BLP 4225

Ornette Coleman - At The Golden Circle Stockholm - Volume 2

Released - 1966

Recording and Session Information

"Gyllene Cirkeln", Stockholm, Sweden, December 3, 1965
Ornette Coleman, alto sax, trumpet, violin; David Izenzon, bass; Charles Moffett, drums, glockenspiel; Frank Wolff, producer.

1691 tk.4 Antiques
1692 tk.8 Morning Song

"Gyllene Cirkeln", Stockholm, Sweden, evening set, December 4, 1965
Ornette Coleman, alto sax, trumpet, violin; David Izenzon, bass; Charles Moffett, drums, glockenspiel; Frank Wolff, producer.

1695 tk.25 The Riddle
1697 tk.28 Snowflakes And Sunshine

Track Listing

Side One
Title	Author	Recording Date
Snowflakes and Sunshine	Ornette Coleman	December 4 1965
Morning Song	Ornette Coleman	December 3 1965
Side Two
The Riddle	Ornette Coleman	December 4 1965
Antiques	Ornette Coleman	December 3 1965

Liner Notes

Ornette Coleman’s trio, now and for the next two weeks at the Gyllene Cirkeln, is one of the great cultural events in Stockholm this fall. Rarely can such strong words be used about a jazz event, but perhaps they have never been as justified. It is beyond discussion that Ornette Coleman plays a central role in the new jazz. He belongs in the some class as John Coltrane, Elvin Jones, Eric Dolphy, Cecil Taylor, Don Cherry and perhaps a few more of the great innovators, but it is he who has become the symbol of the new jazz and he has given it a striking profile.

His music is very universal, not just because he is more than a jazz musician who improvises in a new way, as compared with earlier jazz musicians, or who ploys without piano accompaniment, or who plays the saxophone, trumpet and violin in an unusual manner. Ornette Coleman is important simply because he creates good music. To be able to create this — in this case good jazz music — it is necessary to ploy differently compared with pre-1965 as well as 1959, when Ornette Coleman appeared on the scene. The old musical language has become “worn” or “spent.” The bebop style is as impossible today as the spoken drama or tachism or the realistic novel.

But Ornette Coleman’s greatness is of course due to his perceiving this, starting a new style and influencing a lot of musicians positively and thus carrying jazz forward. But for him this renewal has absolutely not been a goal or an end in itself, only a condition to enable him to express himself fully and to create good music.

If we refrain from thinking of his technical and stylistic importance and simply listen when sitting at the Gyllene Cirkeln, it may become easier for us to understand why his music is universal and why it reaches beyond jazz. Ornette Coleman succeeds in expressing a vision or delivering a message with authority and a personal punch. This is perhaps an approximation of what is meant when referring to artistic greatness.

His emotional range is fairly limited and if it were not for the variety of his music, we would certainly consider it tedious. The content of his music is mostly pure beauty, a glittering, captivating, dizzying, sensual beauty. A couple of years ago nobody thought so, and everyone considered his music grotesque, filled with anguish and chaos.

Now it is almost incomprehensible that one could have held such on opinion, as incomprehensible as the fact that one could object to Willem de Kooning’s portraits of women or Samuel Beckett’s absurd plays. Thus Ornette Coleman has been able to change our entire concept of what is beautiful merely through the power of his personal vision. It is most beautiful when Coleman’s bass player, David Izenzon, plays string bass together with him. Then, it is almost hauntingly beautiful. To many, Izenzon will certainly be the great experience during this guest appearance and this is understandable. We know Coleman so well from numerous records even if the impression is strongly changed through hearing him personally. But Izenzon has the freshness of the newly discovered.

How come David Izenzon’s name has not been mentioned more often during all these years? Suddenly at the Cirkeln we discover something we always suspected was true — namely that Scott LoFaro and all the other great virtuosi were just virtuosi. lzenzon is a real innovator.

He is largely that, just by using the "old" technique and by playing string bass. A contrabass is undoubtedly built just for this purpose and the greatest possibilities lie there. The third man in the group stands somewhat in the shadow of the two greats. His name is Charles Moffett, who plays the drums and is probably the only one in today’s jazz world who could fit into Ornette Coleman’s trio.

Ornette Coleman’s trio at the Gyllene Cirkeln — it should be repeated — is a great cultural event. Everybody in Sweden’s music world, from pop musicians to serious composers, should hurry to the jazz club during the two weeks of this visit. Next Sunday, everything reverts bock to normal for jazz in Sweden.

