There have now been a number of attempts (see for instance Jost Reference Jost1994; Litweiler Reference Litweiler1992; Mandel Reference Mandel2008; and Wilson Reference Wilson1999) to account for the music and ideas of American composer and musician, Ornette Coleman, whose albums from the late 1950s and after constituted a decisive break with an approach that sought to orient melodic improvisation with respect to temporal-harmonic coordinates. Some of these texts have attempted to deal with the question of ‘harmolodics’, the word Ornette created to name his approach, and Stephen Rush's Free Jazz, Harmolodics and Ornette Coleman is the latest in this sequence, written with the explicit goal of explaining this sometimes difficult work, and the notion of harmolodics in particular.
Rush presents a text in three parts – the first an introduction to ‘harmolodics’, the second the transcription of an extended interview the author conducted with Ornette in 2011 and the third the analysis of compositions and solos the author takes to be ‘harmolodic’. Rush's account puts the accent on the question of equality, insofar as it is possible to discern parallels between the equality that pertains to relations in Ornette's groups and the struggle for the recognition of equality by the movement for civil rights in the country of Ornette's birth. Harmolodics, says Rush, ‘reflects the major cultural shift that was the Civil Rights Movement in the United States. Once again, the move towards the liberation of the voice in the jazz ensemble parallels the demand for equality by black Americans’ (p. 25).
Rush links his thesis to the particular musical problems Ornette was attempting to navigate at the beginning of his career, in particular the hold harmony had on jazz at the end of the 1950s, with the dominance of an approach that constrained improvisation to ‘playing the changes’. In its place, says Rush, harmolodics proposed improvising ‘over the ethos of the composition’, offering new possibilities of melodic transposition, fragmentation and extension, as well as the possibility of, for instance, changing the groove, breaking away from the constraints of 4/4 time, or changing the tempo (p. 8).
Related to this liberation from the ‘changes’, Rush stresses the priority Ornette has given to melody; melody is the ‘source of the music’, Ornette once told the author, suggesting, says Rush, an approach that is ‘top down’, rather than ‘bottom up’, with melody generating all harmony, groove and intervallic content (p. 12). In an analysis of ‘Peace Warriors’, for instance, Rush notes a structure constituted from eight transpositions of the opening phrase, an operation that, he says, proceeds ‘with absolutely no respect for the traditional hierarchy of tonality’, freed from the dominance of ‘playing with the changes’ (pp. 15–16). In addition, Rush recognises the particular significance transposition has in Ornette's music, linking it to the phenomena of transposing instruments (p. 10).
In an attempt to explain harmolodics, Rush is also prepared to offer a determinate list of ‘basic strategies’ for solo improvisation that could, he suggests, be codified as harmolodic approaches. These include the use of range to organise the structure of the improvisation, references to keys heard in the composition, the manipulation of phrase lengths and a balance between inside and outside, amongst others (pp. 8–9). In addition, Rush offers explanations of some important terms particular to Ornette's discourse, such as ‘unison’, which he defines in relation to transposing instruments, as well as ‘playing in unison of heart and unison of intention’ (p. 21).
Perhaps the most significant section of Rush's text is the lengthy interview he conducted with Ornette in 2011, covering well over 100 pages, and included in this text as the second section. Whilst Rush seeks support in this interview for his thesis regarding the historical and political parallels to the development of harmolodics, the field of problems he and Ornette discuss is, in fact, vast, touching on not just race and equality, but also tonality, intelligence, representation, sex, money, women, sound, humanity, violence, and so on.
In this regard, one potential criticism of Rush's text is that, whilst the issues of race and equality may be crucial to Ornette's work, the field of problems touched on in this interview cannot be thought solely in terms of the political-historical articulation that Rush seeks to give it, and instead may require a longer elaboration giving attention to each of these problems in their specificity, as well as to the complex ways they are related. In practice, however, Rush is a more agile and open interlocutor than a strict insistence on his central thesis would allow, and it is in part for this reason that the interview generates so much material of interest for someone with a serious engagement with Ornette's music and ideas.
In the final section of his text, Rush uses tools from some traditional analytical approaches to analyse aspects of Ornette's compositions and solos he takes to be harmolodic, aspects such as motivic development, transposition and the establishment of multiple tonal centres. Much of this analysis has the virtue of detailed engagement, with attention to the moment-to-moment interaction that constitutes the fabric of an improvised texture. It is worth noting, however, that, in his illustration of the harmolodic approach, Rush includes analyses of solos by not only Ornette himself, but also by significant collaborators such as Branford Marsalis, Paul Bley, Pat Metheny and Keith Jarrett. This choice is not necessarily problematic, particularly if the link between harmolodics and the practice of these musicians is already established, but it is unclear why their improvisations are to be preferred over the improvisations of Ornette himself, particularly as a study of Ornette's own solos may reveal aspects of his musical thought yet to be discovered or given proper articulation.
With these criticisms to one side, however, what comes through on almost every page of Rush's text is a passionate and sustained engagement with Ornette's work, and it thus joins a fraternity of thought and writing for which Ornette's thought and ideas represent a breakthrough, opening new possibilities for what music might be. Rush's text is a valuable contribution to this ongoing research.
