort of music as the answer to “Where Do We Go From here?”

After eliminating the extremes of atonality and the tonal music of the classicists he forecasts a “pan-tonality, where the basic folk nature of the scales is preserved.

“And yet, because you can use any number of scales or you can be in any number of tonalities at once, and or sequentially, it also creates a very chromatic kind of feeling, so that it’s sort of like being atonal with a Big Bill Broonzy sound.”

And that, I think, is just what Ornette Coleman, in his own modest way, is doing.

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Hackensack Record
Irving Kolodin : 06/25/1960

Though you will look in vain for his name in an exhaustive register of jazz performers published as recently as 4 years ago, the most mentioned new name in jazz belongs without question to Ornette Coleman, whose instrument is the saxophone and whose following is at least legion.

In addition to commanding the respect of pundits and public, Coleman has been listened to and commended by musicians of many persuasions, ranging from Leonard Bernstein to Sam Levenson, which gives him a clean sweep of the celebrity board. Much of this necessarily goes on in the small clubs (such as the Five Spot of New York’s East Side) where he performs with his group, but it can also be sampled by a series of Atlantic recordings of which the latest is Change of the Century.

This boldly immodest title is by no accident derived from one of his own compositions, in which Coleman professes the belief, “We have to make breaks with a lot of jazz’s recent past, just as the boppers did with swing and traditional jazz.” Whether he will cast a net of influence as widely as did the late Charlie (Bird) Parker, to whom he has been likened as an innovator, is yet to be determined, but there is little doubt that in Coleman jazz has a new and compelling performing personality.

A native of Fort Worth, TX, where he was born some 30 years ago, Coleman has done little but play music since he picked up the alto at 14. Self-taught because money was lacking for instruction, Coleman was indoctrinated to the road as a member of a rhythm and blues group before he was 20, traveling to the West Coast when there was work, and when there wasn’t picking up odd jobs as an elevator operator, handyman, or whatever.

Along the way he had occasion to pawn his horn, and took to playing on a plastic sax because it was cheap. Now, though he can play any instrument of his choice, he prefers the plastic horn, having become identified with its hoarse, certainly off-beat sound. Coleman might have been list to fame a few years ago had not some of his pieces come to the attention of Les Koenig, who runs the Contemporary label.

Coleman was so broke in Los Angeles that he wired his family for money to get back to Texas by bus. The day money for the ticket arrived, Koenig asked Coleman for an audition and took a fancy to what he heard. This was an endorsement of more than ordinary implications, for Koenig was a member of the sax section in the Benny Goodman orchestra in its pre-war heyday.

Coleman’s Contemporary disk made him known to musicians, brought him work in California, and eventually provided him with the opportunity to show his wares at the School of Jazz (adjacent to Tanglewood) in Lenox, MA, last summer. His flights of improvisatory fancy (his mind seems to blot out conventional figures and phrases in cruising the alto terrain) and lively inventive faculty soon became the links in a chain of word-of-mouth which promises to be nation-wide by the time this summer’s schedule of jazz festivals is rounded out.

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San Bernardino County Sun
Jim Angelo : 07/16/1960

Is Coleman‘s music “sick sick sick” as some critics and fans aver? Or is it “unlocking the door of the future” as others claim? Probably neither. But – let’s face it – it’s here, its impact is considerable, and it can’t be ignored. Coleman is attempting “a breakthrough to a new, freer conception of jazz, one that departs from all that is ‘standard’ and cliche in modern jazz.” Is he succeeding? No answer can be given as yet. His music can be powerful and moving (Bird Food, The Face of the Bass, Change of the Century) as well as aimless and incoherent (Ramblin’, Free, Forerunner). Coleman’s musical approach is uncluttered by conventional bar lines, chords changes, or even orthodox fingering – utter freedom, in other words – or chaos – depending on the listener’s reaction. One thing is certain: Ornette has created more controversy in jazz circles than anyone since Parker and Gillespie, instigators of the “Bop Revolution” in the mid-forties. There is a high degree of understanding among Coleman’s sidemen; Cherry‘s searching trumpet and Haden‘s powerful, propulsive bass are quite impressive. Recommended for progressive buffs – not for the average modern jazz fan.

