Artist in Residence Ornette Coleman

A trail-blazing artist, the greatest innovator of free jazz in the fifties and sixties: Ornette Coleman. This year’s guest of honor will perform a remarkable project this evening: This is Our Music Now.

Friday 9 July 2010

Jazz fans will recognize the title as coming from the album Coleman made together with bass player Charlie Haden in 1960. Haden was a member of the Ornette Coleman Quartet and his rhythms were the points of reference in the compositions that were frequently very free. During that period, Coleman evolved into one of the most influential as well as one the most criticized free jazz musicians, with his improvised albums that were so radically different from the then accepted bebop and hard bop. Tonight the festival presents a unique preformance of the Ornette Coleman Quartet with special guest Charlie Haden. Coleman and Haden are performing together again after thirty years. And special guest Joshua Redman, son of Dewey Redman, who played together with Coleman in the sixties.

Saturday 10 July 2010

The Ornette Coleman Quartet laid the foundations for dramatic changes in jazz: the band departed from bebop structures and gave
all possible room to collective improvisations. Coleman restructured jazz freely around a rhythmical pulse and so made room for his lovely lyrical sound. On Prime Time he gave equal importance to harmony, melody and rhythm and called it ‘harmolodics’. Although he has since left Prime Time’s free funk behind him and is returning to acoustic jazz, he still observes this musical concept. Demonstrated this evening by a line-up of Coleman himself, two bass players and a drummer.

Sunday 11 July 2010

The Ornette Coleman Quartet will perform with some very special guests tonight: Bachir Attar & The Master Musicians of Jajouka. This
Moroccan band has been passing on their musical tradition from father to son for centuries. In the 1970s, Coleman became fascinated with the mesmerizing sound of the rhaita (a wind instrument) and the band’s hypnotizing rhythms. He recorded an album with the group; his first take on record with the double electrical and bass guitar that would later become his trademark. Coleman’s other guest this evening is former pupil James Blood Ulmer. He is one of the most remarkable free jazz guitarists and he follows the “theory of harmolodics”, as devised by Coleman. A unique opportunity to see Coleman, Master Musicians of Jajouka and Ulmer together on stage!