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Ornette Coleman on the connection between harmolodics and Jewish cantorial music
9.22.06
In "Seeking the Mystical Inside the Music", a fascinating "listening interview" with Ornette Coleman in yesterday's New York Times, the avant-garde jazz musician and composer talks at length about the great effect hearing the great cantor Yossele Rosenblatt had on his music:
MR. COLEMAN'S first request was something by Josef Rosenblatt, the Ukrainian-born cantor who moved to New York in 1911 and became one of the city's most popular entertainers — as well as a symbol for not selling out your convictions. (He turned down a position with a Chicago opera company, but was persuaded to take a small role in Al Jolson's film “The Jazz Singer.”) I brought some recordings from 1916 and we listened to “Tikanto Shabbos,” a song from Sabbath services. Rosenblatt's voice came booming out, strong and clear at the bottom, with miraculous coloratura runs at the top.
“I was once in Chicago, about 20-some years ago,” Mr. Coleman said. “A young man said, 'I'd like you to come by so I can play something for you.' I went down to his basement and he put on Josef Rosenblatt, and I started crying like a baby. The record he had was crying, singing and praying, all in the same breath. I said, wait a minute. You can't find those notes. Those are not 'notes.' They don't exist.”
He listened some more. Rosenblatt was working with text, singing brilliant figures with it, then coming down on a resolving note, which was confirmed and stabilized by a pianist's chord. “I want to ask something,” he said. “Is the language he's singing making the resolution? Not the melody. I mean, he's resolving. He's not singing a 'melody.' ”
It could be that he's at least singing each little section in relation to a mode, I said.
“I think he's singing pure spiritual,” he said. “He's making the sound of what he's experiencing as a human being, turning it into the quality of his voice, and what he's singing to is what he's singing about. We hear it as 'how he's singing.' But he's singing about something. I don't know what it is, but it's bad.”
I wonder how much of it is really improvised, I said. Which up-and-down melodic shapes, and in which orders, were well practiced, and which weren’t.
“Mm-hmm,” he said. “I understand what you're saying. But it doesn't sound like it's going up and down; it sounds like it's going out. Which means it's coming from his soul.”
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