A New History of Jazz
Alyn Shipton
You could tell whenever the band was playing, because the audience would be outside on the sidewalk, and then when the intermission came, they’d go into the club for a drink.
Paul Bley describing the debut of Ornette Coleman at the Hillcrest Club, Los Angeles, in 1958.
It was my night off from my regular gig, and I went to an after hours jam session based around Gerry Mulligan’s band at a place called the Haig.The room was jam-packed, and you couldn’t even walk in there, but a man came up to stage, took out a plastic alto sax, and began to play. And the room lit up for me. I’d never heard anything so brilliant, because I’d gone to a lot of jam sessions myself and been hearing a way in which I could play without using chord structures, but staying on a certain part of the tune, or staying in a mode, or even creating an entirely new structure. Whenever I tried it, people would get upset, but here I heard somebody actually doing all that. It really startled me, but almost as soon as he started to play, they asked him to stop.
Charlie Haden on Ornette Coleman.
