New Ideas from Don Ellis

I mainly missed Don Ellis. I never heard his early avant-garde music (and it probably never got much airplay, anyway), I wasn’t into big band music enough to seek out his odd time signature stuff, and too snobbish to listen to his electrified records. His sadly premature death from chronic heart problems ended what was a very interesting and diverse musical career. When I had the opportunity to pick up one of his early recordings, I decided to educate myself.

New Ideas, recorded in 1961, is an good example of how the revolution kicked off by Ornette Coleman was affecting younger musicians with a bent for shunning bop clichés. Ellis used some of the best people around: his friend Jaki Byard, Ron Carter, Charlie Persip (before he lost the “e” in Charlie), and the unfairly obscure Al Francis on vibes. Overall, I enjoyed this music, although I think the totally improvised and collectively improvised pieces (Despair to Hope and Imitation, respectively) were a bit too studied and cold for my taste. Of course, very few musicians then or now can execute these challenging techniques very well, and the experiments  were worthwhile.

The compositions that used tonal clusters (Tragedy), unusual time signatures (Four and Three), and patterns (Uh-Huh) worked better for me. Al Francis, who apparently is still active in music, displays a really fresh approach to the vibraphone, Carter and Persip seem comfortable in any setting, and Jaki Byard is always a joy to hear.

New Ideas is a good example of the post-Ornette ferment in jazz. Not everything worked, but neither did playing 99 more versions of On Green Dolphin Street, and much of the album holds up very well, indeed. Here's one of the more conventional pieces (sorry for the wacky video accompaniment) that still provides a sense of what the musicians were trying to accomplish.