Review of “Ornette Coleman: The Territory and the Adventure” by Maria Golia

Ornette Coleman: The Territory and the Adventure
By Maria Golia
London: Reaktion
ISBN: 978–1–78914–223–5
368 pp., $22.50 (hardback)

While ostentatious at times — another book could be written about his wardrobe — Ornette Coleman was a soft-spoken gentleman whose few pronouncements about music tended to be cryptic and vaporous, and comments about his personal life were almost nonexistent. “The other autobiography of my life is like everyone else’s. Born, work, sad and happy and etc.,” he wrote in the liner notes to This Is Our Music (Golia 263). He left few written records behind, including an unfinished book about his musical theory of “harmolodics.” There is a rich record of his life and times in his music, however, a body of work as lasting and influential as any in the twentieth century from any genre. As critic Geoff Dyer writes, Coleman’s group “didn’t just take the roof off the Five Spot, they took the roof off the idea of the roof and left jazz exposed to the elements” (272).

Maria Golia has not written a lengthy scholarly biography (a great deal is missing, not the least of which is a complete or even selected discography). This is not a walk-through of each key recording session. The thesis of the book is in the subtitle: Ornette Coleman: The Territory and the Adventure. The subject is, of course, the life of Coleman, beginning with his ancestors and ending with his funeral, but it is mostly about the historical and cultural contexts which set the horizons for Coleman’s achievement. Golia’s own achievement is to trace the path Coleman made from a rejected young local sax player to an icon of avant-garde art, a rocketing trajectory portrayed in the four chapter titles: “Coming Up,” “Ignition,” “Atmospherics,” and “Transmission.” Golia cites statements of Coleman’s pervasive influence from the Journal of Management Inquiry, therapists, a theoretical physicist, and of course all manner of musicians. (Cream was “secretly an Ornette Coleman band with Eric [Clapton] not knowing he was Ornette,” said Jack Bruce [264].)

Golia takes a chronological approach with several key subplots to Coleman’s story. In the “Coming Up” chapter, there are numerous profiles of Texas jazz, blues, and R&B musicians, from the famous (Blind Lemon Jefferson, T-Bone Walker, Lightnin’ Hopkins) to the obscure (Eddie Durham, James Clemons, Bobby Bradford) from the 1930s-1950s. Attention is rightly paid to Coleman’s Fort Worth high school, I.M. Terrell, which provided an astonishing group of avant-garde jazz talent, some of whom Coleman would collaborate with throughout his career: Prince Lasha, Charles Moffett, Dewey Redman, Ronald Shannon Jackson, John Carter, Julius Hemphill, Cornell Dupree, King Curtis, and Ray Sharpe. Golia wisely doesn’t force the issue of direct influence, instead setting the context for the music Coleman would (and would not) play. It’s a powerful reminder that Texas jazz went from Scott Joplin to Ornette Coleman in the space of two generations. Coleman’s ticket out of Fort Worth was playing ragtime and Dixieland, with one blues solo a night, in a traveling vaudeville tent show. Twenty years later he was recording audio orgasms with Yoko Ono.

Another recurring subplot is a clear-eyed history of Coleman’s hometown, Fort Worth. Golia does not overgeneralize and pretend that Fort Worth is a typical Texan (or American) city — she demonstrates how its unique life and culture both nurtures and destroys its roots. Golia makes a persuasive case that you cannot fully understand Coleman’s rebellious streak without understanding the pioneering spirit — and the pervasive racism — of Fort Worth. Later in the book, she offers a similarly persuasive case for the importance of New York’s dynamic and extraordinarily fragile loft scene on Coleman’s music and the emergence of free jazz overall. Much of the evolution of this still thriving music took place in Coleman’s living room.

It will probably come as a surprise to those quick to make assumptions about the arts scene in “cow town” Fort Worth that it was once home to one of the most progressive arts institutions in the United States, a site of explosive African American culture, and a Xanadu of avant-garde music. Hopefully this book will not be the only one written about the absolutely astonishing Caravan of Dreams, whose mission was to “apply the transformative balm of music to America’s rawhide heart” (287). It deserves a full-length treatment for the historical record, with photos and interviews from all angles. Golia, who worked there for a time, documents how the history of this jazz club, performance space, and arts collective (1983–2001) was interwoven with Coleman’s inspiration and key performances.

Many Texas towns and cities are run behind the scenes (or in front of them) by a handful of powerful families flush with oil and/or real estate money. In Fort Worth, it was the four Bass brothers. Three of them became billionaire businessmen and political figures in Fort Worth, but the black sheep of the family, Edward Perry Bass, discovered Coleman records and started a jazz club while still at prep school in Andover. After graduating from Yale like his brothers, he bypassed the family firm and hit the road selling Navaho carpets and jewelry. He met his type of people in Santa Fe: they called themselves the Synergists, lived in a geodesic dome, set up a theater troupe, and took eco-tours around the world. They had college degrees, no drugs were allowed, and later they ate dinner together every Sunday night in silence. Ed Bass became a committed environmentalist and used his fortune to build a sustainable timber plantation in Puerto Rico, a cultural center in Kathmandu, a cattle ranch in Australia, an ecological conference center in Aix-en-Provence, and an art gallery in London. His ecological masterwork, however, was the famous Biosphere 2 project in Arizona.

For his home town of Fort Worth, Bass stuck his finger in his brothers’ eyes and created a palace for Coleman. The Caravan of Dreams, complete with a glittering geodesic dome on the roof housing a cactus garden, was a combination opulent jazz club, experimental theater space, art exhibit hall, and housing unit for fellow Synergists in the heart of Fort Worth near his brothers’ office buildings. Coleman headlined the opening extravaganza in September 1983 and returned there triumphantly many times. It couldn’t last. Today it’s a cowboy-themed steakhouse.

Golia portrays Coleman as wry, iconoclastic, thoughtful, and sometimes as sour as his tart alto sax tone. He could be a loyal friend, a lonely innovator, and someone who has been both homeless and rich but always unhappy with his paycheck. What comes across most strongly, however, is his open-mindedness and willingness to embrace new musical contexts, from duets with bassist Charlie Haden to a full electric rock band to a symphony orchestra to transformative performances with the Master Musicians of Joujouka in Tangier. Golia writes with informed affection for Coleman the man, but even more powerfully, she writes of how Coleman’s drive and creativity was formed through his distinctive path through American cultural history. When Coleman says that harmolodics means “Harmony, melody, speed, rhythm, time and phrases all have equal position in the results that come from the placing and spacing of ideas” (241), you may not always be clear on how that manifests in his sometimes difficult music, but Golia shows us how a harmolodic imagination like his was, for a time, both possible and necessary.

(Originally published in Popular Music and Society, August 22, 2023)
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03007766.2023.2245318