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.
