Dancing in Your Head
| Dancing in Your Head | ||||
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| Ornette Coleman studio album | ||||
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| Label (s) | A&M / Verve | |||
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LP, CD |
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Title (number) |
3 (4) |
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running time |
31:29 (35:31) |
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Studio (s) |
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Dancing in Your Head is a jazz album by Ornette Coleman , on which Ornette Coleman introduced a changed group concept and his “new musical language”.
History of the album
In the early 1970s Coleman dealt with various forms of African music: In 1972 he traveled to Nigeria, where he played with Haussa musicians. In January 1973 he went to Morocco , where he met the Master Musicians there in the Atlas village of Joujouka , an elite of musicians who looked back on a thousand-year-old tradition and who, to the outside world, made a "seemingly telepathic interplay" with "sudden, collective changes in tempo" outside of the European tone system. He had heard the musicians on recordings by Robert Palmer and spontaneously decided: “Let's go. Let's go and make a record. ” Coleman set off with a group of sound engineers from CBS and his cousin, producer James Jordan. At first there were some “rather informal, tentative musical encounters”. Then Coleman conceived a work Music from the Cave with him on the trumpet and an unusually composed orchestra of the Master Musicians on flutes, a fiddle, two gimbris and three percussionists, in which for the first time “the group sound was the decisive factor , not the musical individuality of those involved ". This work was supposed to appear on a double LP with Columbia along with other recordings from Joujouka, but then fell victim to a decision by the label that affected many musicians against the acoustic jazz, which then only promised low profit margins.
The experience of Joujouka was formative for Coleman: After he had either played dance music "that artistically restricted him, or his own music, which gave him freedom of invention, but not the physical contact with the audience that he made his own." Youth knew, “he experienced a synthesis there. He made it clear that, "by using electric guitars and dance-oriented rhythms, he could achieve the same thing in our culture - keep freedom and yet establish [physical] contact with the audience."
Since September 1973 Coleman experimented with electrical groups, first with the guitarist James Blood Ulmer , from 1975 with the first line-up of Prime Time , with whom he was to go to the studio in Paris. He played the recordings from Joujouka to all of the musicians, as the changed group sound was important to him. Coleman pre- funded the prime time recordings in Paris out of his own pocket and eventually sold it to Herb Alpert's label A&M for $ 85,000 . In addition to two longer versions of Theme from a Symphony , which was called The Good Life in the Skies of America symphony and clearly bears nursery rhyme-like features and was henceforth called Dancing in Your Head , the album also contained one of the first recordings , Prime Time from Joujouka, Midnight Sunrise . Presumably Coleman wanted to " at least hint at the connection between Joujouka and the music of Prime Time ."
Track list
- Theme from a Symphony (Variation One) 15:37
- Theme from a Symphony (Variation Two) 11:06
- Midnight Sunrise 4:36
- Midnight Sunrise — Alternate Take (only on the 2000 CD edition)
All compositions are attributed to Ornette Coleman.
Impact history
The album is considered a milestone, the "most radical embodiment" in Coleman's career and the first album of the so-called Free Funk with its new type of "group integration". Shannon Jackson plays "not a stubborn backbeat , but dense polyrhythmic patterns that are more reminiscent of African drumming than the high-tech drummers of fusion music ." The bassist, too, "doesn't hammer monotonous funk bass riffs, but invents independent lines" and that Both guitarists deliver a dense chordal "undergrowth" to which Coleman improvises without pause, "with simple repeated riffs , which he naturally relates to changing tonal centers in the old polymodal manner."
Groups like Sonic Youth or Shannon Jackson's Decoding Society have built their musical concepts on this album.
The Down Beat critics polled Coleman's record as one of the albums of 1978. One of them, Joachim Ernst Berendt , discussed Dancing in Your Head negatively in his radio broadcasts on Südwestfunk and initially suppressed it in his jazz book , even reversing the direction of the story: The trend of free funk is not set by Coleman, but by his students. Coleman, however, "took the side of his former students" and now also plays this music. Scott Yanow is also very ambivalent about the album. In his view, Theme from a Symphony is a rather boring and repetitive melody, so it's "a little difficult to hear".
Chris Kelsey counted the album in his all music essay Free Jazz: A Subjective History among the twenty most important free jazz albums . The album was also inducted onto The Wire's “100 Records That Set the World on Fire (While No One Was Listening)” wirelist .
Rolling Stone magazine voted the album 78th on its list of The 100 Best Jazz Albums in 2013 .
literature
- John Litweiler: Ornette Coleman. A Harmolodic Life Morrow & Cie, New York 1992
- Peter Niklas Wilson: Ornette Coleman. His life, his music, his records Oreos, Schaftlach 1989
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c Wilson, Ornette Coleman , pp. 160f.
- ↑ A short sequence of which is in the documentary Ornette: Made in America to see
- ^ Wilson, Ornette Coleman , p. 63
- ^ A b Wilson, Ornette Coleman , p. 64
- ↑ Litweiler: Ornette Coleman , p 153
- ↑ Robert Palmer, cit. n. Wilson, Ornette Coleman , p. 65
- ↑ Litweiler: Ornette Coleman , S. 157f, Wilson. Ornette Coleman , p 67
- ^ Wilson, Ornette Coleman , p. 65
- ↑ While according to the information on the album the recordings are from December 1976, Litwiler assumes that the recording took place on December 28, 1975. See Litweiler: Ornette Coleman , p. 228, but Wilson, Ornette Coleman , p. 68
- ↑ Litweiler: Ornette Coleman , p 162
- ^ Max Harrison , Eric Thacker, Stuart Nicholson : The Essential Jazz Records: Modernism to Postmodernism , London, New York, Mansell 2000, p. 573
- ^ Wilson, Ornette Coleman , p. 65
- ↑ a b Suzanne McElfresh Dancing in Your Head (review in) Spin November 2000
- ^ JE Berendt The great jazz book. From New Orleans to Jazz Rock. Frankfurt a. M. 1982, p. 64
- ^ S. Yanow, Jazz on Record - the first 60 years, 1917-1976 , San Francisco: Backbeat 2003, p. 715
- ↑ Chris Kelsey: Free Jazz: A Subjective History. ( Memento of the original from March 3, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Retrieved from Thomas Chapin's page on July 20, 2012; In the current list of the 100 most important albums of this genre on Allmusic, the album still appears, but only in the third category.
- ↑ Rolling Stone: The 100 Best Jazz Albums . Retrieved November 16, 2016.
