We collect cookies to analyze our website traffic and performance; we never collect any personal data. Cookie Policy
Accept
NEW YORK DAWN™NEW YORK DAWN™NEW YORK DAWN™
Notification Show More
Font ResizerAa
  • Home
  • Trending
  • New York
  • World
  • Politics
  • Business
    • Business
    • Economy
    • Real Estate
  • Crypto & NFTs
  • Tech
  • Lifestyle
    • Lifestyle
    • Food
    • Travel
    • Fashion
    • Art
  • Health
  • Sports
  • Entertainment
Reading: Composers Give New Shape to Ornette Coleman’s Jazz
Share
Font ResizerAa
NEW YORK DAWN™NEW YORK DAWN™
Search
  • Home
  • Trending
  • New York
  • World
  • Politics
  • Business
    • Business
    • Economy
    • Real Estate
  • Crypto & NFTs
  • Tech
  • Lifestyle
    • Lifestyle
    • Food
    • Travel
    • Fashion
    • Art
  • Health
  • Sports
  • Entertainment
Follow US
NEW YORK DAWN™ > Blog > Entertainment > Composers Give New Shape to Ornette Coleman’s Jazz
Composers Give New Shape to Ornette Coleman’s Jazz
Entertainment

Composers Give New Shape to Ornette Coleman’s Jazz

Last updated: April 27, 2022 5:37 pm
Editorial Board Published April 27, 2022
Share
SHARE
27longplay1 facebookJumbo

Bang on a Can had big plans for 2020.

Before the pandemic started, this classical music collective was busy planning its most ambitious festival yet in New York City: a three-day event called “Long Play,” with acts stretched across multiple venues in Brooklyn.

In moving beyond their storied, single-day marathons, Bang on a Can was signaling new ambitions, and was going toe-to-toe with other major avant-garde bashes like the Big Ears Festival in Tennessee.

Of course, those designs were plowed under. So Bang on a Can reacted nimbly and quickly by commissioning artists from those scuttled dates to write solo pieces that were premiered online. Those “pandemic solos,” as they have been called, became a tradition of their own. (Some of them showed up as programming last year at the collective’s summer festival.)

Still, there was a sense of something lost.

“We had this gigantic idea of how to expand the marathon into Long Play,” David Lang, the composer and Bang on a Can co-founder, told The New York Times in April 2020. “I’m sure we’ll do that again, should the world ever get back to normal.”

Now, it’s normal — enough — for another go at it. Long Play comes to New York City this weekend at seven venues in Downtown Brooklyn, from Friday afternoon through Sunday evening. There are familiar names on the lineup, but also ones that suggest Bang on a Can has its ears open to the work of younger artists. (Friday night’s sets by Jeff Tobias and the Dither guitar quartet offer some of that generational variety.)

The festival won’t be a retread of the 2020 program. “Mostly, this is new stuff,” Lang said in an interview. And a sparkling highlight comes at the close, on Sunday night: a thorough, multilayered reimagining of the saxophonist and composer Ornette Coleman’s 1959 album “The Shape of Jazz to Come.” The performance will feature a band led by Coleman’s son, Denardo, who held the drum chair in his father’s groups over several decades (including in “Haven’t Been Where I Left,” a piece the elder Coleman, who died in 2015, wrote and sometimes performed with the Bang on a Can All-Stars).

This weekend’s take on “Shape” will also include a 20-person ensemble, conducted by Awadagin Pratt and playing new arrangements of all six compositions from the album. These have been written by a dizzyingly varied roster of artists — including the vocalist and electronics virtuoso Pamela Z (who arranged “Lonely Woman”) and the orchestral and big band composer David Sanford (who took on the boppish “Chronology”).

“There are all these threads that go through the festival,” Lang said. “Threads of young composers, and threads of dead composers. And threads of modernist music and threads of free jazz.”

The idea is for audiences to be able to follow their own stylistic predilections. “But all of these threads lead to this piece, and to this concert,” Lang noted. “We designed some of the concerts to interfere with other concerts; nothing interferes with this concert.”

To prepare for this festival climax, Denardo Coleman has been rehearsing his own core group of players on a weekly basis. On a recent afternoon, in a modishly designed living and rehearsal space near Penn Station in Manhattan, he drilled the group, now called Ornette Expressions, through the album’s six tunes, twice.

Although the music comes from “Shape,” the musicians come from different generations. The guitarist James Blood Ulmer and the bassist Jamaaladeen Tacuma both played with Coleman’s father in the 1970s. In an interview after a rehearsal, Coleman said that the ensemble’s pianist, Jason Moran, hadn’t made his way to Ornette Coleman’s home until the early 2000s; he was already a leading light in the contemporary jazz scene, and quickly built a rapport with one of the great melodists of the field’s avant-garde.

Filling out the ensemble are two up-and-coming musicians: the saxophonist Lee Odom and the trumpeter Wallace Roney Jr. The first time they all played one of the compositions, “Peace,” they hewed somewhat closely to the original, an emotionally complex work that manages to be at once mournful and finger-snapping.

