There’s a scene right at the beginning of Ornette: Made in America that features a group of actors dressed up in old west clothing, doing a reenactment or performance of some sort for the onlooking crowd of Fort Worth, Texas natives. Guns are drawn quickly, and bodies hit the dusty streets like 10 pound bags of potatoes. Later in the film, Smithsonian Institute jazz critic, Martin Williams recounts a tale of Ornette Coleman playing at the Five Spot Cafe during a blizzard. During the set Ornette started playing a blues exactly the way Charlie “Bird” Parker would have. This moment of derivation struck Martin as odd, yet exciting. Ornette wasn’t known for playing a straight ahead blues the same way as the beboppers of the 40s and 50s. When Martin asked Ornette why he didn’t play like that more often, Ornette responded that it was something he just did for fun. After Martin’s anecdote, I recalled the opening scene. A quote from jazz bassist Charles Mingus popped into my head about the original title for the song “Gunslinging Birds,” which was originally called “If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger, There’d Be A Whole Lot of Dead Copycats.” I don’t think Ornette would have been in any danger of being one of Charlie’s victims, considering that for a majority of his life Ornette was as original as you could get. Ornette: Made in America, directed by the criminally overlooked Shirley Clarke, captures that originality in a way that is in sync with Ornette spectacularly explosive music and tripped out philosophies.
The phrase “Made in America” brings the association of something that is a true original—something that could only spring forward from the constantly swirling melting pot of The United States. Ornette Coleman is one of America’s great creations. Born in Fort Worth, Texas on March 9th, 1930, he started playing saxophone as a teenager, mostly playing in R&B and dance bands. Even in this period, Ornette would stretch out on songs, not playing strictly in the key or in tempo. “Ornette has always been different,” his sister Truvenza Leach reminisced. This distinct attitude toward music wasn’t always met with open arms. Musician James Clay recounted the night he met Ornette out in a club in Los Angeles, when his bandmates weren’t so friendly to his zaggy style. “…the entire rhythm section, they just got up and left the stand, and left the saxophone player up there playin’. So I came to the conclusion that this has got to be Ornette Coleman.” It wouldn’t be until the landmark year of 1959 (the year Dave Brubeck’s Time Out, Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue, John Coltrane’s Giant Steps, Charles Mingus’s Mingus Ah Um and Duke Ellington’s score to Anatomy of a Murder were all released) that Ornette would have people start accepting his sound with the release of two albums: Tomorrow is the Question! and his seminal The Shape of Jazz to Come. When The Shape of Jazz to Come hit like a left hook from Muhammad Ali’s right hand, it caught people off guard. The music sounded downright alien. A jazz quartet with two horns, bass and drums and no piano. Having no piano or guitar in a group at that time was like having a house with no doors and open windows. Ornette’s play style sounded even more extraterrestrial. He had hte dexterity and lightness of Charlie Parker, but the wail of a preacher in the pool pit, speaking in tongues.
Later that year Ornette would play a legendary engagement at the Five Spot Cafe that would be extended from two weeks to ten. Music luminaries such as Leonard Bernstein and Miles Davis dropped by just to get a taste of this new sound. In 1960 he’d push this sound even further out with the release of the album Free Jazz. The album coined the name for the genre and was the first definitive recording of the avant garde movement: two quartets simultaneously playing their own themes, motifs, and improvisations without the confines of harmonic movement in stereo. After Free Jazz, Ornette would continue to push the envelope and dip his toes in everything from third-stream jazz, symphonic pieces and jazz fusion (his brand of jazz fusion was called “free funk”). Along the way through mutual friend Yoko Ono, he would meet and collaborate with experimental and independent filmmaker Shirley Clarke.
Clarke was a dancer and choreographer before shifting to filmmaking. She got early notice with her first feature film The Connection, adapted from the play by Jack Gelber, about heroin addicts waiting for their fix in a New York apartment. The Connection featured music and live performance by composer and pianist Freddie Redd and hard-bop and post-bop saxophonist Jackie McLean, meaning Clarke would not be a stranger to working with jazz greats. She followed up with the neorealist film Cool World, featuring non-actors playing the parts of street youths. Her documentary Robert Frost: A Lover’s Quarrel with the World about the titular poet would signal her emergence from the underground after winning an Academy Award for best documentary feature. In the mid ’60s after meeting Ornette, Clarke started making a documentary about him due to the fact that this was the era in which Ornette was using his musically untrained 11 year old son Denardo Coleman as the drummer in his new band. Shirley shot footage for a few years before abandoning the project due to creative and financial problems with the film’s producer.
