This is another case of what I call Citizen Kane Syndrome. Have I mentioned that before? I feel sure I must have, but neither Google nor Typepad's search can find it, if I have. To explain, at the risk of repeating myself, the first time I saw Citizen Kane, I quite enjoyed it, but I felt it was a bit of a let down after the enormous build-up of what I'd heard about it being the greatest film ever made. Once more, you put me right, explaining the many innovations and never-seen-before techniques that the film deployed. CKS, then, is the experience of missing what made something special because all those things have since become commonplace.
The techniques used in Citizen Kane were part of the everyday grammar of films for my generation. The Shape of Jazz to Come came, like Dancing in Your Head, with a reputation as one of Ornette's avant-garde breakthrough albums. That's why I bought it, and that's why I was shocked at how unshocking it sounded: this was what I expected bebop to sound like, not free improvisation. (By this stage, I probably already had Ascension and Derek Bailey, and frequented free improv gigs, so those formed my expectations of avant-garde.)
This time I didn't have you to explain it all to me. Now I depend on Wikipedia to detail things like Ornette's abandonment of chord structures.
The difference between Citizen Kane and Ornette is that I now feel like I understand most of what there is to 'get' about the former, but the latter is still beyond my reach. At his Barbican show five years ago (mentioned previously), Ornette apparently played Lonely Woman, the opening track on The Shape…. I didn't even recognise it.
MusicBrainz entry for this album
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