Vitro Nasu

NYtimes obit

Derrida and Ornette

Derrida Interviews Ornette – The Others Langauge (Three of Being)

Philosopher Jacques Derrida Interviews Jazz Legend Ornette Coleman: Talk Improvisation, Language & Racism (1997)

One more lengthy article on Ornette Coleman and Derrida

previous post (see videos – Chappaqua suite & Naked Lunch)

John Lurie – June 11 2015 via FB

When I first started playing saxophone and discovered Ornette Coleman he freed me up. He put me on a path that made sense for me to follow.
I would search the Worcester Public Library for anything about jazz and found a book about him and Cecil Taylor. For some reason the line that stayed with me that Ornette said was, “I knew I was on to something when I found I could make mistakes.” That hit me so profoundly. Yeah, that is exactly right, even if no one but you knows, you are on to something if you can make mistakes.
I managed to see him play often. When he took his solo at the end of Skies in America at Carnegie Hall, Bill Noel turned to me and said, “he just stopped time.”
Which was also exactly right.
Later, when the Lounge Lizards started he was remarkably supportive and helpful to the young band leader following in his footsteps.
And much much later, when I had found my musical voice, I had some of the guys in my band that he used to hire, but was having a really rough time with them.
So I called Ornette and we had an amazing two hour conversation
about running a band.
Ornette’s passing hit me really hard. He meant something to me and not because of all the musical innovations that he made, which are many but because of the sweetness in him. Almost like an angel.

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Photo of Ornette Coleman by Andrew Pothecary

Chappaqua suite was not used in the film.

See Chappaqua (full film) here on youtube.

Ornette is 82

Happy birthday Ornette Coleman!

Naked Lunch soundtrack

To Steve Signed by Ornette

He’s a friend of my friend Abigail, who knows everyone, and used to show up occasionally at various events. I gave Ornette a ride home from a dinner at Abigail’s place, probably mid 80s. He had an entire 5 story tall primary school on the Lower East Side at the time. He had bought it from the city and was way behind in paying for it and fixing it up and the city was trying to take it back, which eventually they did. I dropped him there and he gave me the record, or maybe autographed a copy that Abigail had at her house. I think I had offered to help him work it out with the city, I was pretty good at that back in the day, but he never followed up with me. Steven Schwartz

Eric Dolphy

Eric Allan Dolphy (June 20, 1928 – June 29, 1964)

Trying to play

With Mingus <> <> <> Gazelloni

You don’t know what Love is

Young Saint with a horn
(Image via)

Jazz needs Eric Dolphy more than ever. A virtuoso on saxophone, clarinet and flute, his work bridges the two sides of a debate that dogs jazz fans and performers today. To oversimplify, the neoconservatives argue that jazz must be profoundly grounded in tradition, that new developments are little more than a gloss, and that history stops with Miles Davis and modal jazz in the middle ’60s, with bare whispers of Ornette Coleman and nothing from swingless radicals like Cecil Taylor. The rebels (most now older than the neocons) counter that jazz loses its essence by going backward, that the titans revered by the neocons were fearless innovators, and that the whole reactionary movement reduces jazz to a museum music with a self-righteous fence around it. Dolphy could have listened to both sides, picked up his horn, and showed the way out in a dozen choruses. But he died in 1964, barely 36, struck down by complications stemming from undiagnosed diabetes. (Salon Young Saint with a horn )

Google logo 2010

Happy Father’s day!
Necktie Skirt by Charles LeDray