Billboard : 11/16/1959
Three stars

Ornette Coleman, hailed by some critics as an important new jazz artist and derided by others as much less important, features his controversial style along with trumpeter Don Cherry. Again Coleman plays in his unique manner of alto sax, a style that is self-consciously different and takes a lot of listening to get attuned to. Altho it really isn’t outstanding jazz, its controversial nature will interest avant garde jazz buyers. Best sides are Tomorrow is the Question and Giggin’. All of the tunes were penned by Coleman.

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Audio
Charles A. Robertson : February 1960

Since the release of his first Contemporary LP, Ornette Coleman has invaded the East Coast and appeared in concert at Town Hall. Each of the present albums, recorded shortly before the alto saxist left Los Angeles, offer an excellent opportunity to study a figure which has alternatively stunned and stirred the jazz world. All the tunes are original works, played with various rhythm men and an inseparable companion, Don Cherry, on pocket trumpet. As the average listener may need to acquire a taste for the tone of Coleman’s plastic instrument, the new Contemporary LP is recommended as a starter. Drummer Shelly Manne and bassist Red Mitchell, who take to heart the leader’s strictures about freedom, launch blithely into inspired performances. you are likely to return time and again to their solos on Lorraine, and Turnaround, even though not all of Coleman’s questions are answered. And if you are slightly bemused by his intentions, there is some comfort in finding such a worthy as bassist Percy Heath in a similar state on several numbers. Manne’s drums sound fine in stereo, as recorded by Roy DuNann.

On Atlantic, the presence of regular bassist and drummer, Charlie Haden and Billy Higgins, enables the quartet o attain greater unity of expression, and form is more apparent in Coleman’s compositions. Some loss of freedom attends this achievement, however, and the rhythm men seem to operate under wraps. One of Coleman’s stated ambitions is to “reach into the human sound of a voice” on his horn, which is hardly unique among jazz players. It is the lack of any adherence to conventional vocal lines that sets him apart from the rest. His sound and phrasing result from attempting to delve beneath the surface and give utterance to feelings of joy, despair, or passion at the moment when they are happening. When he portrays Lonely Woman, you are there. Tears Inside, on the Contemporary album, is described as “wanting to cry, but the human emotion won’t release the tears.” A bullfighter would call it the moment of truth, but you may find it a traumatic experience.

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Minneapolis Star Tribune
Charles Hanna : 12/13/1959

Alto saxophonist Ornette Coleman presents an almost unparalleled challenge for those who try to assess his worth and work.

The tendency among some critics is to describe the inexplicable as something of the future. This has been the case of Ornette Coleman, admittedly a jazzman of perplexing ideas.

Some critics have called him a new prophet, but in terms that leave a shade of doubt.

Uncertainty, in Coleman’s case, is something that can be unashamedly admitted. His playing is provocative, but just how much influence he is likely to bear on the jazz of tomorrow remains to be seen.

Coleman’s ideas have hardly learned to stand alone. His style is still emerging.

Coleman’s solos are like sprawling vines that ignore their trellis and grow rapidly off in unexpected directions. Some jut off into space, too weak to support themselves and too intent on remaining independent to hold to some established form.

Perhaps his best effort thus far is in The Shape of Jazz to Come (Atlantic) where he and three others of the Coleman quartet play six original compositions.

Nearly as representative is Tomorrow is the Question (Contemporary) where he and Don Cherry are joined by Percy Heath or Red Mitchell on bass and Shelly Manne on drums for nine other Coleman creations.

Often compared with Charlie Parker, Coleman either lacks or has gone far beyond Parker’s sense of form (a moot point of generous proportions).

The only significant relationship between the two is the alto saxophone. Their manners of playing greatly differ.

Parker’s solos possess a highly developed logic in construction. They sound as though they came from a drawing board after careful revision and improvement.

Coleman’s solos appear as the immediate release of ideas as they form in the player’s mind, unclothed by order and reason.

The ensemble work of the regular quartet hangs together extremely well. This is managed by the similarity of expressions by both Coleman and Cherry.

Both blow with a feeling of deep emotion. Their instruments wail together in crying the blues and sometimes in laughter.

We’ll have to hear a lot more of Coleman before we can predict his power of influence or his values.

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Providence Journal
Philip C. Gunion : 12/06/1959

Ornette Coleman‘s alto sax is almost a new voice crying out int he field of modern jazz and he writes his own charts too. I must confess that Ornette takes a little getting used to but I think it is worth the effort. New ideas still are rather scarce and it’s a good idea to listen to them when they come along.

