Clarity

It's a bit disturbing that, in spite of my current existence as a pianist, I've recently gravitated so heavily toward combos with no piano. First it was the Dave Holland Quintet, who open up their sound by substituting Steve Nelson's marimba and vibes. He tends to play thinner chords than a pianist--which makes sense, because he's got what, four mallets probably, versus a pianist's ten fingers--and also just play less, and even when he does the timbre is so different, higher and again, thinner, so it doesn't seem to saturate the spectrum as much as a piano.

And now it's the Ornette Coleman quartet. I finally got one of his records because I heard the SF Jazz Collective version of "Una Muy Bonita" and thought to myself, well, I've got to hear the original of that. So I picked up Change of the Century, and holy shit that's a beautiful rhythm section! It's straight up ecstatic, in places, to hear Charlie Haden and Billy Higgins crackling around one another--the interplay is so complex but it always rings, and there's no comping instrument to muck it up. I suppose a rhythm section of a chording instrument plus one other could have a similar effect, but as a million people have said by now, the absence of comping also frees the soloists to really stretch out melodically, which results in some just damn gorgeous solos, with a terrific off-beat sense of phrasing.

I realize Coleman's records where very path-breaking for the time, but it's unfortunate that he still has such a spiky reputation. He obviously deserves to be known as an innovator, but I find this stuff extremely easy to dive into, and there's no excuse for it taking this long for me to hear it.

UPDATE: Exhaustive Wikipedia research has yielded the fact that trumpeter Don Cherry is the father of pop musician Eagle-Eye Cherry, and that this is evidently actually his real name. Charlie Haden's daughter Petra has been involved with both that dog. and The Decemberists. Also, Haden is from Iowa. How about that.