Ornette at 80

4 Comments

• James Keepnews says:

  March 9, 2010 at 3:54 pm

  I saw Ornette in America and found it enga­ging, where not goofy (the end­less “title sequence”(s), for starters, and some moon­shot sci-fi sequence I don’t exactly recall but am con­fid­ent was not exactly inspired by Ornette’s inspired Science Fiction, &c.). But the scene cap­tured above at the begin­ning of the film, where Ornette quer­ies young Denardo about his mature pre-adolescent music­al approach, demon­strates Ornette’s unpre­dict­able sens­it­iv­ity, to say noth­ing of bandleading/parenting skills (not always the same thing, though Bern Nix, like many oth­ers, has stor­ies…). Never did see him as an act­or in Chappaqua, but esteem the hand­ful of times I saw him (esp., the unfor­get­table Song X tour with Metheny/Haden/DeJohnette + The Colemans) as eas­ily some of the greatest con­certs I’ve ever exper­i­enced. Change of the Century, for real.
  Wish I could be listen­ing to his WKCR day-long birth­day broad­cast now (cranked “Focus on Sanity” they were play­ing from the car when I dashed to lunch here in un-scenic Secaucus, NJ), but I for­got my head­phones and work in a truly Kafka-esque office with a floor of tightly arranged cubicles extend­ing out to the hori­zon. Sort of (film blog that this is) like the office scenes in Welles’ The Trial…

• groove68 says:

  March 9, 2010 at 4:44 pm

  Ornette: Made in America – no longer crim­in­ally unavailable:
  video on demand stream
  http://www.realeyz.tv/en/shirley-clarke-ornette-made-in-america_cont2029.html

• Glenn Kenny says:

  March 9, 2010 at 11:21 pm

  @ groove68: Thanks, it’s good to know it can be seen that way. I’d love to see a full-blown res­tor­a­tion, of that and of a few oth­er Clarke films.
  @ James: Yeah, all the Ornette shows I’ve seen have been keep­ers: Carnegie Hall, the legendary Prime Time/original quar­tet “In All Languages” show at Town Hall, the Battery Park show idi­ot­ic­ally cut short by the cops. I hope to see the man at least a couple more times while we’re still around.

• Fuzzy Bastarrd says:

  March 10, 2010 at 10:40 am

  Re: Clarke: No kid­din’! I caught some of her work at the Anthology ret­ro­spect­ive, and was amazed at how influ­en­tial much of it is. The Connection, obvi­ously, is the one that every­one should know; I had­n’t real­ized up until then how decis­ively it formed the whole NY indie aes­thet­ic, from Panic In Needle Park to Trees Lounge. It’d also be nice to have a non-bootleg ver­sion of her mem­or­able per­form­ance in Varda’s Lion’s Love—not a great movie (prob­ably the only Varda that isn’t a great movie), but a hel­luva time capsule.