The tonal effect of Ornette’s album, Tomorrow is the Question! by Contemporary is one of pleasure and it will have you thinking out loud.

With him are Don Cherry, trumpet; Percy Heath or Red Mitchell, bass, and Shelly Manne, drums. They support him in the style to which he would like to become accustomed.

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San Bernardino County Sun
Jim Angelo : 11/21/1959

Conceded by many critics to be the most revolutionary musician since Charlie Parker is altoist Ornette Coleman whose latest LPs are appropriately titled Tomorrow is the Question and The Shape of Jazz to Come. He’s accompanied on the Contemporary album by his musical soulmate, trumpeter Don Cherry, and two rhythm – bassist Red Mitchell and drummer Shelly Manne. Programmed are 9 Coleman originals with such unique and graphic tags as Tears Inside, Compassion, Rejoicing, and Turnaround. The Atlantic disk finds Coleman and Cherry aided by bassist Charlie Haden and drummer Billy Higgins. Six more of Ornette’s originals are performed among them Lonely Woman, Eventually, Peace, and Focus On Sanity. As pianist John Lewis puts it: “Ornette is doing the only really new things in jazz since the innovations in the mid-forties of Parker, Gillespie, and Monk.

Although the music cuts across the usual chordal patterns and compositional forms, it is intensely personal and starkly emotional. Rough edges and shallow concepts are apparent in places but there’s much of value here and repeated listening will greatly reward most modern devotees.

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San Francisco Chronicle
Ralph J. Gleason : 12/17/1959

An alto saxophonist named Ornette Coleman, who is completely self-taught and whose knowledge of the mathematics of music is rudimentary insofar as its formal expression is concerned, is the most controversial jazz musician on the current scene.

Ornette has had three LPs issued: Something Else!; The Shape of Jazz to Come and Tomorrow Is the Question. His recent appearance at Monterey drew a mixed reaction, as did his stay at the Lenox School of Jazz this summer. His appearance this month in New York drew a burst of critical hosannas and an equal number of solid dissents. Musicians themselves are divided into those who don’t dig him and those who think he’s the shape of things to come.

Ornette Coleman is another manifestation of the questing nature of the jazz musician. In company with many young contemporary jazzmen (chief among them being Cecil Taylor and John Coltrane) Ornette is working toward a freer form of jazz improvisation in which the actual bar number may be whatever the improvisor desires; in which the harmonies develop as the soloist improvises and are not the structuring factor; and in which the broadest possible range of sounds is utilized. There is a great similarity to the human voice in the way in which Ornette plays with highly charged emotion, abruptness and discontinuity. He uses unfamiliar themes, the better to startle our ears perhaps, and the sound that he gets is not yet easy to listen to.

It would seem only logical to suspend judgement on what he is doing to see where it goes. It is obvious that his work is only a beginning; we don’t know where the end is. From it we may reasonably deduce that the saxophone, for one, and possibly jazz itself may never be the same.

One can listen to Ornette Coleman’s records with interest and with some sense of discovery. This listener, however, does not derive any pleasure from Ornette’s music nor from that of Cecil Taylor, to be frank. John Coltrane, on the other hand, far removed though he may be from the tenor sound of Lester Young, is pure pleasure.

Despite the lack of obvious logic to the music of Ornette it is just as obvious that there is a hidden logic to it. Otherwise Don Cherry, who has played with him for some time now, could not improvise so tightly with him. You and I may not know what Ornette is doing but Don Cherry does. Meanwhile, anything this young man does will be watched most closely by everyone. Nobody’s taking the chance of missing the boat, as they did with Bird.

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San Francisco Examiner
C.H. Garrigues : 11/22/1959

By far the most controversial musical figures at this year’s Monterey Jazz Festival were two young men from Los Angeles – Ornette Coleman, an alto saxophonist who plays on a plastic instrument because he likes the dry sound he gets, and Don Cherry, who plays a tiny, toy-sized trumpet because “it enables you to hear yourself back.”

Coleman and Cherry (or Coleman, rather, this is really his story) appeared on the Los Angeles musical scene with something that could be called a new kind of music six or eight years ago. Jazz musicians in general ignored them, putting them down as not knowing harmony or as playing out of tune. Jobs were out of the question; if they even tried to sit in at sessions the other musicians would lay out.

The first exception was the very perceptive bassist, Red Mitchell; he took Coleman to Lester Koenig, head of Contemporary Records, who commissioned his first album Something Else.

