Musical_Guru's Full Review: The Music of Ornette Coleman: Something Else!!! by...
Thom Jurek--the worst writer at the wonderful All-Music Guide--says that Something Else "shook up the jazz world" when it was released in 1958. It's completely untrue. After all, this was a no-name leader with no-name sidemen, recording for a tiny label (Contemporary Records) and playing slightly-off-kilter bebop in Los Angeles, a city best known for its ultra-mainstream "cool" jazz. Something Else might have shaken up the world of the fourteen people who heard it in 1958.
But it's hard to imagine this record shaking up anybody, in 1958 OR 2005. Because Something Else, despite a real college try to skew it out of the pattern, is a basic bop record. The "freedom" that Coleman and trumpeter Don Cherry (the only ones here who really did anything remotely avant-garde) is little more than coloring slightly outside the lines. If you're a fan of the West Coast bop scene of the period, you'll probably find a lot to like here. If you like Coleman's later, more characteristic work, this record may be pleasant enough, but it's a letdown.
Cherry, who would one day be the more abrasive of the two--and the most surprising in his solos--is here pretty much what every other trumpeter in '58 was: a Clifford Brown disciple. He takes some liberties with the harmony, yes; but it never lasts long. Ornette is clearly the adventurer here...but not by much. Even when he's venturing way, waaaaaaay out on the song, as he does on "Jayne" and "Alpha," something about the phrasing vs. the arrangement always makes it sound like he's perfectly in touch with how the music is supposed to sound.
Personally? I blame the piano. There's no flexibility to the harmony here, because that dang Walter Norris is always grounding everyone in the chord. The musicians are listening to him play throughout, even when doing their own solos, and they can't venture so far away from what he's done without the whole performance collapsing. And Ornette, believe it or not, was NEVER interested in having performances collapse.
But Musical_Guru, sez you, Are there good things about this album? Why yes there are! In fact the real value of Something Else!!!!--at least as far as examining it against Ornette's whole musical legacy--is that it should shut up every half-cocked critic who ever said that Ornette couldn't write a decent melody. Geez, what melodies he writes here! "The Blessing," the second cut on the album, is a wistful, cool piece where the accursed piano is actually a highlight. (It's a perfect Los Angeles tune.) "Jayne" is actually a snappy samba, "Angel Voice" is an adrenaline rush, and "The Sphinx" is all breezy exclamation points. Truly, Something Else!!!! is probably Coleman's most purely happy record. It's only when it comes to his love of experimentation that he's...tentative.
So Ornette Coleman was taking the first tentative step to changing how we listen to music. And that's the best way, I think, to approach Something Else!!!!: as the first tentative step to changing how you listen to music. Because the thing that will strike you is how unusual this record ISN'T. Overall, you're looking at a pretty conventional late '50s West Coast jazz album, and one that makes it practically inconceivable that this is the same man who made Free Jazz less than three years later.
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