Meltdown Festival 2009
South Bank Centre, London
The history and influence of free jazz legend and avant garde icon Ornette Coleman always made him an ideal candidate to be the 16th director of London’s most eclectic music festival, Meltdown, following in the footsteps of Scott Walker, David Bowie and Robert Wyatt. Reviewing a Coleman concert at the newly reopened Royal Festival Hall in Tribune two years ago, I likened him to an alchemist in a musical laboratory and this pioneering and experimental spirit was evident in the artists, collaborations and appearances from Patti Smith to Baaba Maal and from Yoko Ono to Yo La Tengo which formed the best festival line-up for years.
Saxophonist David Murray was a classic Coleman pick – a formidable and prolific tenor player with roots in gospel, free funk and African jazz whose dizzying circular breathing technique enables him to phrase in astonishingly long and fast swoops. Murray’s set with the Gwo Ka masters, the hand drummers of Guadeloupe’s folk music, was laced with propulsive grooves and joyful Creole melodies, in places nodding at Miles Davis with a slap funk bass and its rich chordal textures. It wasn’t all a torrent of incendiary rhythms as a Guadeloupian death prayer evoked a magnificent choral call and response while “Twa jou sans manje” (three days without food) was a blues drenched Afro lament.
Harmony meets melody or “harmolodics” has long been Coleman’s overarching musical vision – an open approach to musical expression without adherence to conventional tonal, rhythmic or harmonic structures. It chimes with the late Joe Zawinul’s depiction of his band’s dynamic that “nobody solos, everybody solos”. Indeed a harmolodics school took place for “ambitious musicians, dancers and other artists interested in practically exploring ideas of making art inspired by Ornette’s philosophy of harmolodics”.
So the harmolodic spirit was a prominent presence on the South Bank in sets from Coleman’s young British acolytes Get the Blessing, Acoustic Ladyland and Led Bib. However, it was his former guitarist, James “Blood” Ulmer, who proved a true adherent to the creed with an astonishingly cliché-free solo blues set of near spiritual intensity and depth (in marked contrast to Moby, who also performed), while ably supported by Shlomo’s Beatbox Harmolodics featuring Cleveland Watkiss.
A huge, hulking yet timidly gentle figure, Blood evoked a fantasy jam session between John Lee Hooker and John Coltrane, his ghostly voice pulsated with a ragged soulfulness amid plucky, spiky riffs, sitaresque upward runs and otherworldly flourishes. “Katrina” recalled John Martyn at his most melancholic, while “Dead Presidents” was all blues with no 12 bar. Coleman joined him on stage at the end for an emotional farewell, guru and disciple together. l
James McGowan
