Consumer Guide Album

Ornette Coleman: Ornette at 12/Crisis [Real Gone Music, 2017]
Released 1969 and 1972, Ornette's lost Impulse albums were recorded live at Berkeley May 1968 and NYU March 1969. Dewey Redman's tenor sax roughs up the alto/trumpet/violin-wielding leader, Charlie Haden bows darkly more than he plucks staunchly, and the drummer is 12-year-old Denardo, rumbling irrepressibly all over nine titles that are sometimes also tunes--"New York" and "Broken Shadows" cross-referential, "Song for Ché" a dirge to remember. It sounds good because what Ornette doesn't? But you hardly notice Don Cherry returning on the second album, and while you can hear what a magnificent player Denardo will become, he's here partly because he isn't yet--Ornette wanted a bottom more untethered than the mere magnificence a grooving Ed Blackwell would soon provide on 1970's Friends and Neighbors. The late '60s were politically turbulent times, and good for Ornette for trying to tell the truth about them. But in the end, that wasn't the kind of truth that set him free. B+