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Thriving On Riff 3

The document discusses Jaron Lanier visiting jazz saxophonist Ornette Coleman at his home in New York City. Ornette Coleman was an innovator of free jazz who believed improvisation should not be constrained by song structure or form. He demonstrated this by having Lanier play his saxophone and explaining that one can have a conversation using just the twelve musical notes.

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18 views

Thriving On Riff 3

The document discusses Jaron Lanier visiting jazz saxophonist Ornette Coleman at his home in New York City. Ornette Coleman was an innovator of free jazz who believed improvisation should not be constrained by song structure or form. He demonstrated this by having Lanier play his saxophone and explaining that one can have a conversation using just the twelve musical notes.

Uploaded by

muhdqasim
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Thriving on a Riff 95

Berkeley Hills, Jaron nonchalantly said, “Stephon, remember that fruit-


fly thing? Well, some buddies of mine turned the technology into a
start-up and wrote me a check. That’s how I got this house.” Not bad
for someone who never went to high school. Well to be fair, Jaron did
build and live in his own geodesic dome tent in New Mexico and at-
tend college math classes as a teen.
Jaron also played the saxophone, so at some point during that first
meeting in New York, sax talk came up. “You know, Stephon, my buddy
Ornette Coleman lives uptown. How about we go visit him?” My jaw
dropped. This is the same Ornette Coleman I had listened to as a kid
in the Bronx, my first serendipitous exposure to jazz improvisation. Lee
responded before I could stop daydreaming: “Oh, that would be fantas-
tic.” Jaron picked up the phone, and after a yellow cab ride, we found
ourselves in Ornette’s midtown palace.
Ornette Coleman was raised in the blues and folk tradition of Texas
and is one of the major innovators of free jazz. At the time I was (and
still am) studying what some musicians consider straight ahead or clas-
sic mainstream jazz. As with theoretical physics, it’s necessary to first
master a whole body of knowledge in order to play straight ahead. As
an example, if you are in a jam session, and someone called a tune, say
“Autumn Leaves,” you would be expected to know the head (the be-
ginning melody) and the remaining form (the harmonic and rhythmic
structure). So an improvised solo on classic jazz is constrained by the
structure or form of a song. But my discussions and lessons with Or-
nette would change the way I thought about improvisation and its con-
nection to theoretical physics.
Ornette was a gentle, calm man who spoke often in parables. When
I first met him, he took me to his studio and showed me his quintes-
sential white alto saxophone. Then he gave it to me and said: “Give it
a try.” Imagine: one of the legends of jazz asking you to play his horn.
On one level, it was beyond flattering; on another, very frightening.
He gave me a clean mouthpiece and reed, and I started playing up and
down a scale. Then, gently, he said, “It’s amazing that there are only
twelve notes, and you can have a conversation with those notes.” It

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