20. “Rock the Clock,” Ornette Coleman, The Complete Science Fiction Sessions (1971)

Ornette Coleman’s tenure at Columbia records lasted only one year, ending with Skies of America (1972), a symphonic piece living somewhere between jazz and classical—a space composer Gunther Schuller dubbed “third stream” music—and recorded by the London Symphony Orchestra. The album introduced listeners to harmolodic theory—which, according to a message from Coleman in the liner notes, “uses only melody, harmony, and the movement of forms…harmolodic modulation [means] to modulate in range without changing keys.”
 
Coleman explained his novel harmolodic method in a number of not-entirely-consistent ways over the years, but here it seems to involve marking the same melodies in the treble, bass, alto, and tenor clefs without necessarily worrying about transposition—a kind of chance operation that yields different notes in each register and creates some truly weird polytonality. The resulting work in one long movement—broken arbitrarily into 21 different “tracks”—features both a full drum kit and tympani, often plodding or thumping along without apparent regard for the rest of the orchestra.
 
In the year prior to unleashing Skies of America, Coleman worked on an album that reunited him with trusted collaborators from his past yet presented a bold afro-futurist vision. Science Fiction brought trumpeter Don Cherry and bassist Charlie Haden back into the fold, both of whom had played with Coleman on his groundbreaking albums in the late 1950s. But it also included sultry vocals from future space-disco icon Asha Puthli; spoken word by poet David Henderson, soaked in electronic echoes and broken up by the sounds of a crying baby; and drummers Billy Higgins and Ed Blackwell, often playing as if disconnected from the rest of the band. On many of the tracks, the horns stagger around in front of or behind the tempo set by the drummers’ busy interplay, giving the record a floating, unmoored feeling.
 
Writer Howard Mandel once referred to the song “Rock the Clock” as “funk-spoof”—presumably meaning that both the propulsive drum pattern that emerges halfway through the song and Charlie Haden’s wild, snarling electric bass, blown-up with distortion and cartoonish wah-wah, are played for laughs. Adding to this perception, Coleman solos over the damaged groove ecstatically on not one but two instruments on which he has no training: first with shrieking assaults on trumpet, then sawing and squealing away on the violin.
 
Though all of this does sound parodic, amateurism and wild, unschooled sounds were career-long preoccupations for Coleman. Take, for example, his decision to use his son, then-ten-year-old Denardo Coleman, as his drummer in 1966. Denardo would appear on three albums by decade’s end: The Empty Foxhole (1966), Ornette at 12 (1968), and Crisis (1969). Bassist Charlie Haden predicted that the boy would “startle every drummer who hears him,” but West Coast drummer Shelly Manne—who appeared on Coleman’s second album, Tomorrow Is the Question! (1959)—captured the critical consensus of the time by describing Denardo’s tentative, rudimentary playing as “unadulterated shit.”
 
Yet Coleman picked Denardo because he wanted to play with musicians who could abandon their preconceptions—and, unlike most drummers, his son hadn’t established any yet. As with Denardo’s tenure in his band, Science Fiction illustrates how Coleman was willing to follow his instincts wherever they led and risk misunderstanding and derision as long as it promised discovering something new. The record threads his past compositions, emerging sounds in popular music, and disorienting studio experimentation into one definitive statement.