The jazz musician Bob Dylan identified with: “They didn’t understand it”
The myriad musical patchwork that Bob Dylan‘s creative path snakes around across his over 60-year body of work would have surprised anybody eagerly immersing themselves in the folk revivalism that struck New York’s Greenwich Village as the 1960s arrived.
A jump into rock would infuriate the purists, but as the years rolled on, Dylan’s creative radar would point him toward born-again gospel, country roots, Rat Pack standards, a Christmas record, and even a hip-hop collaboration with Kurtis Blow.
A love of both the American songbook and its musical 20th-century bedrock binds his chequered creative fancies together, mining the nation’s history of its weathered blues and rock and roll heritage as much an excavator over a mere fan or inspired interpreter.
Jazz is no different. Dylan has smattered albums such as Love and Theft and Modern Times with jazzy arrangements, namechecking Art Pepper, Charlie Parker, Bud Powell, and Thelonious Monk in Rough and Rowdy Ways‘ ‘Murder Most Foul. Among jazz’s storied and evolving history, one artist struck Dylan as unique in his confounding originality and hunger to push the art form to new dimensions.
Speaking to author Bill Flanagan in 2017, Dylan highlighted the experimental work of free jazz pioneer Ornette Coleman for praise, and saw a parallel with the wrath Coleman had incurred after daring to deviate from the form just as Dylan had done when ‘going electric’: “I knew Ornette a little bit and we did have a few things in common. He faced a lot of adversity, the critics were against him, other jazz players that were jealous. He was doing something so new, so groundbreaking, they didn’t understand it. It wasn’t unlike the abuse that was thrown at me for doing some of the same kind of things, although with different forms of music”.
Coleman was an artist who courted controversy, at times to great personal risk. Keen to pull jazz away from its orthodoxies, a dissident solo in 1949 during an R&B set in Louisiana’s Baton Rouge resulted in a beat down outside the club by an enraged mob.
Jump to 1965, a show at Croydon’s Fairfield Hall for his UK debut triggered an attendee to demand Ray Noble’s ‘Cherokee’, a standard noted for its technically demanding performance. Seething, Coleman played a section of the tune in a shifted sequence of phrases as a response. The fan entitlement echoes the accusations of “Judas” hurled at Dylan by small-minded folkies during his UK tour the same year.
Both shared an affinity with a perennial embrace of styles, too. Coleman would grapple with the trumpet and violin outside his trusty saxophone, worked with the London Symphony Orchestra for 1972’s Skies of America and dabbled in jazz-funk in his Prime Time band. For the more open-minded jazz fan, Coleman’s self-described “harmolodics” would instil some philosophical edge to his work: “the use of the physical and the mental of one’s own logic made into an expression of sound to bring about the musical sensation of unison executed by a single person or with a group”.
From insatiable creative curiosity to cerebral disassemblage, Coleman’s unique take on the voluminous jazz genre and the conflicts he soldiered through provided Dylan with a solid template for his own artistic detours and steadfast soldiering through fan expectations who want their idyll forever in frozen stasis.
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