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San Francisco Chronicle
Ralph J. Gleason : 06/19/1960

Just as the publication of “On the Road,” whether or not Jack Kerouac is a great writer, is coming to be recognized as a turning point in American literature, and just as the emergence of Mort Sahl and Lenny Bruce indicates a turning point in American humor, so does the emergence of Ornette Coleman mark the end of something in jazz music and the beginning of something else.

Just as in other arts, there had been indications of things to come. Cecil Taylor, a pianist with startling technique but hampered by a cold, unemotional style, had served notice of intention to strike out for a new style and new forms away from the tradition.

Charlie Mingus, Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins, John Coltrane, and above all, Thelonious Monk, made solidly demonstrable progress toward a jazz form, in terms of concept and sound, far removed but still linked to the tradition. Bill Russo, Teddy Charles and John Lewis, from jazz, and Gunther Schuller, Andre Hodeir, and a few others with a classical orientation, experimented with a new music.

Underneath it all was a basic disenchantment, a boredom if you will, with endless repetition of the once fervent phrases and homilies of the Parker–Gillespie era, by now cliches. Another reprise of Scrapple from the Apple, another application of the bop syndrome to a ballad, of the string of solos ending in an exchange of fours was not enough. The thing, George Bernard Shaw wrote, “is to make an end; to do what cannot be bettered.” And, to be frank, it was hard, it not impossible to improve on Charlie Parker, Lestery Young and Dizzy Gillespie. Looking back now, these men made a contribution that seems somehow less the start of a new era than the final touches to the concept of swing.

“I’m tired of playing songs,” Miles Davis is supposed to have said, and Charlie Mingus paid public tribute to all the encompassing influence of Parker upon his contemporaries. The contemporary musicians, many of them conservatory – trained or rigidly self-educated in the disciplines of formal music, wanted more than instrumental virtuosity, more than the excitement of the moment, most than the exhilaration of stream-of-consciousness improvisation.

Not that these things will every vanish from jazz any more than classical devices of a century old will vanish from formal music. But young minds, energetic, probing and determined to seek their own identifies, wanted something else. Perhaps it would turn out to be better, perhaps not. In any case it would be individual and not merely an extension of the paths trod by others.

This subliminal activity explains much that is happening today; the return to the roots as exemplified by Ray Charles, Cannonball Adderley and the blues and gospel school; the endless experimentation of Coltrane, the agonizing reappraisal of Rollins, the new forms and extension of the line of Lewis, the “new music” of Schuller, Hodeir, J.J. Johnson and, of course, Lewis.

Count Basie predicted it almost a decade ago to the day. “Some kid will come along that nobody’s heard of with some new kind of music” he said, during the intermission of a dance at the old Edgewater ballroom in San Francisco.

And some kid did.

His name is, of course, Ornette Coleman, and even though his music is not yet fully formed (in contrast to Lester Young and Parker and Monk who emerged fully formed, it has already turned the jazz world upside down. European critics who last year complained their American counterparts couldn’t see the old timers for adulation of the new, now complained that Coleman couldn’t get a hearing. Such stalwart jazz figures as Oscar Peterson and Ray Brown were vehemently opposed to Ornette Coleman’s work. Others, equally important, such as Lewis, Giuffre, Schuller, and Julian Adderley, were for it.

Ornette Coleman’s latest record, Change of the Century has just appeared. Unfortunately, a good deal of his propaganda has featured such terms as The Shape of Jazz to Come (Stan Kenton once concentrated on the term “forwardism” and Gillespie named a composition Things to Come) and this has hindered acceptance. However, again to return to Shaw, Ornette Coleman has “made a beginning.” And it is a new feeling, though still one containing the vitality and personal expression of jazz, but one which breaks through the old boundaries of the bar structures and the cord changes into a new individual cry. It has less debt to Parker than it has to the seminal roots of jazz itself.

