Dancing About Architecture?

Some thoughts on free music. (Alternate title - "Where's the Melody?")

These thoughts are spurred by a comment left in a post here which I initially misinterpreted, to the effect
"In my favorite music you can't tell who's playing what".

I remember many years ago complaining to a friend who turned me fully on to Sun Ra that I had problems with not being able to hear who was playing what.
At the time, I was probably listening almost exclusively to the early music of Ornette Coleman, who's music of the late 50's is a precursor of much of the free music that came after.

In Ornette's Harmolodic theory (and I'm paraphrasing here, but I'll give you the gyst as I understand it- but note that many people have complained that even Ornette's spoken and written thoughts on the subject of his own theory are frustratingly vague and unclear), but- in any case:
In harmolodic music the focal point (which Ornette refers to as "the melody") can be anywhere at any given moment; it can be in the saxophone one moment and in the bass the next, then the trumpet for a few moments, then in the drums.
(Just referring to a melodic drum part is problematic, as drums are typically un-pitched. I think perhaps part of the fuss some people make about this theory's vagueness may be in here somewhere: "The Melody".)

Webern had, many years earlier, created (or at least named) a melody of a sort he called "Klangfarbenmelodie" - Tone-Color Melody,
Which is a somewhat similar thing, or at least gives us a somewhat similar result: the melody in Webern's music skips from instrument to instrument, sometimes in single note transitions, which can make the melody very hard to follow for someone (like me) who doesn't really read music, and has no music-theory knowledge to speak of. (To be more precise- I can't recognize what a particular piece of music will sound like by looking at it, beyond certain basics- "That's fast, that's dense, that's wobbly"...)
And so, when I listen to Webern (for example) what I hear as the melody may not be, strictly speaking - according to Dodecaphonic (twelve-tone) theory - the melody at all, but simply what I perceive as the moving focal point of the musical line.

So, I personally never thought I had grasped the meaning of Harmolodic theory, but I noticed that when I hummed the melody to (say) "Lonely Woman" from the album "The Shape Of Jazz To Come", I found myself singing a bit of Ornette's line, then a bit of Don Cherry's, and back and forth, and maybe even a few of the notes in the bass line (played by Charlie Haden), and this is what, in my mind, I had absorbed as the "melody". I think I had perhaps intuitively grasped the practical result of Ornette's theory.

Now- creating a music where a listener can't tell who's playing what isn't really that difficult- a high degree of similarity in sound between instruments will achieve this effect - i.e: all loud, all low, all high, all fast, etc, etc...
But a music which achieves this effect the way the best jazz ensembles often do- with the interplay being so "close" that it verges on e.s.p. is really inspiring to hear.

It does, however, make the music rather difficult to write about with any degree of precision: Trying to pick it apart in order to laud the merits of a given player's contribution when the music achieves an effect which seems to make manifest the dictum "the whole is greater than the sum of the parts" is really quite difficult, and may leave one who writes and/or reads the result with the feeling that something essential has been lost in the translation.
One can read only so much vague prose about "sound-masses" and suchlike.

Many of the Jazz records of the type I'm alluding to here have no liner notes, and usually an interested reader will end up reading details about chronology and personel replacing critical review or analysis, a la wikipedia (but, to be fair, criticism is not their mandate)...Perhaps this is a good thing, as the music can be left to speak for itself, as it usually can.
But perhaps also, a few extraneous words about the content and context of the music can be helpful to some.

The gist of this is- I may post some records with almost NO text to accompany them. It's not that these records are any less interesting or important to me, it's just that the music might in my opinion speak so clearly (or perhaps opaquely) that any extra "help" from me might seem unnecessary (or worse: facile).

So- Here's some music: