Ornette Coleman at his 85th birthday party in March 2015.
John Rogers is a photographer living in New York City who specializes in jazz. A few weeks ago, he approached NPR with the idea to document the unique connection he shared with his friend Ornette Coleman. He was working on it when Coleman died last week at 85. Rogers finished the story for us here. —Ed.
When I was a teenager, I moved to Lancaster, Penn., for a summer. One of the only places I enjoyed was the record store. At this particular store — I think it was called Imaginary Records — there was a beautiful color poster on the wall of Ornette Coleman. I had fallen in love with Ornette's music growing up in Nashville, and I would always ask the guy in the store to sell me the poster. He always declined. It became a running joke between us.
The day I left for good, I went to the store to tell the clerk goodbye. To my shock, he had packaged up that poster of Ornette, and he gave it to me as a gift. If only I remembered his name, I would love to tell him all the stories of how I later became friends with Ornette Coleman — and shared that friendship with many others.
I first met Ornette after winning tickets to see him play Carnegie Hall on the radio station WKCR. (Well, I had met him in passing a few weeks earlier, but this was the first "official" meeting.) I went to the show and ran into Greg Cohen, Ornette's bassist at the time. Greg said he would try to get me backstage, but couldn't promise anything. After the show, I saw Greg's kids, and they took me backstage and said I was their cousin John. I had my camera and was taking a few photos when Ornette came up to me and started talking. He said he was enjoying what I had to say and invited me over to his apartment to continue our conversation. So the next day, when I finished work, I biked up to Ornette's pad.
I started going over there quite a lot and, at first, always by myself. Sometimes we listened to music together, or he destroyed me on the pool table. Mostly we would discuss philosophy. Ornette seemed to really enjoy my perspective, and vice versa. He gave me countless new ways to think about the universe and life. He had this unique way of thinking, and I found myself writing down everything he said. For example: "Sound can change things you would never imagine," or "Sound is eternal but means something different to everyone." Sometimes, we went to eat or wandered around Midtown. Once, we went to the Halloween parade on a whim after watching it start on TV.
We were both from the South originally, so I think we related to each other in that way. Ornette told me: "I grew up with musicians playing from sounds, not from notes. That's how the South was powerful. You may not understand it, but the emotion gets you. That's why existing is so eternal."
Funmi Tofowomo Okelola
-In the absence of greatness, mediocrity thrives.
No comments:
Post a Comment