Zach Top This Is Our Music [VINYL]

The inventor of what has been called "free jazz," Ornette Coleman belongs to that rare breed of artists/thinkers whose influence extends far beyond the realm of their chosen medium. Always putting his remarkable virtuosity at the service of melody and emotion, he has had a powerful impact on how musicians play, improvise, and compose, on how music lovers listen, on the color and sound of music the world over. It was while working as an elevator operator in the late-50s in Los Angeles, CA that he formed the Ornette Coleman Quintet, a core of players who would figure largely in his life: a lanky teenage trumpeter, Don Cherry, and a cherubic double bass player with a pensive style, Charlie Haden, who in Ornette found a dream accomplice. Drummers Billy Higgins and Ed Blackwell also joined the intense exploratory fold as integral pieces. Coleman fondly recalls his early collaborators: "I would write new music all the time, usually for every show we had, and they would play like they had been playing it their whole lives. As a group and as human beings, we found a relationship to our common humanity and to the creation of art that was really special, truly something else." This Is Our Music was issued on Atlantic Records in 1960, Coleman's third release for the label and fifth release overall. The seminal 7-song set is his first with drummer Ed Blackwell in place of Billy Higgins and is also significant in that it's Coleman's lone Atlantic release to feature a non-original, the Gershwin standard "Embraceable You." The remainder of the program is comprised of creative Coleman compositions which give the piano-less quartet room to showcase their immense improvisational talents, highlighted by numbers like "Blues Connotation," "Beauty Is a Rare Thing" and "Kaleidoscope." This essential edition of the Ornette Coleman Quartet's 1960 album This Is Our Music by ORG Music was mastered from the original analog tapes at 45RPM by Bernie Grundman, pressed on two 180 gram audiophile-grade LPs at Pallas in Germany, and is housed in an old school style Stoughton case-wrapped gatefold jacket.