But nothing much happened; there were a few favorable reviews (including one here), and Coleman went back to running an elevator to support his young family. Another record was cut for Contemporary in the spring but lay in the vaults unreleased. It looked as though the “new music” was destined to remain unheard.

Then John Lewis, musical director of the Modern Jazz Quartet and head of the School of Jazz at Lenox, Mass., heard Coleman on one of his trips to the coast. Lewis flipped. he immediately arranged for Coleman to attend the School of Jazz on scholarship – less, he confessed, for what Coleman would learn there than for the chance it would give him to be heard by such faculty members as Max Roach, Milt Jackson, Bill Evans and Gunther Schuller.

While Coleman was in Lenox, Lewis called him to the attention of Nesuhi Ertegun, of Atlantic Records. “Ornette is doing the only really new thing in jazz since the innovations of the mid-forties of Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk,” Lewis told Nesuhi.

Ertegun, after hearing him, agreed and signed Coleman to a new LP series. Lewis, who also was musical director of the Monterey Jazz Festival, signed him for his first big appearance, and Coleman, after years of struggling had received his first break.

With the close of the festival, Coleman’s new LPs – the one he made for Contemporary last spring and his first for Atlantic – are off the press and available for serious study. (They are Tomorrow is the Question and The Shape of Jazz to Come. After extended playings, I am certain that they justify Lewis’ seemingly extravagant praise – and that of such men as Schuller and Shelly Manne, quoted on the liner notes).

The first thing of which the listener is aware the first time he listens to Coleman is that he – the listener – feels exactly as he did, back in the forties, the first time he listened to Parker. This is not to say that Coleman is “another Parker” (in the way that Sonny Stitt was said to be another Parker) or that he is Parker’s successor (in the way Cannonball Adderley was said to be Parker’s successor).

On the contrary, Coleman sounds very little like Parker; he lacks the furious, flaring technique which enabled Bud to force his music down the throats of his fellow musicians long before they were able to grasp it for its ideas.

Further, where Parker was an extrovert, wailing at a furious pace which carried the listener along in spite of himself, Coleman’s sound is small, tight; his phrasing is short, tense, almost lachrymose in a bitter sort of way.

So Coleman sounds nothing like Parker – still less like the imitators of Parker who cam after. he only makes you feel like Parker did… the first time you heard Parker. You knew, somehow, that this was it.

Any reservations? Some how, the music of the 60s (which this is) seems not quite for us of the 40s. You can, after years of Adderley and Stitt and Quill and Woods, go back and play a Parker track and say, always with the same note of wonder, “Nobody ever played like Bird!” I doubt if you will ever say that about Coleman. There is the tenseness, the tightness.

Yet the reservations, perhaps, do not apply. This is the music of the 60s; this is new; this is it. Even if it remains so far out that Coleman has to keep running his elevator for the rest of his life.

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Tampa Tribune
Vance Johnston : 11/22/1959

Tomorrow is the Question is not the title of a poem or a book but a pleasant LP of modern jazz featuring Ornette Coleman on the Contemporary label.

Coleman may be new to most of you, but remember his name. One day in the not too distant future this alto sax man will have a following as big as the late Charlie Parker.

Coleman plays with the freedom The Bird mastered and yet in some respects it’s a cut above the great Parker. While he is not, in any way, imitating Parker, his playing is reminiscent of Parker’s, but much deeper.

Coleman plays each note as though he personally invented it. He has a warmth that comes from a deep love for the work he is doing.

And while the tunes in this package are not familiar, they are, nevertheless, appealing. The selections, by the way, were composed by Coleman.

Don Cherry is featured on the trumpet in this package and one can only hope that he’ll continue to associate himself, musically speaking, with Coleman.

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Down Beat : 12/24/1959
Don DeMichael : 3 stars

To say this is a strange album is an understatement. Astonishing comes closer to the mark, for the LP is an expression of Coleman‘s conception; and if anything, this conceptin is astonishing. Coleman is almost certain to create a furor and start the biggest controversy since Thelonious Monk.

Most of his playing on this LP is very good, but some of it is outrageous. His wild, incoherent solos on Tomorrow, Tears, and Mind are marked by extremely bad intonation and sloppy execution. On the other hand, his work on Lorraine, Compassion, and Giggin’ is startling in its emotional impact. Again, it must be emphasized that a greater percentage of his playing is 5 stars, but when he descends to playing hit-any-note-but-hit-it-fast, the rating falls to 1 star.

