Between Thought and Action
Ornette Coleman was one of the few musicians to approach music with a new syntax, intimating that music is essentially a shadow of language (or language as a vestige of music), and played within the cracks of that ambiguity.
Language can sometimes have prosody and pattern, and can sound musical. Ornette Coleman's music is like that--a chattering stream of phonemes sometimes becoming a comprehensible language. Slippage between sense and nonsense is what makes it compelling.
There are many moments in an Coleman composition or performance that can be strident and annoying. Dissonance is difficult not only to listen to, but from a compositional or improvisational perspective, difficult to reconcile with the tradition of consonance. A Jackson Pollock painting has this quality. It is completely non-representational; one should not see any forms within the sinew of paint spatter. In dissonant music, the occurrence of a consonant triad should be strictly avoided.
We now know that the brain impulses are a microsecond ahead of every movement. This is perfectly intuitive (literally) from a musician's perspective, otherwise music could not occur as a contiguous event. When reading music, we read the bars ahead as we're playing the current one. In Ornette's angular phraseology, every micro-moment is transfigured. As regards Jackson Pollock, the performance is edited as it occurs, so that no representational forms appear on the canvas. The analogue in music is that no perfect sonorities or triads occur. Paint can be pushed around when it appears as a "mistake", but "wrong" notes take time to recontextualize. And Ornette let all the "errors" be suspended, unmoored from the gravity imposed by diatonic harmony. Pandiatonicism (using all the notes in a scale at once) is a way to escape the gravity of the tonic note, and Ornette's (and James Blood Ulmer's) harmolodics was a step beyond that.
This brings to mind something Walter Murch said of the metaphor of DNA and film editing: at some juncture commonalities in the DNA between species branch off into different forms. Culture has lots of common DNA, but it's much more complex than that. Humans have access to the buffer zone between unconscious thought and action, and that's what makes art so wonderful in all its forms. It is a "play space" in more ways than one. Coleman and Pollock (and many other artists) bring clarity to those parts of consciousness that we don't realize are there.
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Post-sctipt June 14, 2015:
In retrospect, we have a tendency to associate certain artists as contemporaries, although at the time they were created, they had no intimate connection. Ornette Coleman's first record came out in 1958, and Pollock died in 1956. It is certainly plausible that Pollock (at least subliminally) influenced Coleman, as Pollock was a celebrity. Cross-pollinations are happening all the time, but sometimes you don't fully realize them until decades later.
http://www.artnews.com/2015/06/11/ornette-colemans-jackson-pollock-connection
