Happy birthday to the great, and still active and vital, Mr. Coleman, seen above with his son Denardo in Shirley Clarke's wonderful (and criminally ill-available) 1985 Ornette: Made In America.
Ornette at 80
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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…
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
@ 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.
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.