Something Else!!!!: The Music Of Ornette Coleman (Original Jazz Classics Remasters)

Album review

In the span of 12 months, Ornette Coleman released two albums on Lester Koenig's L.A.-based Contemporary Records.  Known as one of the primary homes of the cool West Coast sound, the label was something of an unlikely home for Ornette, who shared little in common with the other musicians on the roster besides a Los Angeles mailing address. But Koenig gave the saxophonist a shot when most other labels wouldn't, and gave him the resources to document his rapidly developing approach to jazz composition and improvisation. Of course, this approach was not greeted with universal acclaim; in fact, most of the jazz cognosce gnti were outright hostile to it, and the albums—Something Else!!! and Tomorrow is the Question! (remastered and repackaged in 2022 as Genesis of Genius: The Contemporary Recordings)—had a far less seismic impact than they deserved. While Ornette would quickly move on to Atlantic Records (his debut was released the same month as Tomorrow is the Question!) recording a string of iconic albums in the process, the groundwork he was laying on the two Contemporary albums was constrained not by ability or vision, but by more pragmatic factors.

On Something Else!!!, Koenig contractually obligated Ornette to utilize a piano on the recording. And while Walter Norris's playing here is excellent, it also anchors the album to a jazz tradition, providing beefy chords that keep Ornette from reaching full flight. Another factor: neither Norris nor any of the other musicians on the sessions—save Don Cherry—were part of Ornette's regular band, and seem largely uninterested in the improvisation-forward approach that Ornette was taking. The result is an album that, depending on how you tilt your head, is either a highly competent, straight-ahead post-bop adventure with occasional moments of shocking solo pyrotechnics, or a wobbly, slightly discordant attempt to smush together harmony and melody atop a jazz-based infrastructure. Cuts like "Chippie" and the hard-swinging "Angel Voice" are so right down the middle it's hard to believe this is the same man who would, just a few years later, release an album that sounded like its Jackson Pollock cover art. Yet, you can nonetheless feel Coleman champing at the bit. "Jayne," for instance, is probably the most traditional and bouncy hard bop number, but it's also the one that most clearly foreshadows where Coleman is headed (his signature harmolodic "theme" pops up for the first time), if only he is allowed the freedom to do so. © Jason Ferguson/Qobuz