—Ludvig Rasmusson

RVG CD Reissue Liner Notes

ORNETTE COLEMAN AT THE GOLDEN CIRCLE, VOLUME TWO

Omette Coleman played alto saxophone and Charles Moffett played trumpet when they first met as mates in the l.M. Terrell High School band in Fort Worth, Texas, in the mid-1940s. Before long Moffett became a drummer and played with Coleman and other teens in a local jump band. After Moffett’s U.S. Navy service (during which he became welterweight boxing champion of the Pacific Fleet), the two of them spent the summer of 1950 playing rhythm-and-blues in a band at a club in Amarillo. Coleman was best man at Moffett’s wedding in 1953. Directing a high school band in Fort Worth was so rewarding that when Ornette offered him a job in 1960, Moffett initially refused. The next year, though, he moved to New York City and joined the Ornette Coleman Quartet (with trumpeter Bobby Bradford and bassist Jimmy Garrison) that played two months at the Five Spot nightclub. David Izenzon, by contrast, did not begin playing bass until he was 23 years old. Originally a classical musician in symphonic and chamber ensembles, he also played bop with groups in his hometown, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, before moving to New York in 1961. He sat in with the quartet at the Five Spot, but by the time he replaced Garrison, Ornette had begun turning down offers that didn’t meet his new, higher price. As a result the new quartet seldom worked; then Bradford’s move to California made the group a trio. At the end of 1962, when Ornette rented New York’s Town Hall to present a concert, Moffett and Izenzon put up posters around the city and the bassist composed “Taurus,” a solo bass work, for the event. During the next two years, while Coleman retired from performing, Moffett taught in New York City schools while Izenzon played in classical ensembles and recorded with Archie Shepp, Bill Dixon and Sonny Rollins, among others.

Busy at last in 1965, the trio proved the most liberated jazz group that Coleman ever led, at a time when Albert Ayler and others were also having daring adventures on the music’s frontiers. Throughout this CD the rhythm section maintains high tension. A brilliant technician, Moffett accompanies Ornette’s solos with commentary that grows into interplay and then develops into patterns like swinging parade drums; in the faster tracks he changes textures many times, and as the most conservative of the three, he often naturally moves to 4/4 meter; hear, too, his sensitive colors as he accompanies the ballad “Morning Song.“ Izenzon was an innovator. He spontaneously moves from pizzicato to arco; he bows in double stops and microtones, accompanies with contrary rhythms or counter-melodies without pulse; when he changes tempo, which is often, he doesn’t halve or double the time — his alternate tempos are independent. He played unusually softly, and his devotion to a true bass sound precluded using an amplification attachment. For all the times Izenzon and Moffett join to alter rhythm and textures behind Coleman, this is not a trio in conflict. Rather, high skill and sensitivity — the harmolodic theory in action — make the music work; Izenzon’s departures, especially, develop from motives in Ornette’s solos, for he is a wonderfully close and imaginative listener. His solos are unbroken arco melodies, singular among jazz bass solos for their unity of form and heartfelt feeling. In “Morning Song” his solos are theme developments that in themselves are firmly shaped compositions, topped off, in the master take, with a perfect Moffett touch: over the bass. he plays the melody on orchestra bells. The most adventurous — dangerous? — trio performance is “Snowflakes And Sunshine,” a fast piece with five violin solos alternating with four trumpet solos, each solo separated by interludes of bass and drums. Much of Ornette’s frantic violin playing sounds impulsive, without the intervention — distortion? — of will. On the other hand, the trumpet solos develop motives like his alto solos, and like his alto soloing, the need to breathe in part determines the length of his phrases. His technique on both trumpet and violin is unique, self-taught, and the notes he plays have no relation to standard tuning at all. The third little trumpet solo is especially fine, while by the fourth violin solo he’s attempting motive-based lines on this instrument, too. Is this primitive music? Critic Max Harrison called Coleman’s violin playing “an indeterminacy as drastic as John Cage’s” — true? The two-string textures are wonderful. Contrast the rawness of the violin sound with the dark. woody sound of Izenzon’s bass. By the third violin solo Izenzon, too, is bowing wildly, and throughout the piece the bassist and drummer’s spontaneity reflects their leader’s.

Coleman plays alto on the other pieces. In the ballad “Morning Song” his slowed-down phrases provide an especially good introduction to his concept of tonality, how he moves from key to key and creates fulfilling lines without cadential resolutions; hear the theme-derived unity of his solo in the master take. Izenzon and then Moffett oppose Ornette’s solo lines with dancing rhythms in the master take of “Antiques,” and I especially like the alto melodies in the alternate take. Coleman in both very fast versions of “The Riddle” contrasts with the unalloyed optimism of his fast solos in Volume One. Now there’s a fire about his playing that’s exacerbated by the bass-drums flux and that sometimes even erupts into fierce sheets of sound, though high spirits is still the prevailing mood. Hear Izenzon’s witty solos, too — again, both are theme-derived and end in satiric drooping phrases.

After the Ornette Coleman Trio’s triumph at the Golden Circle, their tour of Europe continued until May, 1966, ending with a concert in Croydon, England, where it all began nine months before. Moffett went on to play trumpet and vibes, as well as drums, in Coleman’s groups for another year; three decades later, his bassist son Charnett Moffett also worked with Coleman. Izenzon stayed with Ornette until 1968 and returned to play occasional gigs with him in the 1970s. Especially in these recordings, the ensemble feeling between these three special musicians is an especially rare phenomenon in jazz. These two Blue Note CDs of two nights at the Golden Circle are the most extensive documents of an extraordinary trio, as well as some of the finest performances by a great jazz artist.

— John Litweiler, author of Ornette Coleman: A Harmolodic Life (Da Capo Books)