One track on this LP, Ramblin’, puts me in mind of the Jenkins Orphanage Band which used to parade in Saratoga Springs in the summer 30 years ago. It stresses individuality in concert with group improvisation, as yet limited to two horns but encompassing the bass and drums. It has great freedom even if still unorthodox, and thus displeasing sound for some.

It makes a strong and fundamental contrast to the warmed over bep-bop that has passed for jazz language in many small groups for several years. It will never make obsolescent the good feeling of swing, of instrumental virtuosity, of improvisation in the orthodox idiom of jazz. We will have these, thank heaven, with us always. But it does indicate a Third Force, in modern jazz. We have the new music of Lewis and Schuller, we have the neo-classicism of Mingus, the iconoclasm of Monk and Miles (and I might add, the parallel iconoclasm of Ellington) but there is now added to it the beginnings of a new individual freedom of expression in improvised jazz. It is starting to form. It is being documented on LPs step by step and it is fascinating. It may well produce a new era in jazz. It marks the end of one. In any case it is here to stay.

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San Francisco Examiner
C.H. Garrigues : 06/05/1960

Ornette Coleman, the young Los Angeles altoist who was first introduced to jazz fans of the West in this column in August, 1958, continues to be the most controversial figure in the world of jazz today – and will continue to be on the basis of his new album Change of the Century.

The controversy, it may be said, rages more violently among musicians than among fans – if only because Coleman’s unorthodox concepts present a challenge which they must immediately meet in action. The fans can sit back and allow understanding to come when – and if – it does.

Inevitably, there can be no discussion of Coleman without a discussion of Charlie Parker. This is not merely because both introduced new concepts of jazz harmony (though Coleman’s chords are less sensationally new than were Parker’s). But it is because much of the furor concerning Coleman has been due to an unwillingness on the part of the critics, and the fans (and some musicians) to “miss the boat” on another genius as so many missed it on Parker.

Of Coleman’s new album, we must repeat something which we state upon reviewing his first three: that although Coleman does not sound like Parker he does, I think, confront his listeners with the same sense of startled shock that most of us older generation fans felt when we first heard Scrapple or Klactoveedsedtene or Crazeology – a sense of shock which is accompanied by the realization that here something is being said which needs to be and which, as of now, only Coleman and his cohorts are capable of saying.

It is difficult now, in 1960, to play Klacto or Scrapple and recapture the shock we felt from it in, say, 1947. We feel, on the other hand that here is something almost old-fashionedly pleasing ; we are able to pay tribute to Bird’s fantastic technique, his virtuosity, his musical “sense” – and we cannot help but wonder whether or not Coleman, in, say, 1970, will not give us that same sense of familiarity.

Already in the new album there is some evidence that this may come to pass. Ramblin‘, Free and Forerunner sound almost familiar. Bird Food (of which Coleman says “Bird would have understood this”) is even more so. And then Change of the Century bursts on you and you demand: “Is this stuff music?”

It is only fair to recall that for some of us an appreciation of Bird came the same way. Maybe it was Relaxin at Camarillo that came first, or Star Eyes or even Au Privave – and then, bit by bit the whole wonderful experience began to come through.

It does not matter whether or not Coleman is “another Charlie Parker.” (As a matter of fact he isn’t.) Coming to know his music is, I would still be willing to bet, an experience comparable to coming to know Parker’s.

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Down Beat : 08/18/1960
Ralph J. Gleason : 4 stars

This is, of course, the best of all the Coleman LPs issued so far and is the only one to which I can listen with any degree of pleasure at all. So much for that sort of comment, except that I might add that the use of a priori propaganda of titles like Change of the Century and Shape of Things to Come reminds me more of Stan Kenton and his “Forwardism” than anything else.

