Tag: Ornette Coleman

Sonic Youth’s “Daydream Nation”

Album cover for Daydream Nation

This week, I’ve been listening to Sonic Youth’s double-LP “Daydream Nation” from 1988. The band formed in 1981, creating no-wave noise rock. No-wave describes a movement that started in the late-70s. These musicians were inspired by elements of punk-rock but rejected its musically-conservative nature. Punk promised rebellion by creating something new rejecting what they saw as commercial music out of touch with reality. Most punk did so by making a return to the song-writing of early rock of the 1950s. This meant following long established song-structures and chord-progressions. No-wave intentionally avoided these norms like Ornette Coleman did with free-jazz. Sonic Youth developed their sound and style from these no-wave roots. By “Daydream Nation,” they combined the experimental sound with somewhat more traditional song-structures.

I first heard Sonic Youth when a friend lent my their 1990 album “Goo” in 1994. It took me a few listens to get into it and then I loved it.

Teenage Riot

The album opens strong with “Teenage Riot.” This 7 minute track consists of an 79 second long intro of a single clean electric guitar playing a series of two simple chords slowly. Female vocalist Kim Gordon speaks in a blasé manner, recording twice and panned hard left-hard-right. The words give new meaning to teenage poetry: “You’re it; no, you’re it;hey, you’re really it; you’re it;no I mean it, you’re it;say it,don’t spray it.” As with much of Sonic Youth’s vocals, they give us passionate rebellion with a disconnected cool like Andy Warhol in sunglasses. They’re cultivate an impression of being uncultivated. By elevating the mundane emptiness of self-conscious youth culture, they creating art out of the superficial and question the sublime. Its quite clear throughout this album that they appreciate the Velvet Underground and carry on many of those traditions.

Like the Velvet Underground, Sonic Youth songs frequently evolve into a driving mechanical rhythm. With guitarists strumming continuous hard beats, with the movement happening more on the fretboard. They build up rock rhythms on during the first couple bars, then rise up to higher notes. This repeats, dropping back down. It gives the impression of a rock n roll machine.

Sonic Youth are not afraid of alternate tunings; Or rather, they depend upon them. The main guitar on this song is tuned to what has become known as the “Teenage Riot” tuning (GABDEG). The other guitar uses a bizarre tuning with four of the strings all tuned to a G note and the other two tuned to a D (GGDDGG). Tunings like these can lead to creating new patterns and combinations of notes, as they break a musician from established habits of playing. Guitar strings tuned far from standard tuning vibrate differently and resonate with each other different. This creates new sonic territory for the instrument.

Thurston Moore delivers the vocals throughout the rest of the song. The verses follow an ABAB rhyme scheme. The first and third lines use particularly loose slant rhymes like “location/rockin'” and “weather/temper.” The second and fourth lines, stick to strict rhymes like “true/two”, “you/clue”, “you/do” that all rhyme with each. An interesting technique with the “you/do” is that the “do” is not the end of the line; the line is sung with extending the word “you” to allow it to rhyme while following up with “me for now.” Lyrically, this is a song about adolescent turmoil, meaninglessness and the savior rock n roll.

Looking for a ride to your secret location
Where the kids are setting up a free-speed nation for you
Got a foghorn and a drum and a hammer that’s rockin’
And a cord and a pedal and a lock, that’ll do me for now

The Sprawl

The third track, “The Sprawl” takes the driving rhythm of “teenage riot” and melts it into a rock n roll drone. Bass and guitars harmonically blend into a numbing hum. Gordon speaks, “To the extent that I wear skirts and cheap nylon slips, I’ve gone native. I wanted to know the exact dimensions of hell. Does this sound simple? Fuck you!” She’s dawned the costume of society’s female to learn and expose it as a facade. The lyrics continue into a condemnation of consumerism and societal expectations. The rhyming chorus succinctly provides the message as a catchy slogan, like a marketing jingle. The repetition here makes it memorable, but also suits the message.

Come on down to the store
You can buy some more and more and more and more
Come on down to the store
You can buy some more and more and more and more

Rain King

What I really like about this album is that it provides an atmosphere of rock n roll attitude. Through their evoluation from late 70s no-wave, combined with Warholian laissez-faire, they’ve precipitated 90s slacker subculture. Often mischaracterized as not-caring, the more philosophical side of slacker was concerned with dismantling meaningless constructs of society. They were frequently educated: some college, or college-preparatory high school, or self-taught through literature. They felt pressures from society regarding how they should make decisions about school, career, fashion, friends, music, etc, and they asked “why?” They explored these expectations and found it was a mess of self-perpetuating materialistic consumerist boondoggle.

