My first instrument was the saxophone. That instrument introduced me to performing music and if I hadn’t started playing my horn at the age of 11 I probably would have never started writing my own songs. I still love my saxophone. Even though my singer/songwriter output is balanced on my lyrics, playing the saxophone offers a respite from words in music — more than any other instrument the sax replicates the tonality and intricacy of the human voice, unencumbered by the ballast of language. Playing the saxophone is pure singing in a way that song-singing can never be.

Ornette Coleman died yesterday, but his legacy of pure musicality continues to affect me and any musician concerned with personal expression. Coleman’s radical improvisational experiments created a bridge that took Be Bop to its logical conclusion, and his pioneering music is the aural equivalent of Jackson Pollock’s revolutionary canvases. Like Pollock, Coleman’s music has been hailed and reviled, lauded and laughed at, but his indelible influences at jazz’s most daring edges will forever define his legacy as one of the most important of American music-makers.

Here’s Coleman and his trio in 1966…

“Ornette Coleman Trio,” presents Ornette Coleman’s famous trio during their visit to Paris in 1966 in order to record the soundtrack of a very nutty-looking Belgium film called “Who’s Crazy?”.

Realized by Richard “Dick” Fontaine–who is considered to be one of the founding fathers of erotic gay cinema (with such famous titles as “The Days of Greek Gods”) and that years later realized the full length film “Art Blakey: The Jazz Messenger”-. the film was made in three days and offers a portrait of the trio that becomes an “ironic essay in dignity in the face of insanity”. Ornette, who in this era was one of the leaders of the Jazz Avant-garde movement, faced the challenge with his two fellow musicians by responding with passionate improvisations to the stimuli that reached him from the screen where the images are projected. A priceless testimony to the innovations which revolutionized the world of jazz in the sixties.

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My favorite Robin Williams’ film is Dead Poets Society, but this scene from Good Will Hunting encapsulates the man’s best work for me: Williams starts off the scene on script, but by the middle, when he mentions his late wife waking herself, farting in her sleep, he’s off and running on one of his can’t-help-it improvisations — when the camera cuts to Matt Damon’s busting-up reaction, notice the frame wiggling as the cameraman tries to keep it all together.

This hilarious moment captures Williams’ quicksilver knack for improvisation as well as his ability to engage in a nuanced dialog while remaining intimately close to the bone. Here, he slides effortlessly between the two like the talented, troubled genius that he was.

“O Captain! My Captain! our fearful trip is done…”

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Van Morrison joined the British Invasion with Them until he left the band to meet Dylan and the folk rock revolution head-on with his first great masterpiece, Astral Weeks.

Here’s what Rolling Stone has to say about this epic, emotive music:

Van Morrison never sounded more warm and ecstatic, more sensual and vulnerable, than on his enigmatically beautiful solo debut. Fresh off the success of “Brown Eyed Girl” and newly signed to artist-friendly Warner Bros., he explored the physical and dramatic range of his voice during extended poetic-scat singing, and set hallucinatory reveries on his native Belfast to wandering Celtic-R&B melodies. The crowning touch was the superior jazz quintet convened by producer Lewis Merenstein to color the mists and shadows. Bassist Richard Davis later said that Morrison never told the musicians what he wanted from them or what the lyrics meant. Maybe he didn’t know how to. He was going deep inside himself, without a net or fear.

This is big-heart music for the thinking person — a masterpiece of lyrical inspiration and musical improvisation. Van’s use of his own repetitive voicing as a percussion instrument speaks to the poetic underpinnings of his songwriting in the Celtic, spiritual traditions where he has continued to root his mature music. This is deep, dark sound. It’s also ecstatic, mystical music — Morrison reveals himself to be a rock shaman par excellence within the tracks of this album’s lustrous, longing message.

Here is the album in its entirety:

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Louis VS Schmeling, Ali VS Frazier, Tyson VS Holyfield — it’s rare to see two great heavyweights meet head-to-head. But that’s what happened in 1986 on Coney Island when two champions of avant garde music met for a less-than-bloody collaboration that found a pair of the world’s most out-there tunesmiths having a musical meet-up that read more like a artistic summit meeting than a jam between giants. While there is no audio evidence of the improvisation that occurred at the end of the show, there are gems to be discovered here and it’s enough for me to imagine the possibilities.

The WFMU blog has the skinny:

I remember stumbling upon a box of records containing many dozens of copies of a single album—John Cage Meets Sun Ra. Wow! It wasn’t easy remaining nonchalant when confronted with such a dense concentration of holy vinyl. I must have been stunned, because for some stupid-ass reason I didn’t buy a copy. I must’ve made the genius calculation that there were so many, I’d just swing back in a few days and snag one then. Of course, the box and its contents were gone upon my return…

Sponsored by Coney Island’s Sideshows by the Seashore, John Cage and Sun Ra were presented as a double bill. Despite the album’s misleading title, most accounts of the concert state that the two alternated sets and never actually shared the stage. Nevertheless, “Blue” Gene Tyranny in a review of the disc asserts that Messrs. Cage and Ra did in fact perform together toward the end of the evening, though there is no audible evidence of this on the recording.

If you’re more than a little bummed about having missed the show yourself, here’s the next best thing: Download both sides of the show’s recording at the Sun Ra site From Nowhere.

Here is the album in its entirety:

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