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Fifty Years Ago Today: Ornette Coleman's "Turnaround"

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Ornette Coleman was becoming well known in the Los Angeles jazz scene in the 1950's, supporting himself with menial jobs during the day and blowing bebop in the clubs at night. Deeply dissatisfied with following the pack, he began to play with others who felt the same way - , trumpeters Don Cherry and Bobby Bradford, drummers Ed Blackwell and Billy Higgins, and bassist Charlie Haden. His first album, The Music Of Ornette Coleman - Something Else!!!!, had Cherry and Coleman working with Modern Jazz Quartet bassist Percy Heath, an odd choice if there was one for the time. Don Payne was on bass, and Walter Norris was rushed into the studio to full a piano part at the record company's request.

The next year, Coleman entered studios in Los Angeles to record his follow-up, Tomorrow Is the Question! He had his buddy Cherry with him again, but Red Mitchell and nightclub owner and drummer Shelly Manne were in the rhythm section. It was 50 years ago today they cut a seminal track, “Turnaround".

Ethan Iverson wrote about the album in his blog Do the Math:
Tomorrow is a better record than Something Else by far, since without a piano, Ornette's concept immediately sounds less wrong. However, this rhythm section cannot follow Ornette either, and keeping the form behind Ornette doesn't really work. (It is just too symbolic when Manne and Mitchell get a bar off of each other on “Rejoicing"! I doubt if these professionals ever got lost playing “C" rhythm changes before or since.) Both blues are good examples of the Ornette/band conflict, especially since Don Cherry plays them so beautifully, hurrying back to hold our hand if we think he is lost. Unlike Cherry, Ornette is done with handholding. Ornette's solos have wonderful blues phrases and those magical leaps away into new keys, but the rigorous bassists don't support his digressions. The feeling gets very diffuse, resulting in an awkward ending of Ornette's solo on “Tears Inside." On “Turnaround" it's even worse, with a terrible edit as the head comes back in. (Manne's drumming is particularly wrong on “Turnaround.")

It wouldn't be long before Coleman broke free from the bonds of the jazz tradition. Finally getting the chance to work with Cherry, Higgins and Haden, he would record the wildly different and massively influential The Shape of Jazz to Come in May 1959, and Change of the Century in October 1959. Free Jazz, with the famous octet that was basically two quartets functioning separately, one for each stereo channel, would follow in December 1960. That group (groups?) may have been the greatest collection of eight musicians ever to improvise together at one time - Coleman, trumpeter Don Cherry, bassist Scott LaFaro, and drummer Billy Higgins on the left channel and trumpeter Freddie Hubbard, bass clarinetist Eric Dolphy, bassist Charlie Haden, and drummer Ed Blackwell on the right.

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