This LP, like all the others, consists of original compositions by Coleman in which there is trumpet-alto ensemble, trumpet solo, alto solo, exchanges, and, now and then, solos by the bass and drums.

Since we don’t know the tunes themselves (and one observation I would like to make is that I will be surprised if a great many of these tunes become standard jazz vehicles even to the extent of being played by the fledglings in their emulation of the latest word), we don’t know if the various shiftings, etc., take place all the time.

If you don’t know the reference, you can’t get the real point.

I would suggest that this music is part of the general revolt against the bop cliche, the endless routinizing of tunes, the orthodox solo pattern, and the general stagnation into which the newcomers in jazz have been mired for a couple of years now. (The major forces make their own rules). It may or may not be the music of the future; only time will tell that. But if it is symptomatic of a new wind ablowin’ just as Kerouac, the Tokyo riots, Absolute Beginners, and La Dolce Vita are symptoms of new things.

It would be helpful for evaluation even now if there were an LP of the group playing standards. Then there might be some clue for us tin-eared critics. As it is, there’s nothing to do but face the music squarely – if you will forgive me. So my reaction, after numerous hearing of this LP, is the following:

I do not think that this is what Ornette Coleman will sound like when he has perfected his style. He is, after all, one of the few major contributors (if he is a major contributor) not to come completely formed (as Lester Young, Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk did) to recording. We are watching the thing work out here. If this is what he wants to sound like ultimately, I am sorry, but it is an annoying and unmusical sound to my ears.

In Ramblin’, for instance, I find the echoes of the street bands like the Jenkins Orphanage Band of the ’20s, rather than any bow to the Bird’s word. In Una Muy Bonita, by far the most attractive tune, there is a kinship between the playing and the overtones of Spanish music that is surprising.

All in all, I find the tunes difficult to judge and the playing of Coleman himself highly individual, highly erratic and hash, and sometimes ingenuously winning.

He and Cherry obviously improvise together with facility and empathy that is not all surprising, since they have worked together so long. Just as on the other LPs, I feel that Cherry is the only one who knows or sense what Coleman is up to at any given point. Not that the others don’t fit. They do, or rather the pattern is one that allows them to sound as if they do, and no one knows if they are successful in Ornette’s terms or not, only whether or not the overall effect is good.

Again, I say I cannot listen, except to Ramblin’ and Una Muy Bonita, for personal pleasure – and not much then.

But this does not mean the LP or the total body of work is unimportant. It obviously is. And in my opinion, it marks the turning point away from the ultimate extension of swing into bop and is another indication of possible new directions for part of jazz to take, along with John Lewis and Gunther Schuller’s “new music,” John Coltrane, Monk, Sonny Rollins, Miles Davis, Charlie Mingus, and the others who are attempting to create a music that is still jazz but is more free of the restrictions inherent in swing-bop than what has been done so far.

Of course, for musical value, there’s always Duke Ellington.

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Liner Notes by Ornette Coleman (as told to Gary Kramer)

Some musicians say, if what I’m doing is right, they should never have gone to school.

I say, there is no single right way to play jazz. Some of the comments made about my music make me realize though that modern jazz, once so daring and revolutionary, has become, in many respects, a rather settled and conventional thing. The members of my group and I are now attempting a break-through to a new, freer conception of jazz, one that departs from all that is “standard” and cliche in “modern” jazz.

Perhaps the most important new element in our music is our conception of free group improvisation. The idea of group improvisation, in itself, is not at all new; it played a big role in New Orleans’ early bands. The big bands of the swing period changed all that. Today, still, the individual is either swallowed up in a group situation, or else he is out front soloing, with none of the other horns doing anything but calmly awaiting their turn for their solos. Even in some of the trios and quartets, which permit quite a bit of group improvisation, the final effect is one that is imposed beforehand by the arranger. One knows pretty much what to expect.

