Ornette Coleman stands before Jackson Pollock’s Number 13 (1949), one of the more poetic splatter paintings, ferociously dense yet airily light. He ponders it for several minutes, tracing his index finger over its subtler patterns. “These don’t look like strokes,” he finally says in his hushed, gentle tone. “They look like signals or messages, like Read More
To borrow a line from Yellow Submarine, in What Good Are the Arts? the English literary critic John Carey disappears up his own existence: His brilliant, provocative, wrongheaded book ends up erasing itself in contradiction.
Mr. Carey, chief critic for London’s Sunday Times, is far too deliberate to be called a bomb thrower. Like his Read More
It’s been almost half a century since Ornette Coleman released his Atlantic records debut. On the cover, there’s a photo of Mr. Coleman hugging his plastic alto sax. Above that, printed in red letters: The Shape of Jazz to Come.
Before making that defiant statement, Mr. Coleman had already endured the extremes of derision Read More
Sonny Rollins, the greatest living tenor-saxophone player, recorded some of his most thrilling—yet strangely neglected—music from 1962 to 1964, the brief era that’s captured on a new two-disc compilation called The Essential Sonny Rollins: The RCA Years.
It was an amazingly experimental time in jazz—in American culture generally—and Mr. Rollins’ probings were especially intense. Just Read More
