As a teenager in s Fort Worth, Ornette Coleman supported his family playing tenor saxophone on the radio and in regional clubs, honing woozy gutbucket rhythm and blues suitable for partying and abandon.
The sadness, exhaustion, and mania of the tavern scene echoed the pain and tragedy Coleman sensed in Texas culture, and he felt trapped there, unable to grow or create an environment where others could grow. By playing the Blues, he could only propagate the blues. He could not explore a way to leave the blues behind. Over steadily carved arco bass from David Izenzon and energetic bouncing and splash from drummer Charles Moffett, Coleman draws out the horn phrasing, making it reach, ending elongated stamina blasts with boozy, hard curls.
The audience, 1, Danes in an auditorium nestled in the grounds of a sprawling, fanciful nineteenth-century amusement park, are transported to the clubs of postwar Fort Worth. Coleman plays his past to them as he introduces himself. He shakes his memories of intoxication, sorrow, and delirium before they become reverie, and picks up the pace; Moffett follows, and Coleman puts some nimble bebop into his playing, quotations of other moments, people, and places.
The song collapses in exhaustion, and the audience erupts into applause. Moffett plays a few rolling, ecstatic hits and the crowd starts clapping percussively. The precise syncopated reaction is jarring, and the first audible clue that this is not an American audience. There is an intense energy in the room. Izenzon plays nimble pizzicato, chasing the horn line around, looking for the key and the phrasing.
Moffett keeps an up-tempo ride pattern going. Coleman hits a peak and lays off. Izenzon takes a short solo; Moffett takes a long solo. One has the sense that everyone has settled into the space. Coleman rejoins and they celebrate for a good while longer. The tune lasts twenty minutes. Coleman goes for a stroll, taking some time and space to think. The sadness in question feels like the hardness of estrangement rather than the softness of despair. For this valediction to his Copenhagen audienceβforty minutes after greeting them for the first timeβColeman plays the violin and trumpet, two instruments he had never played on record.