Coleman’s influence on his compatriots is strong. The best example of this is in Lorraine. On this beautiful dirge in memory of Lorraine Geller, Manne, Mitchell, and Coleman become so cohesive and empathetic that they play as one. Cherry, on this track, takes up where Coleman stops and continues in the same manner as Coleman. Such continuity and interaction is one of the rarest phenomena in jazz.

Mitchell, more than any other on the date, catches the spirit of Coleman’s conception, His long, involved solo on Turnaround is the most amazing bass solo I’ve ever heard. Red’s playing on the last three tracks is not merely excellent, it’s superb.

On the other hand, Manne at times plays as if he’s not quite sure what’s going on. He seems to catch the spirit more when working with Mitchell than Heath. His solo on Lorraine is a fascinating abstraction of the main theme.

All in all, this record demands attention and must be listened to many times before it can be digested even partly. Ornette Coleman may be the next great influence, but only time will tell. In the meantime, he should be heard so that a fair evaluation can be made.

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Liner Notes by Nat Hentoff

I’m especially convinced that Ornette Coleman is making a unique and valuable contribution to “tomorrow’s” music because of the startling power of his playing to reach the most basic emotions.

“He sounds,” as Shelly Manne says, “like a person crying or a person laughing… when he plays.“

I’m not saying that Ornette has arrived fully-formed to unlock the next door into the future. There are rough edges and not wholly plumbed conceptions in his work, but I do feel that his is among the most strongly personal music now being played in jazz, and that as he increasingly frees himself to be more of himself in his playing, he is showing others how to be free in their ways.

There is never any mistaking that it’s Ornette Coleman who’s speaking, and speaking is just what he‘s doing. As he explained in an interview for his first album (Something Else! The Music of Ornette Coleman), Ornette is involved with making music into “human” sounds.

“You can always,” he explained, “reach into the human sound of a voice on your horn if you‘re actually hearing and trying to express the warmth of a human voice.” To do this, he began working with the extensive potentialities of pitch with a resultant sound that is often unorthodox. “There are some intervals that wry that human quality if you play them in the right pitch.” His phrasing and his metrical flexibility are also kept natural – to his way of feeling – so that he can speak as freely as possible on his instrument.

It is this uncompromising rush of freedom that makes Ornette’s initial impact so piercing. John Lewis – particularly after having heard Ornette in California – was stunned, a condition not usual for him. “I‘ve never heard anything like Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry before”, he told Fran Thorne in an interview for the Italian magazine Jazz di ieri e di oggi. “Ornette is the driving force of the two. They‘re almost like twins; they play together like I’ve never heard anybody play together. I can’t figure how they start together. It‘s not like any ensemble that I‘ve heard…”

Lewis arranged for Ornette and Don Cherry to become scholarship students at the third session of The School of Jazz in Lenox, Massachusetts in August 1959. The school, of which Lewis is musical director, has an extensive three week curriculum with leading working jazzmen as instructors – Max Roach, Milt Jackson, Bill Evans, etc. Lewis had Ornette come, not so much because he felt Ornette needed instruction but so that Ornette might be heard and start building a steady career instead of scuffling for jobs as he has nearly all his life.

To recapitulate Ornette’s biography briefly (a fuller account is contained in the liner for Something Else!), he was born in Fort Worth, March 9, 1930. Almost entirely self-taught, he started on alto in 1944, switched to tenor two years later, and worked around Fort Worth until 1949. He journeyed with a carnival, a rhythm and blues band out of New Orleans, and another r&b unit out of Fort Worth that stranded him in Los Angeles in 1950. His California experience was grim – few music gigs and mostly day jobs. There were two more years in Fort Worth from 1952 to 1954. and then a return to Los Angeles where he ran an elevator for two and a half years. Very few musicians were civil, let alone encouraging to him. Red Mitchell was an exception and suggested that Ornette bring one of his originals to Lester Koenig, who decided to commission a Coleman album – the first interest anyone in the music business had ever shown in Ornette.

Despite a number of excellent reviews, and the enthusiasm of a small group of avant-garde listeners, not much happened after the release of Something Else! to raise Ornette‘s spirits or his income: in a little over a year he had only one six-week gig as a sideman (for almost no money). The three weeks at The School of Jazz brought him for the first time the enthusiastic encouragement of major jazz musicians. I remember watching Professors John Lewis and Max Roach beaming as their pupil dominated the student concert on the final night of the school. Lewis’ enthusiasm for Ornette’s music keeps rising. “I feel he’s an extension of Charlie Parker, but I mean a real extension. He doesn’t copy Parker’s licks or style. He‘s something more, deeper than that. I just hope he and Don Cherry have a long – and healthy – artistic life.“

Cherry also created a favourable impression at The School of Jazz, and added visual attention to himself with his “pocket” trumpet, which he uses on Side 1 of this album. It’s noticeably smaller than the usual horn, but is a B flat instrument. He explains “by its being short it enables you to hear yourself back.”

