This 1958 debut recording by
the Ornette Coleman Quintet
, which featured
Coleman
on his trademark white plastic alto,
Don Cherry
on trumpet,
Billy Higgins
on drums,
Walter Norris
on piano, and
Don Payne
on bass, shook up the
jazz
world -- particularly those musicians and critics who had entered the
hard bop
era with such verve and were busy using the
blues
as a way of creating vast solo spaces inside tight and short melody lines.
Something Else!!!!
is anathema to that entire idea, and must have sounded like it came from outer space at the time. First,
's interest was in pitch, not "being in tune." His use of pitch could take him all over -- and outside of -- a composition, as it does on
"Invisible,"
which begins in D flat. The intervals are standard, but the melodic component of the tune -- despite its
tempo -- is, for the most part,
free
. But what is most compelling is evident in abundance here and on the next two tunes,
"The Blessing"
and
"Jayne"
: a revitalization of the
as it expressed itself in
.
refurbished the
framework, threaded it through his
without getting rid of its
folk-like
, simplistic milieu. In other words, the groove
was getting here was a people's groove that only confounded intellectuals at the time.
restored
to their "classic" beginnings in African music and unhooked their harmonies. Whether the key was D flat, A, G, whatever,
revisited the 17- and 25-bar
. There are normal signatures, however, such as
"Chippie"
in F and in eight-bar form, and
"The Disguise"
is in D, but in a strange 13-bar form where the first and the last change places, altering the talking-like voice inherent in the melodic line. But the most important thing about
Something Else!
was that, in its angular, almost totally oppositional way, it swung and still does; like a finger-poppin' daddy on a Saturday night, this record swings from the rafters of the human heart with the most unusually gifted, emotional, and lyrical line since
Bill Evans
first hit the scene. ~ Thom Jurek