When our group plays, before we start out to play, we do not have any idea what the end result will be. Each player is free to contribute what he feels in the music at any given moment. We do not begin with a preconceived notion as to what kind of effect we will achieve. When we record, sometimes I can hardly believe what I hear when the tape is played back to me, is the playing of my group. I am so busy and absorbed when I play that I am not aware of what I’m doing at the time I’m doing it.

I don’t tell the members of my group what to do. I want them to play what they hear in the piece for themselves. I let everyone express himself just as he wants to. The musicians have complete freedom, and so, of course, our final results depend entirely on the musicianship, emotional make-up and taste of the individual member. Ours is at all times a group effort and it is only because we have the rapport we do that our music takes on the shape that it does. A strong personality with a star-complex would take away from the effectiveness of our group, no matter how brilliantly we played.

With my music, as is the case with some of my friends who are painters, I often have people come to me and say, “I like it but I don’t understand it.” Many people apparently don’t trust their reactions to art or to music unless there is a verbal explanation for it. In music, the only thing that matters is whether you feel it or not. You can’t intellectualize music; to reduce it analytically often is to reduce it to nothing very important. It is only in terms of emotional response that I can judge whether what we are doing is successful or not. If you are touched in some way, then you are in with me. I love to play for people, and how they react affects my playing.

A question often asked of me is why I play a plastic alto. I bought it originally because I needed a new horn badly, and I felt I could not afford a new brass instrument. The plastic horn is less expensive, and I said to myself, “Better a new horn than one that leaks.” After living with the plastic horn, I felt it begin to take on my emotion. The tone is breathier than the brass instrument, but I came to like the sound, and I found the flow of music to be more compact. I don’t intend ever to buy another brass horn. On this plastic horn I feel as if I am continually creating my own sound.

Now to the music. They are all originals. Each is quite different from the other, but in a certain sense there really is no start or finish to any of my compositions There is a continuity of expression, certain continually evolving stands of thought that link all my compositions together. Maybe it’s something like the paintings of Jackson Pollock.

Ramblin’ is basically a blues, but it has a modern, more independent melodic line than older blues have, of course. I do not feel so confined to the blues form as do so many other jazz musicians. Blues are definite emotional statements. Some emotional statements can only be told as blues.

Free is well-explained by the title. Our free group-improvising is well demonstrated here. Each member goes his own way and still adds tellingly to the group endeavor. There was no predetermined chordal or time pattern. I think we got a spontaneous, free-wheeling thing going here.

Face of the Bass begins as a vehicle for our bassist. Charlie Haden is from Missouri and he has a lot of heart. It is unusual to come across someone as young as he is and find that he has such a complete grasp of the “modern” bass: melodically independent and non-chordal.

Forerunner shows the interchangeability and flexibility of the component parts of the group. I like the way the melody here often runs through the rhythm instruments, with the melody instruments – the horns – providing rhythm accents (the traditional function of drums and bass.)

Bird Food has echoes of the style of Charlie Parker. Bird would have understood us. He would have approved our aspiring to something beyond what we inherited. Oddly enough, the idolization of Bird, people wanting to play just like him, and not make their own soul-search, has finally come to be an impediment to progress in jazz.

Una Muy Bonita, in Spanish, means “a very pretty girl.” I had no one in particular in mind. It is perhaps a little lighter in mood than some of our other pieces. It has a relaxed feeling and a more settled rhythm – and yes, I suppose, a “prettier” melody.

Change of the Century expresses our feeling that we have to make breaks with a lot of jazz’s recent past, just as the boppers did with swing and traditional jazz. We want to incorporate more musical materials and theoretical ideas – from the classical world, as well as jazz and folk – into our work to create a broader base for the new music we are creating.

Every member of the group made an important and distinctly personal contribution to this album, which I think is the best we have made so far.