Musicians, writers and scholars on Ornette Coleman | Hacker News Reader

Musicians, writers and scholars on Ornette Coleman

nytimes.com

54 pointstintinnabula23 comments

I always found his harmolodic concepts interesting, if delivered unevenly. I feel like some of his proteges did a better job implementing the ideas that Ornette did sometimes (e.g. Ronald Shannon Jackson's Decoding Society, or some of Jamaaladeen Tacumas stuff) but in general Ornette was brilliant and interesting.

True story digression: went to an Ornette concert with my Missus at the time, and a pair of friends. One of them disappears right before the show from a cigarette break. After the show we find her and ask where she went...she had run into Tom Waits out front, who bummed a light from her and as a reward asked if she wanted to sit with his family in their box seats. Who would say no to that offer?

One of my all time favorites and an inspiration, as I'm a musician too. Push boundaries and break stuff.

Love his work. The Shape Of Jazz To Come is so good.

Free Jazz is a crazy album. Especially when listened to with headphones. Each stereo channel has a distinct quintet playing. Challenging listen for sure.

A lot of people don’t realize that opinions about Ornette Coleman are often tied to how a person reacts to irregular tuning.

Some people find deliberately ‘off pitch’ notes stimulating, some people find them unlistenable. Like fingernails on the chalkboard.

This is quite true but I like to think that the stimulating feeling can be learned.

Virgin Beauty is my favorite Ornette Coleman & Prime Time album. There is some really crazy, goofy stuff going on, and it's always fun to hear Jerry Garcia noodling around aimlessly in the background.

One of the rare jazz devotees of the Grafton:

https://wikiless.org/wiki/Grafton_saxophone?lang=en

Rare how? Charlie Parker famously used it on Jazz at Massey Hall

That's two major jazz saxophonists. That's rare, in my book.

Doesn't sound like he was that devoted to it: he bought it because it was cheap, and later moved to a white-lacquered Selmer that looked similar but played better.

Yeah, too late for me to retract the word "devotee" when "player" would have sufficed.

Been listening to this all day. This style of jazz may be my new go-to listening music.

famously, kingsley amis and philip larkin couldn't stand him - they were not mad about coltrane or davis either) - in the case of coleman, i tend to agree.

Sounds more like they just didn't like Jazz!

larkin was a famous and influential writer on the subject

And Miles, Coltrane, and Coleman are the seeds of everything that happened in Jazz since post-bop

Phillip Larkin was a "trad jazz" devotee and his writing about music has not aged well at all. It probably would have completely faded into obscurity were it not for the fact that his poetry is so well-known.

The headline is "5 Minutes That Will Make You Love Ornette Coleman".

Why does HN monkey with titles like this?

The alternative is for HN to be dominated by clickbait, which would make for a completely different site.

The title editing system (software and mods) works well except when it doesn't. The cases where it works well are priced in—they aren't noticeable and everyone takes them for granted. The cases where it doesn't work do get noticed, and often amplified. It's understandable! but skewed. If you weight the pros of a system at 0% and the cons at 100%, it ends up looking inexplicably terrible.

Incidentally, the fix for the OP is not to add the magic number back—it's to rewrite the title so it's not clickbait to begin with. That's in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait" (I've done that now.)

HN's headline style auto-formatter is getting weirder. Are all leading numbers removed now? Would "3,700 expected to be laid off from Twitter" become "expected to be laid off from Twitter"?

I appreciate the intent of this algorithm, but I'm not convinced it's still fulfilling its original purpose.

I wonder if it’s just programmed to look for clickbait listicle numbers like

5 secrets your doctor doesn’t want you to know

10 ways to grow muscle without exercising

And that sort of thing. Maybe it’s even just looking for any leading number under 15 or something like that. I’d expect out of any random assortment of modern day headlines, most that start with a low number are clickbait nonsense, where something that starts with a number in the hundreds or thousands is likely to be a real article

This isn't "getting weirder", this has been the case for close to a decade if not more. HN has long removed the numbers. The good news is that the submitter has time (though in this case I think it's expired) to edit headlines for submissions, I think it's the same time window as comment editing, 1.5-2 hours. When you submit a headline and it's altered by HN in a meaningful way, you can change it back to the original.

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