A Great Day -Outside – Harlem

Of course while the Great Day in Harlem photo captures a number of jazz greats on that day many, many more were not pictured. Some were serving time for drug convictions; some were playing in Europe, some didn’t get or failed to respond to Art Kane’s call. Most were on the road at a time when every major American city boasted a distinctive jazz scene.

And the decade following 1958, when the picture was taken constitutes probably the most intensive and creative period in the history of modern jazz- certainly in the U.S. The lingua franca of bebop laid down by the early bebop masters in the late 40’s- Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell, Monk, Max Roach and Kenny Clarke -had been studied and integrated into the jazz styles that followed. The music was now poised to be taken into many new directions

I want to focus on two very different jazz legends who were not present on that Harlem stoop on that day; Miles Davis and Ornette Coleman.

Miles Davis: Leading up to Kind of Blue

In 1958 Miles Davis’s first great quintet comprising Miles, Coltrane, Red Garland, Philly Joe Jones, and Paul Chambers, was reaching the apex of its creative life. But Miles was growing tired of reinventing show tunes and bebop classics. He had recently signed for Columbia, and while he was fulfilling his contractual commitments with the Prestige label with a string of outstanding albums all recorded in a matter of weeks in 1956, his thoughts were turning towards looser, more impressionistic and modal approaches. 

The ground was being prepared for the seminal recording, Kind of Blue in 1959. Miles arrived at the studio with some new concepts to share and the refreshed sextet now including Cannonball Adderley on alto sax, Jimmy Cobb on drums and crucially (& briefly) Bill Evans on piano went on to make jazz history. It is worth mentioning that the recording was achieved in less than half a day with very little in the way of preparation or rehearsal. The tunes were sparse with very few underlying chord changes. Miles was setting a new mood and trusted his musicians to interpret that mood in their own ways. The stellar music laid down in Kind of Blue continues to fascinate and resonate to this day.

One of the best descriptions I can find of Kind of Blue is in Richard Williams’s brilliant book The Blue Moment (2009)

“It is the most singular of sounds, yet among the most ubiquitous. It is the sound of isolation that has sold itself to millions…

Before Kind of Blue there had been slow jazz, mournful jazz, romantic jazz astringent jazz. But there had never been anything that so carefully and single-mindedly cultivated an atmosphere of reflection & introspection to such a degree that the mood itself became an art object…

The musicians seem to have been spellbound. No wonder its forty odd minutes of music were made in barely nine hours, and that it was never repeated.”

Ornette Coleman at the Five Spot 

The Five Spot Café in east Broadway during the period it was run by the Termini brothers quickly attained legendary status within the jazz world. Thelonious Monk headlined a six–month residency with John Coltrane in 1957. “It was a long, narrow room with a bar on one side, tables down the middle and a slightly elevated stage at the far end opposite a WC that reportedly emitted eye-watering fumes. When full the Five Spot held around 75 people.”  The club was happy to offer long running bookings to bands who were breaking boundaries in the music, including Mingus, and the avant-garde pianist Cecil Taylor. Ornette Coleman with Billy Higgins on drums, Don Cherry on cornet and Charlie Haden on bass took the place by storm.

Record producer John Snyder recalled many nights catching Ornette’s quartet at the Five Spot.

“A fairly wild looking crowd of jazz aficionados. Long haired painters in mottled dungarees. Village girls in leotards, men in sweaters and leather jackets. Dark glasses. Sailors, cadets and the Madison Avenue crowd.” 

Here are some recollections and real time responses to Ornette Coleman’s legendary lengthy residency at the Five Spot in New York running from late 1959 to early 1960 all taken from Maria Golia’s insightful new biography, Ornette Coleman (2020)

“He’ll change the entire course of jazz” “He’s a fake” “He’s a genius” “I can’t say, I’ll have to hear him a lot more times”. “He has no form”. “He swings like HELL”. “I’m going home to listen to my Benny Goodman trios and quartets”.  “He’s out Real Far Out”. “I like him, but I don’t have any idea what he is doing”  

“Roy Eldridge said ‘I think he’s jiving baby’ Miles Davis sat in with Ornette commending him ‘because he doesn’t play cliché’s’, but he soon revised his opinion. ‘The man is all screwed up inside’. Max Roach reportedly followed Ornette home one night and challenged him to a fight. Charles Mingus harassed him onstage. Mingus subsequently revised his views, ‘You can’t put your finger on what he’s doing. It’s like organized disorganization or playing wrong right’.

“When John Coltrane heard Ornette at the Five Spot, he said ‘Well that must be the answer’ and the two would become fast friends, with Coltrane purloining three quarters of Ornette’s band for his album The Avant-Garde.

The great contemporary alto saxophonist Jackie McLean observed, ‘You spend your life making a three-piece suit that’s incredible, and this guy comes along with a jump suit and people find that it’s easier to step into a jump suit than to put on three pieces’.  Jackie McLean went on to record a classic Blue Note album, Old and New Dreams with Ornette.

Tellingly, Ornette himself declared ‘when you hear me you probably hear everything I’ve heard since I was a kid’.

When I listen to Ornette I hear his formation in Texas blues, the Texas church and show bands. The rich musical and cultural gumbo in which he was formed in Fort Worth. I’m with the contemporary critic Robert Palmer who declared that,

‘Ornette’s compositions and performances looked ahead to explorations rather than pre-determined patterns and looked back through the jazz tradition with its collective improvisations, and its personal, speech-like approach to intonation and phrasing.’

Ornette Coleman’s arrival in New York in 1959 and his recorded output for Atlantic records at that time had a monumental and divisive effect on the jazz world and wider impacts in the New York art and contemporary music scenes. Sixty years on without having to listen to Ornette’s music through the prism of the unprecedented sound and fury that his arrival provoked, I think it is possible to hear a composer and instrumentalist drenched in the roots of the blues and while at the same time searching for new ways to present the deeply etched play book of the blues. It also easier to hear now what a brilliant composer Ornette Coleman was in that period, how accessible most of these compositions were at that time. 

The accompanying playlist takes you into the sound world of Miles and Ornette almost precisely to coincide with the Great Day in Harlem photoshoot.  I also offer three bonus tracks from other great artists not present on that day -Bud Powell, Betty Carter, and John Coltrane- all recorded on or close to the magical year of 1958.