The Shape of Jazz to Come

Six tracks in about thirty-eight minutes, and the subtractive test finds most of the record held. The heads are short and exact, and nothing is written that does not set the solos going. “Lonely Woman” cannot lose its fast drums or its slow horns; the work is the gap between them. “Peace”, the longest track, is the record’s long breath, and the sequence needs it between the two short pieces of side one and the turns of side two. The test bites twice. “Eventually” and “Chronology” are both fast pieces on angular unison heads, and one could go with less loss than any other track. And Cherry’s solos sometimes find less than Coleman’s and mark time inside the free length the form allows. Freedom of length is the argument, so the cost is light; it is still a cost.

Score: 8.5 / 10

What the record brings into the open can be stated. First, that the chord grid was a convention and not a law: four players can make music that coheres without it, by following the melody and each other, and the coherence is audible on every track. That is a claim about freedom and order, shown in sound, and it holds. Second, in “Lonely Woman”, that grief can be voiced as a cry rather than as a form: the horns keen with the pitch bent toward speech, and the world around them, in the drums, does not slow down for it. That is the disclosure of a human condition, not only a mood. Held near its gate because the first disclosure bears on how music is made more than on how people live, and the second is carried by one track of six.

Score: 8.6 / 10

The height is real and unevenly spread. “Lonely Woman” is at the summit for its whole length: the keening unison, the drums racing under it, the bass sounding the floor. “Peace” rises by another road, a slow piece of long lines in which Coleman’s tone and phrasing make a lyric that is plainly beautiful and unsentimental. Elsewhere the record’s register is energy, wit and argument. “Congeniality” is play, “Eventually” and “Chronology” are speed and angle, and “Focus on Sanity” holds interest more than elevation. These compel, and they do not rise in the sense the axis asks. Two tracks of six at height, one at great height, place the axis below Kind of Blue’s 9.1, where height comes on four tracks of five, and above a record that rises once.

Score: 8.6 / 10

With no words, the archetypal must be built by the music or not at all. In “Lonely Woman” it is built: the lament, the solitary figure keening, and around her a world that runs on at its own speed. The opposition of tempos is the figure, and it bears weight. The title names a woman; the music builds the mourner. Beyond that track the archetypal is thinner. The cry of the horn reaches back to the field holler and the blues, which Coleman brought from Fort Worth and from rhythm and blues, and that is evoked rather than built. The titles point at states and at time, and the music does not make them into structure. The prophecy in the album’s title belongs to the sleeve and the legend, not to anything the record builds; that holds the axis below the gate.

Score: 8.0 / 10

The inherited tradition is the jazz of 1959, bebop and hard bop: the soloist running a fixed cycle of chord changes, the piano setting the harmony every bar. The turn is from the cycle to the line. The soloist follows the melody’s implications; the bass follows the soloist; the piano, the instrument that would have enforced the grid, is gone. Pitch is bent toward the voice, with an intonation many players then heard as wrong. The stake was a career: a near-unknown from Los Angeles placed his first record for a major jazz label on a method established players rejected. Held a step below the top by its own preparation: two records for Contemporary had already made much of the turn, and the head, solos and head, the swing and the blues are kept.

Score: 9.3 / 10

Change the form and the record stops knowing what it knows. Restore the piano and the grid returns, and with it the hierarchy the record removes. Fix the changes and the soloist is navigating again, and the claim that the line can carry its own harmony is lost. The quartet of two horns, bass and drums is the instrument of the knowledge, not its container. “Lonely Woman” makes the form the meaning: two tempos at once, so that grief and the world are heard in the same moment. The sequence opens on the lament, sets the long lyric of “Peace” at the end of side one, and closes on “Chronology”, time itself at speed. Held below the top because the outline of each piece, head, solos, head, is the inherited one, and on the fast tracks the form is conventional where the playing is not.

Score: 8.9 / 10

Evidence rather than promise, over sixty-seven years. Musicians have learned “Lonely Woman” in every generation since, and played it in settings Coleman never imagined; it remains open rather than spent. Writers have returned to the record repeatedly, Ekkehard Jost in his analyses in Free Jazz and John Litweiler in his biography of Coleman among them, in a long argument about what Coleman’s method was, how far the record is free at all (most of it is in steady tempo, with tonal centres a listener can hear), and what his later word “harmolodics” explains of it. The question of the intonation has never settled. The depth is more formal than semantic, and part of the literature treats Coleman’s Atlantic years as a whole, so this record’s share is not wholly separable. That keeps the axis below the top.

Score: 8.8 / 10

The record reorganised what jazz improvisation could be built on: not by replacing the chord with the scale, as modal jazz did the same year, but by showing that the soloist need not be governed by a harmonic frame at all. The intrinsic force is very great. The discount is on reach: it is shared with Coleman’s other records of 1959 to 1961, and free jazz remained a minority practice beside the modal and post-bop mainstream. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the line runs to Free Jazz, recorded in December 1960, to the later Coltrane, to Albert Ayler, to the Chicago musicians of the AACM and the Art Ensemble, and to European free improvisation; Cherry, Haden and Higgins carried it through their own long careers; and “Lonely Woman” became a standard.

Score: 9.0 / 10

Survival is weighed on form, presence and fabric. The form survives whole: six tracks in their order, the record as it was issued. Presence is continuous and strong within jazz: the record is taught and studied, and “Lonely Woman” is played by musicians born half a century after the session. It is narrower than the widest presence of its year; it is not a record heard by people who hear no other jazz, as Kind of Blue is, and it stands a tenth below that record’s 9.0. The fabric is sound. An acoustic quartet, clearly recorded, carries little date, and what once sounded raw now sounds like itself. Sixty-seven years of strong but not widest presence place it here, well below what has lasted for centuries.

Score: 8.9 / 10

Command of the recorded medium, and the making bears weight in places. The unison heads are tight and exact, which is harder without a piano to fix the pitch. Higgins’s drumming is supple and inventive throughout, and on “Lonely Woman” holds the fast tempo under the slow theme without either giving. Haden’s bass, choosing its pitches by ear from the line, is the record’s harmonic intelligence. Coleman’s alto is fluent and vocal, its intonation deliberate. The costs are charged. Cherry’s execution is uneven, with phrases that do not land; the vocal pitch is a choice, but here and there it is not fully controlled; and the recording, clean as it is, is plain. A figure at the level of Kind of Blue’s 9.3 would claim a polish this record does not seek and does not have.

Score: 8.7 / 10

One law governs the record: the line leads, and every player follows the line and each other rather than a given frame. The two most distant elements obey it. “Lonely Woman” is a slow lament over a racing pulse; “Congeniality” is play at a bright swing. Both are made the same way, a composed head and then improvisation that answers the melody’s implication, with the bass following the horns. The range of tempo and mood is wider than Kind of Blue’s, lament, lyric, wit and speed, and the law holds across all of it. Held below the top because the range of form is narrower than the range of mood: the outline of head, solos and head repeats on every track, and the fast pieces resemble one another.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Judged on what the record holds. Consciousness is held, in the grief of “Lonely Woman” and the reflection of “Peace”. The group is held as a small society of equals: no instrument rules the harmony, and each voice listens and answers, which is the record’s social form. The blues and the Texas rhythm and blues behind Coleman are carried, and with them, unstated, African American history in 1959. Time is named in “Chronology” and heard in the double tempo of the opening. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is absence: the family, labour, the state, the sacred and the natural order do not appear. A wordless record of thirty-eight minutes holds what it holds, a little less of the world than Kind of Blue’s blues-centred span, and the figure describes the form.

Score: 7.0 / 10