Old & New Dreams

Music from the Ornette Coleman Extended Universe...

Old and New Dreams (L-R): Charlie Haden, Don Cherry, Ed Blackwell, Dewey Redman

Book news! Jazz drummer and student of the music Vinnie Sperrazza has a deep and thoughtful (and positive!) review of In The Brewing Luminous: The Life & Music of Cecil Taylor in his newsletter, Chronicles, to which you should absolutely subscribe.

Several excellent reviews have been published so far: here’s one by former Wire editor Derek Walmsley, and here’s another by UK jazz journalist Richard Williams (whose own history with Cecil goes back to the 1960s).

The book is available from Amazon and direct from the publisher. I have no more copies to sell myself, unfortunately.

Main site news! Over at BurningAmbulance.com, Todd Manning has a review of two new albums by cellist/pianist Janel Leppin and guitarist Anthony Pirog. Read it, won’t you?

The other day, I was listening to Ornette Coleman’s first two albums, Something Else!!!! and Tomorrow is the Question!, and was struck for about the thousandth time since I first heard his music in the early 1990s by the realization that his compositional language is one of the most instantly recognizable in jazz. You can tell an Ornette Coleman piece in about two seconds. And when someone else is consciously employing that language, like John Zorn did with the Masada quartet, or interpreting those pieces, as Tim Berne, Chris Speed, Reid Anderson and Dave King did with the band Broken Shadows, it’s just as recognizable. But Ornette-ism is more than just a way of phrasing, or a rhythm — it’s an ethos. And lately I’ve been diving deep into one of the foremost exponents of that ethos: the Don Cherry/Dewey Redman/Charlie Haden/Ed Blackwell quartet Old and New Dreams, who released four albums between 1977 and 1987.

All four men were members of Coleman’s band. Cherry had been playing with him since at least 1958; Haden joined the following year; and Blackwell replaced Billy Higgins behind the drum kit in 1960. Dewey Redman came later, first appearing at the 1968 sessions that yielded New York Is Now! and Love Call, and sticking around until the early ’70s. They all played together for the first time at the September 1971 session that yielded portions of the Science Fiction and Broken Shadows albums; an embryonic Old and New Dreams, backing the boss, can be heard on “Science Fiction”, “Happy House”, “Elizabeth”, and “Broken Shadows”.

In the mid ’70s, though, Ornette Coleman changed musical directions. Shedding all his former bandmates, he formed the electric funk unit Prime Time and made the albums Dancing in Your Head, Body Meta, and Of Human Feelings. Left to fend for themselves, Cherry, Redman, Haden and Blackwell formed Old and New Dreams, recording the first of two self-titled albums at New York’s Generation Sound Studios in October 1976. It was released the following year on the Italian label Black Saint.

The record featured two tunes each by Cherry and Redman, and one by Haden, and opened with a previously unrecorded Coleman composition, “Handwoven”.

In a February 1980 appearance at Harvard by all the members of the group save Blackwell, Charlie Haden said, “I learned more about listening playing with Ornette than any other person, because…to play music with him you have to listen to every note he plays, and that’s…we were all raised in that language, Don and Dewey and I and Edward Blackwell and Billy Higgins. We played together for many years with Ornette, and we’re very close to that way of playing. It’s very important for us to be able to be free in our way of improvising. The other part of the concept is the human part of it, which is very close to the sound of the earth or the sound of the human voice, or the sound of whatever it is that music is…whatever it is that life is.”

Haden gets a lot of room to run around on “Handwoven”; it opens with solo bass, and he takes a solo in the piece’s second half as well. The leaping, capering interplay between the horns marks it instantly as a Coleman composition, and Blackwell’s drumming is polyrhythmic but also aggressively swinging and melodic/communicative in an almost African way. The drums are talking all the way through.

The album ends with its title piece, on which Redman plays the musette, a high-pitched, nasal oboe, as Blackwell strikes gongs portentously, Haden bows his bass, and Cherry goes into the trumpet’s upper register. It all has a ceremonial feel that in its final two minutes becomes unexpectedly martial thanks to Blackwell’s shift to parade-ground drumming.

Two years later, the quartet were back in the studio, this time in Oslo, Norway, with producer Manfred Eicher behind the board. Their second album, also self-titled, would be released on his ECM label. It, too, began with an Ornette Coleman composition, this time his classic “Lonely Woman”; the group also premiered another of his pieces, “Open or Close”. Each member contributed one original tune. Although the version of “Lonely Woman” was absolutely glorious, they seemed to be trying to distance themselves from that sound on many of the other pieces. Blackwell’s “Togo”, a fantastically complex rhythmic exercise with occasional horn punctuation and some chanting reminiscent of Cecil Taylor’s poetry, was particularly fascinating and really helped give the group its own voice. On “Orbit of La-Ba”, Redman overdubbed two keening musette lines as the group played an endlessly cycling, North African groove.

The third Old and New Dreams album, Playing, was recorded live in Austria in June 1980 and released in 1981. It included versions of three Ornette Coleman compositions: “Happy House”, “New Dream”, and “Broken Shadows”, as well as new pieces by Cherry, Redman, and Haden. This feints toward being the most conventional of the group’s four releases; Redman’s solo on the opening “Happy House” sounds like Sonny Rollins (who had a quartet with Cherry, bassist Henry Grimes, and Billy Higgins in 1962). But there’s more exploration to come. “Mopti”, on which Cherry sings and plays piano, has an almost South African groove, and the closing title track is a free jazz dance with a pulse that reminds me of the improvising quartet Other Dimensions In Music (Roy Campbell on trumpet, Daniel Carter on saxes, William Parker on bass, Charles Downs aka Rashid Bakr on drums).

The final Old and New Dreams release, A Tribute to Blackwell, was recorded live in 1987 at the Ed Blackwell Festival in Atlanta, Georgia, but it wasn’t released until 1990, on Black Saint. I don’t know how active the group was between 1980 and 1987. I know they played New York in 1982, because they were profiled for the New York Times. Haden said then, “We’re trying to play this music for as many people as we can, people all over the world. We’ve been lucky enough to connect with our own individual creativity, and it’s up to people like us to communicate this to other people, so they can connect with theirs. The people we play for are as much a part of what we’re doing as we are.”

A Tribute to Blackwell is a solid live set; they play “Happy House”, “Togo” and “Dewey’s Tune” (both from the debut) again, as well as Coleman’s “Law Years” and “Street Woman” from the 1971 sessions that initially brought them all together. But it’s not much more than that. Each of their first three releases was the work of a group whose members had collective history but were spending the artistic capital they’d earned on something new and adventurous. The performances on A Tribute to Blackwell are much more immediately crowd-pleasing, or, to borrow a term from superhero film discourse, they’re fan-service. This is Old and New Dreams as an Ornette Coleman cover band, which is exactly what people likely expected from them at the beginning, and also what they worked so hard to subvert.

All these albums are relatively easy to come by, and can be found on streaming services. The first three in particular are much more than a curiosity for Ornette Coleman fans. This really was a band that strove to be and do its own thing. Dive in; you won’t be sorry.

That’s it for now. See you next week!