Coleman’s a controversial figure in jazz (Miles Davis famously criticized him), but arguably also the best saxophonist alive. He won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for music earlier this month for his album Sound Grammar. That album probably isn’t the best introduction to Coleman (for that, go back nearly fifty years, for his 1959 album The Shape of Jazz to Come).
Avant-garde jazz is an acquired taste, even for jazz aficionados (which I’m not — I love jazz, but I’m a novice listener). Instead, this week I’m recommending two fantastic pop songs that feature Coleman’s virtuosity. They’re from the same album, Scar, by one of my personal favorites, Joe Henry.
The first is called “Richard Pryor Addresses a Tearful Nation,” and despite the presumptive title, is a masterpiece. I’ll just hand off to All Music Guide’s Thom Jurek, who’s often wordy, but seldom wrong:
The opener, “Richard Pryor Addresses a Tearful Nation,” slips its smoky way into being with a whining guitar by Marc Ribot, a vibraphone by Brian Blade, and Henry’s cigarette-stained vocal: “Sometimes I think I’ve almost fooled myself/Spreading out my wings above us like a tree/Laughing now out loud/Almost like I was free/I look at you as the thing I wanted most/You look at me and it’s like you see a ghost/I wear the face all of this has cost/Everything you tried to keep away from me/Everything I took from you and lost.” It’s a blues tune, where steel guitar is trumped by Ornette Coleman’s alto blowing his deepest soul-blues. He thins the lyric yet digs its knife in deeper. By the tune’s nadir, the protagonist has shrunk to the vanishing point and disappears in a wisp of smoke.
The Coleman solo really steals what’s an already incredible song.
My second recommendation is the title track, “Scar.” The first four minutes or so are Henry at his best — smoldering vocals evocative of early-era Tom Waits; intimate, searching, deeply personal lyrics sung in the first-person voice of a broken-down man; and an appropriately slow, wafting score, driven by an acoustic guitar, with accents of electric guitar, snare, and soft organ that sounds like a synthesizer set on “calliope.” It’s a fully-realized bit of songcraft. But beautiful as it is, the treat comes once main song is over. The music fades into an almost cinematic coda, hinting at what’s to come. There’s then a prolonged silence, followed by what I can only describe as a sort of hushed, post-apocalyptic soundscape. There’s a vague audible haze, accompanied by odd squeaks and squawks, pops and distortions–you’ve entered a weird, dystopic, sonic realm, backdrop for an amazing, unaccompanied, completely unexpected Coleman solo. It begins abruptly, then softens a bit. It weaves in and out of the backdrop, wriggles and stretches and teases, then deflates, and fades into the landscape. You almost imagine him blowing from atop some mound of cataclysmic rubble. The solo isn’t listed on the album jacket. I remember first discovering it, just by the happenstance of having been too lazy to flip CDs when I thought the track had ended. I was floored. Still am every time I listen to it.
So today’s five-star recommendations are:
“Richard Pryor Addresses a Tearful Nation,” and “Scar,” both by Joe Henry, and both featuring Ornette Coleman.
Unfortunately, neither is available on iTunes (though Henry’s excellent and most recent CD “Tiny Voices” is). So I guess you’ll have to buy the entire Scar album if you want to own them. You won’t be disappointed.