Music Arcades: Ornette Coleman: Dancing in Your Head

It's been a musically challenging couple of weeks here on Music Arcades. The month started off easily enough with The Beach Boys, but just recently we've had dark satire, non-intentional composition, industrial gothic, avant-prog-pop, a quasi-apologia for Stalin, Old Testament lecturing, postmodern gaming and… more avant-prog-pop. So it's nice to relax with an album of… ethno-harmolodic jazz.

Somewhere in the eighties I read a profile of Ornette that identified his landmark albums. Dancing in Your Head was one of them. For years it wasn't in any record shop where I looked for it. And then suddenly it was, just once. This copy (£7.99, Record Collector, Broomhill). So I bought it. That was a long time ago now. The music is familiar to me. I don't understand it, but it's familiar.

Ornette's been in town recently for the Meltdown festival, and the Master Musicians of Joujouka, who dominate the final track on Dancing in Your Head, featured heavily in the programme he curated. It seemed like the best Meltdown since at least Patti Smith's in 2005. I would have gone to several of the shows had it been the old days (i.e. no Boy, and just a pleasant 30 minute walk to the venue), but as it was I just went to the night Patti Smith was on, with Medwyn. That was the event I thought I had most chance of understanding.