After a break — and after Moran had to leave — the tune took a turn, with Roney plugging his trumpet into a wah-wah pedal. This time, his electric trumpet lines wove around Odom’s acoustic, prayerful alto sax playing: even more searching and heated.

“We’re doing our arrangement right now,” Denardo Coleman said after the take was over, though he added that “it may not be that way” at the concert on Sunday. It’s likely to turn out different because the day of that rehearsal, he had only just received the finished arrangement. And much of the balance between his group and the sinfonietta was yet to be hashed out.

In a phone interview, Z said “everybody was asked to write for this sinfonietta.” There was “a little side note,” she added, saying to “also please leave space for Denardo’s ensemble to jump in, here and there.”

When arranging “Lonely Woman” — perhaps Ornette Coleman’s most famous melody — she brought the work in line with her own electronic music. “I played with the music the same way that I play with sampled sound. I really stretched it out, and I compressed it.”

Still, her contribution is entirely acoustic — unlike many of her solo sets. “It starts out with really high harmonics on the strings and bowed vibes,” Z said. “And the first time you hear the melody, it’s played a quarter of the speed that it’s supposed to go, being played on a tuba. So I just had a lot of fun, playing with time in it.”

That’s exactly what Denardo Coleman was hoping for. “The way my father would have approached it would have been that everybody had equal participation,” he said. “Meaning he wasn’t just the leader and everybody was there to make him sound good. If you had an idea, you could take it.”

Hence, Coleman said, each arranger’s freedom in working with the original tunes.

“It wasn’t as if we said ‘OK, just orchestrate the song the way it is,’” he said. “They may reconstruct, deconstruct, turn it inside out, something else. The tune — the composition — is just a starting point. That just leads you into some other territory. And that other territory is what it’s really about.”

You Might Also Like

Evaluation: Stephen King’s ‘The Institute’ units gifted youngsters in opposition to nefarious adults

Evaluate: On the Huntington, the New Hollywood String Quartet remembers legendary studio musicians

That is the uncommon vibrant spot in a troublesome Hollywood job market

A brand new artwork present brings L.A. local weather inequities to life at Descanso Gardens

Justin Bieber’s ‘Standing on Business’: The largest takeaways from ‘Swag’

TAGGED:Bang on a CanClassical MusicColeman, Denardo (1956- )Coleman, OrnetteJazzLang, DavidLong PlayMoran, Jason (1975- )Roney, WallaceThe Shape of Jazz to Come (Album)The Washington MailZ, Pamela
Share This Article
Facebook Twitter Email Print

Follow US

Find US on Social Medias
FacebookLike
TwitterFollow
YoutubeSubscribe
TelegramFollow
Popular News
Ethics panel to fulfill on Gaetz report amid Trump’s AG decide blowback
Politics

Ethics panel to fulfill on Gaetz report amid Trump’s AG decide blowback

Editorial Board November 18, 2024
Ethyl lactate recognized as potential therapeutic for alcohol-associated liver illness
Elda Leisure will publish Overseer Video games’ Kaiserpunk on March 21
Perioperative chemo with sure chemotherapy medication ups survival in resectable esophageal most cancers
Harnessing digital expertise to reinforce the way forward for pediatric nursing

You Might Also Like

Actor who sued Tyler Perry for sexual harassment says he ‘could not keep silent anymore’
Entertainment

Actor who sued Tyler Perry for sexual harassment says he ‘could not keep silent anymore’

July 11, 2025
How Sound and Fury Competition continues to thrive on the bleeding fringe of hardcore’s evolution
Entertainment

How Sound and Fury Competition continues to thrive on the bleeding fringe of hardcore’s evolution

July 11, 2025
Superman vs. ‘Superman’? Dean Cain cries ‘woke’ after James Gunn calls hero an immigrant
Entertainment

Superman vs. ‘Superman’? Dean Cain cries ‘woke’ after James Gunn calls hero an immigrant

July 11, 2025
Evaluate: ‘The Aviator and the Showman’ untangles Amelia Earhart’s fateful marriage — and thrill-seeking ambition
Entertainment

Evaluate: ‘The Aviator and the Showman’ untangles Amelia Earhart’s fateful marriage — and thrill-seeking ambition

July 11, 2025

Categories

  • Health
  • Sports
  • Politics
  • Entertainment
  • Technology
  • World
  • Art

About US

New York Dawn is a proud and integral publication of the Enspirers News Group, embodying the values of journalistic integrity and excellence.
Company
  • About Us
  • Newsroom Policies & Standards
  • Diversity & Inclusion
  • Careers
  • Media & Community Relations
  • Accessibility Statement
Contact Us
  • Contact Us
  • Contact Customer Care
  • Advertise
  • Licensing & Syndication
  • Request a Correction
  • Contact the Newsroom
  • Send a News Tip
  • Report a Vulnerability
Term of Use
  • Digital Products Terms of Sale
  • Terms of Service
  • Privacy Policy
  • Cookie Settings
  • Submissions & Discussion Policy
  • RSS Terms of Service
  • Ad Choices
© 2024 New York Dawn. All Rights Reserved.
Welcome Back!

Sign in to your account

Lost your password?