Ornette was one of the guys that made me want to play horn.
I've read somewhere that Ornette's term harmolodics - he meant playing in two keys simultaneously.
I've never been able to find any information explaining the term.
@altissimo do you have any info on this ?
Oh boy, that's a big question, I'd have to read Stephen Rush's book to answer that properly.
it's difficult finding anything definite on the subject of Harmolodics, Ornette tended to speak in riddles and even those who played with him have difficulty defining what his method was except that it was a deeper philosophy than just music -"Iharmony, melody, speed, rhythm, time and phrases all have equal position in the results that come from the placing and spacing of ideas." is one of the more comprehensible statements he made..
“The theme you play at the start of the number is the territory, and what comes after, which may have little to do with it, is the adventure.”
"Harmolodics allows a person to use a multiplicity of elements to express more than one direction. The greatest freedom in harmolodics is human instinct"
"when you hear my band, you know that everybody is soloing, harmolodically. Here I am with a band based upon everybody creating an instant melody, composition, from what people used to call improvising, and no one has been able to figure out that that’s what’s going on."
“If I play a F in a song called ‘Peace,’ I think it should not sound exactly the same as if I play that note in a piece called ‘Sadness.’”
Wikipedia says this - "Harmolodics seeks to free musical compositions from any tonal center, allowing harmonic progression independent of traditional European notions of tension and release. Harmolodics may loosely be defined as an expression of music in which harmony, movement of sound, and melody all share the same value. The general effect is that music achieves an immediately open expression, without being constrained by tonal limitations, rhythmic pre-determination, or harmonic rules.
trawling the internet came up with this interpretation by someone commenting on a blog -
"given a melody, rather than being restricted to the chord changes or the beat or the key center, you can work equally usefully off the melody, off the melody's internal rhythm (new melodies with similar rhythms, displacements of that same rhythm), or off the harmonies suggested by the melody (treating them as if they WERE the melody). That all of these elements have equal value to the improvisor "
Ornette had read enough theory books and was taken seriously by Gunter Schuller, George Russell, John Lewis of the MJQ and Leonard Bernstein, so we have to assume he was onto something interesting and I think he realised that all the notes are harmonically related somehow and found a way for musicians to play together with no set key signature and spontaneously create melodically and harmonically. This is why I think he wanted his musicians to express the feeling of the music and the harmony would result from the interplay of their various parts, so the harmony would be as spontaneous as the melodic lines and rhythms, thus escaping from the cage of rigid harmonic structures that some musicians were feeling constrained by
Don Cherry - "When we would play a composition, we could improvise forms, or modulate or make cadences or interludes, but all listening to each other to see which way it was going so we could blow that way. Ornette’s harmony would end up being a melody and the original melody would end up being a harmony. So he could continue on that way, starting from the first melody which ends up being harmony to the harmonic melodies that come after the main theme. "
"If I play a C and have it in my mind as the tonic, that’s what it will become. If I want it to be a minor third or a major seventh that has the tendency to resolve upward, then the quality of the note will change."
Charlie Haden - "“technically speaking, it was a constant modulation in the improvising that was taken from the direction of the composition, and from the direction inside the musician, and from listening to each other.”
Bern Nix - ""I [once] said to Ornette that it seemed like counterpoint. I was working with him, rehearsing with him, and we were getting down to a couple of different lines... and I said to him, 'You know, to me this sounds like counterpoint.' He said, 'Well, it's not exactly counterpoint, it's something else.' You know what I mean? The way Ornette uses language, he likes to put his own spin on everything. But to me, it's contrapuntal. I talk to other people and they say the same thing."
"I always thought harmolodics was an open-ended exploration of the meaning of melody, rhythm and harmony; that's the way I see it. [You're asking] what is melody, what is rhythm—what it is. It's more like that, than a big system, you know—it's ways of dealing with it. [You] figure out the different ways of doing [it]."
"[It's] just a way of looking at music—It's not a system. It's a way of...[handling] the difficulty of dealing with melody, rhythm and harmony...[by way of utilizing] melodic variables... [It's] exploratory. [You find] direction with the melody. The harmony doesn't dictate the direction, the melody does"
"the thing about playing with Ornette is he gets you back in contact with why you wanted to play music in the first place. Because it felt good and it seemed like fun. Somewhere along the line you got into all these rules and regulations and it became a discipline. Plus, you want to make a statement of your own. And there’s the interaction with other musicians in something that’s larger than music—especially when it starts getting good, you’re caught up in something that’s bigger than you are. See, Ornette is one of the few musicians you can play with who, whenever you play with, you learn something"
Bern Nix: A History In Harmolodics
George Russell - "It seems logical to me that jazz would by-pass atonality because jazz is a music that is rooted in folk scales, which again are strongly rooted in tonality. Atonality, as I understand it, is the complete negation of tonal centers either vertically or horizontally. It would not support, therefore the utterance of the blues scale because this implies a tonic. But pan tonality is a philosophy which new jazz might easily align itself with… Ornette seems to depend mostly on the over-all tonality as a point of departure for the melody. By this I don’t mean the key that the music might be in. His pieces don’t readily infer key. I mean the melody and the chords of his compositions have an overall
sound which Ornette seems to use as a point of departure. This approach liberates the improviser to sing his own song really, without having to meet the deadlines of any particular chord… Pantonal jazz is here….."
from the notes to 'Sound Museum' Ornette Coleman -
- In music, the only thing that matters is whether you feel it or not.
- Chords are just the name for sounds, which really need no names at all, as names are sometimes confusing
- Blow what you feel - anything. Play the thought, the idea in your mind - Break away from the convention and stagnation - escape!
- [Musicians] have more room to express themselves with me...They should be free to play things as they feel it, the way it's comfortable for them to play it. You can use any note and rhythm pattern that makes good sense for you. You just hear it - like beautiful thoughts - you don't listen to people telling you how to play.
- My music doesn't have any real time, no metric time. It has time, but not in the sense that you can time it. It's more like breathing - a natural, freer time. People have forgotten how beautiful it is to be natural. Even in love.
- Sometimes I play happy. Sometimes I play sad. But the condition of being alive is what I play all the time.
- Music has no face. Whatever gives oxygen its power, music is cut from the same cloth.
- It was when I realized I could make mistakes that I decided I was really on to something.
- People don't realize it, but there is a real folklore music in jazz. It's neither black nor white. it's the mixture of the races, and folklore has come from it.
- I have found that by eliminating chords or keys or melodies as being the present idea of what you're trying to feel i think you can play more emotion into the music. in other words, you can have the harmony, melody, intonation all blending into one to the point of your emotional thought.
- I listen to anybody. The only thing I am interested in is their natural ability. I don't care if they're playing buckets. I'm only interested in what gets through to people, what makes them tap their feet, what moves them.
- I was out at Margaret Mead's school and was teaching some kids how to play instantly. I asked the question, 'How many kids would like to play music and have fun?' And all the little kids raised up their hands. And I asked,'Well, how do you do that?' And one little girl said, 'You just apply your feelings to sound.' She was right - if you apply your feelings to sound, regardless of what instrument you have, you'll probably make good music.
- You really have to have players with you who will allow your insticts to flourish in such a way that they will make the same order as if you sat down and written a piece of music. To me, that is the most glorified goal of the improvising quality of playing - to be able to do that.
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more information can be found in this PhD thesis -
An Analysis Of The Compositional Practices Of Ornette Coleman As Demonstrated In His Small Group Recordings During The 1970's by Nathan A. Frink
and here -
Dancing In His Head - The Evolution of Ornette Coleman's Music and Compositional Philosphy
Harder Bop: Defining “Harmolodics”