Ornette Coleman - Shape of Jazz to Come
1959
This album is beautiful in its simplicity. By abandoning the skeletal cage of chord structures, Ornette Coleman builds the music instead around the seductive beauty of a melodic theme, and the powerful expression of freedom in improvisation. No longer are all musical voices constrained to speak the same language, they come together willingly to express their common theme, and diverge just as consistently to express themselves, all the while maintaining a relation to the others. This is an album of principles—freedom, beauty, unity and individualism, but it does not rely on these principles to justify its greatness, in fact it does not need them at all. It speaks entirely for itself in a distinctly human language.
This was probably the first jazz album I fell in love with, and I still have yet to come across another one which surpasses it. It's right on the border between hard-bop and “real” avant-garde jazz, and because it's still based on melodies retains a common and relatable musical language; a language which is at the same time completely deconstructed and thereby humanized. What can be said about such abstract music to justify one's love for it? I could speak in abstractions, and speak of the relations between the instruments in terms of the harmonious elements of nature, how the bass flows like a river and how the sax seems to hover above it all, communicating in spurts of divinity. I could and I suppose I just have. Ultimately, however, this is an album you must sit down to, and confront directly to figure out if it's speaking to you or if the message was intended for someone else. If you're like me, the revelation will come pretty immediately.