Fast forward to 1983: Fort Worth is opening a new performing arts center called “The Caravan of Dreams,” and they want Ornette to christen Ornette and his then current band “Prime Time” to christen the occasion with a performance of his mixed ensemble piece “Skies of America.”
Ornette was also receiving a key to the city and having an honorary day named after him. Ornette suggested Clarke be the one to document it. Using the almost forgotten footage from the ’60s, the documentation of the events at Fort Worth, and editing techniques that put the material in line with Ornette’s own musical philosophies and play style, Clarke managed to make something that stands apart from the run of the mill “talking heads” documentaries that people were used to. She created an impressionistic portrait of a unique artist
“I wasn’t trying to make a ‘documentary’ of Ornette Coleman,” Clarke explained in an L.A. Times interview. “We wanted people to come away feeling a certain way about somebody and knowing a little bit about his music and it’s relation to him.” Clarke threw every unconventional method she could muster at the screen to get this relationship (not document) across—the most noteworthy being that she eschewed all the history of Ornette’s major contributions to music. Gone are mentions of Free Jazz and The Shape of Jazz to Come in favor of non-linear glimpses and vaguely remarked upon performances from the late ’60s and ’70s and conversations with his son Denardo. This was done consciously so that you don’t get the hagiography of a mythical man, but his place in the world as an artist and a human being.
This isn’t the documentary to come to if you want a Wikipedia-like overview of a historical figure. Everything in the movie supports the now and spontaneity of Ornette’s art and personality. Rapid strobelike editing switching between Ornette’s face and the face of someone telling a story about him gives the impression of thaumatrope (the optical illusionary bird in a cage toy as seen in The Prestige or Sleepy Hollow). Clarke experimented with some early video techniques, having crudely ‘photoshopped’ footage of Ornette flying through space on a exercise bike in a red jump suit, as Ornette himself talks about his relationship to his physical form and the cosmos. Clarke’s approach to the film was an attempt to sync up with Ornette’s own musical theory and philosophy of “Harmolodics,” which Ornette defines in the films as, “The expression of all individual imagination… each being’s individual imagination is their own unison. And there are as many unisons as there are stars in the sky.” To Ornette, what made music,and more broadly sound itself, so special was that it can’t be described by conventional means. In an interview with Philip Clark of the Guardian he gave the example, “88 notes…but only one sound of the piano, and I haven’t heard anyone describe what a piano is.” Shirley Clarke tried to use the medium of film to capture that “unison” and singular quality that only movies have the ability to do—moving in and out of linear time, changing context just through imagery, superimposing sound where none existed, and splicing footage for a surreal and fantastical effect. Whether Clarke truly captured the ideology of Harmolodics is up for debate, but inarguably it makes for a one-of-a-kind viewing experience.
Ornette: Made in America would be Clarke’s final film. It serves as a summation of all of her work. Never one to stay static, Ornette would continue to change and innovate all the way up until his death in 2015. Few documentaries have gone to the depths Clarke went to to capture the true essence of the subject being documented, through form and content. The melding of these two forces produced a unique document worthy of its moniker—something that feels like it was truly “Made in America.”
IU Cinema screened Shirley Clarke’s The Connection, Ornette: Made in America, and Robert Frost: A Lover’s Quarrel with the World in November 2012. In March 2013 Dennis Doros of Milestone Pictures was present for a screening of Portrait of Jason and delivered his lecture Where’s Shirley: The Restoration of Portrait of Jason.
Want to explore another great jazz legend? Rahsaan Roland Kirk: The Case of the Three Sided Dream screens at Sunday, March 26, 2017 at 3:00 p.m. Director Adam Kahan is scheduled to be present. This documentary is an absorbing look at a seemingly superhuman musical force, Rahsaan Roland Kirk (1935–77), who wouldn’t even let partial paralysis keep him from pursuing what he called “The Religion of Dreams.” The film is packed with electrifying archival footage of Kirk and his music, intimate interviews, and inspired animated sequences.
David Carter is a film lover and a menace. He plays jazz from time to time but asks you not to hold that against him. His taste in movies bounces from Speed Racer to The Holy Mountain and everything in between.