The heart of Slacker culture was not laziness. It seemed to be a bunch of kids who didn’t care because they had chosen to disregard what the old men cared about. It was a mass existential crisis, a new Beatnik revolution attempting to create something good out of a discovery of inanity.

Ornette Coleman’s “The Shape of Jazz to Come”

Album cover for The Shape of Jazz to Come

I’ve been listening to Ornette Coleman’s third album “The Shape of Jazz to Come” from 1959. This release receives credit for creating the genre of free-jazz. The producer suggested the title “The Shape of Jazz to Come,” because of the innovative nature of the compositions and performances. Free Jazz intentionally resists established conventions of jazz music, while further embracing the jazz’s improvisational aspects. Coleman’s quartet take a major shift from convention by lacking any instruments capable of voicing chords. Billy Higgins plays drums, Charlie Haden plays bass, Don Cherry plays a pocket trumpet, and Coleman plays a plastic saxophone. There is a noteworthy absence of piano or guitar.

Each week, I devote time to a different album widely considered to be one of the greatest albums of all time. My main purpose is to broaden my horizons and improve my own songwriting, performance, recording and production. Writing about them forces me to think further about what I’ve heard from a more technical standpoint. I often give most attention to the lyrics and chord progressions. From there, I may look at the instrumentation and rhythmic structure, the mixing and production, the atmosphere and attitude, and maybe some of the cultural significance.

Each time I get a jazz album, it presents a great challenge. My experience as both a listener and musician is primarily in descendants of folk, country, and blues music, especially rock music genres. Songs in these genres generally have a foundation of lyrics sung melodically over chord-progression based accompaniment. So far, I’ve for this weekly-album project I’ve listened to John Coltrane, Miles Davis, and now Ornette Coleman. These jazz albums are considered great for having innovated and challenged convention. I enjoy listening to these albums, but I feel woefully ill-equipped to talk about them. Still, I proceed…

Lonely Woman

Ornette Coleman had worked in a department store; during a break, he “came across a gallery where someone had painted a very rich woman who had absolutely everything that you could desire in life, and she had the most solitary expression in the world.” The memory of this painting inspired him to compose “Lonely Woman.”

The song opens with a slow bassline, like a mellow march, joined by fast drums in the background. Both are panned center, with the drums fairly low in the mix. The high-hats dance frantically, as if they have some place to be, pulling the song along. At 18 seconds, the pocket trumpet and saxophone separated into the left and right channels. They play in unison the same melody in slightly different ways, usually about trumpet a few notes higher. It gives the feeling we are hearing two recordings of the song in different keys being played at the same time. Heard in mono, there’s some strange dissonance that happens, but in stereo, they come together in a beautifully odd way.

Coleman developed a concept he called “harmolodic” which allows for improvisation, with emphasis given to melody over harmony. Harmlodics encouraged breaking from the convention of the tonal center. Tonal center is the idea that the tonic note of a chord is the home to and from which melody and chord progressions dance. In the key of F, a song will typically start with the F chord through a series of progressions return to the F chord, usually returning to F in patterns to keep the song grounded. Melodies in the key of F, likewise consists of melodic phrases that often begin with F and end on F. Recognizing their inherently limiting nature, Coleman sought to knowingly work around conventions like these.

Congeniality

“Congeniality” jumps right into an optimistic melody played on the sax and trumpet at an upbeat tempo. This lasts for 3 seconds, a short snare drum roll, and then the tempo drops as the two horns play a mournful melody briefly. The first minute of the tracks mostly consists of this back and forth between cheerful up-tempo and slow mournful melodies.

Then the drums drive in bopping along with bass that almost feels like it’s constantly rising in mood. The horns take turns improvising and dancing with occasional references to the melody introduces at the beginning. The songs on this album follow a structure much like this. Themes are introduced, then the song changes feel often with the drums picking up, and the lead instruments improvising. They make call-backs to the themes, they turn themes upside-down and inside-out. They throws the themes back and forth, exploring the possibilities. There may or may not be another section that introduces different themes. And at the end, all those mutations and experimentation are brought together to return to the original themes. In a way, it’s like replacing the “tonal center” idea with melodic themes instead. With these compositions, Coleman questions the definition of music: what can we change, what rules can rewrite, and still create something musical?