Don, who was on Ornette‘s first album too, was born in Oklahoma City. November 18. 1936. His parents ran the Cherry Blossom night club, and Don recalls staying up late listening to music even then. The family moved to Los Angeles when Don was four. He started piano three years later, and his mother bought him his first horn when he was twelve. In junior high school, Don heard Charlie Parker and Fats Navarro, “the only trumpet player I really cared to copy phrases from.” Around this time, Don first met Ornette at a music store in Watts – “he was trying a #4 1/2 reed (that‘s the thickest reed you can get). He had long hair and a beard; it was about 90 degrees and he had on an overcoat. l was scared of him.”

Don was married in 1955 and left school. James Clay, the tenor saxophonist from Texas, became a strong influence on Don’s musical development: “Up to the time I met him I‘d been concentrating on knowing everything I played and James Clay came along and played what he heard and really felt – and he could make you cry.” Don and James Clay had a group in 1957, and that same year, Ornette and Don co-led a unit which resulted in their present and continuing collaboration.

Shelly Manne, who with Red Mitchell and Percy Heath recorded with Ornette for the first time, feels this to have been one of the most exciting albums he’s ever made. “I‘ve always been bugged by having to stay within certain boundaries. Here is a guy that came along that was able to free me – from my having played with him – of all those things I wanted to throw off. Meter structure, for example. Sometimes Ornette ignores it. He makes you listen so hard to what he’s doing in order to know where he is in the tune and what he’s trying to express. It’s just a complete freedom from every way you might have been forced to play before.

“I don’t feel”, Shelly emphasized, “I‘m actually playing a song. I‘m really playing with a person. I’m playing his song Ornette does something with his own tunes that makes you not only hear the tunes but makes you hear them like eighteen hundred thousand different ways!”

All the songs in this set are Ornette‘s. He conceives of them and works them out first entirely in musical terms. The programmatic titles come later, but these titles do come out of Ornette’s ways of living and of playing music, which are inextricably bound together.

Tomorrow Is the Question, which Don Cherry aptly calls “a rejoicing type of tune” would seem to indicate that Ornette’s view of the future is sanguine. He points out that there are three leads – “two played by the alto as harmony and the third by the trumpet, except for harmony notes and the bridge. It’s written in G with a B flat minor bridge.”

Tears Inside brought the sensation to Ornette‘s mind of “wanting to cry, but the human emotion wouldn‘t release the tears.” D flat is its tonal center, and it’s played in a 12-bar blues form with altered changes. Don Cherry adds: “It‘s an old folk-type blues in the Jesse Fuller vein.”

Mind and Time, Ornette asserts. “is what music is”. It‘s a ten-bar tune. According to Don, “The whole ten bars is one pitch, which gives the soloist the freedom to establish new pitches, new forms and rhythms.”

Compassion, Ornette explains, “was written for a piano player who wanted to play, but he had the wrong idea. He seemed to think human emotion and mind were just a matter of environment. He’s wrong, and I had compassion for him.”

Giggin’, says Ornette, “is an extended 13-bar tune which has minor melodic lines and has harmony played in the last bar of the first chorus and the last bar of the second chorus. Each set of harmony notes is different.”

Rejoicing is thus titled “because the fellows like to play it – it makes them happy. It‘s written in C major for the first half with C minor for the second half.”

Lorraine, with its keening opening, was named after the late Lorraine Geller “because she was a wonderful piano player.” “Shelly’s solo“, Don notes, “is as musical as a drum solo can be.”

Turnaround is called that “because the blues is a change of feeling which goes from one thing to another. It‘s a 12-bar blues with a minor triad as a turnback.”

Endless has “the quality of an endless cadence.” It’s a melodic line that appears not to finish.

The technical maps aside, what counts is the irrepressible life and leaping assertiveness of Ornette’s originals and that quality of his playing that a non-musician friend described, as this record was being played: “He has that wild, everything-coming-from-the-inside excitement and freedom that Bird has but that none of his imitators do. It’s because he‘s himself, not Bird.”