Skies Of America (Rm)

Product Details

Artist : Ornette Coleman
Binding : Audio CD
EAN : 0074646356821
Label : Sony, BMG Japan
Number of Discs : 1
Product Group : Music
Release Date : 2000-06-06
UPC : 074646356821

ASIN : B00004T0PZ

Track Listings for

Disc-1
1. Skies of America
2. Native Americans
3. Good Life
4. Birthdays and Funerals
5. Dreams
6. Sounds of Sculpture
7. Holiday for Heroes
8. All of My Life
9. Dancers
10. Soul Within Woman
11. Artists in America
12. New Anthem
13. Place in Space
14. Foreigner in a Free Land
15. Silver Screen
16. Poetry
17. Men Who Live in the White House
18. Love Life
19. Military
20. Jam Session
21. Sunday in America

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Editorial Reviews

From Amazon.com

Where others have seen musical boundaries, Ornette Coleman has always found possibilities--from his original conception of free jazz and the classic Atlantic recordings of 1959-61 to the use of electric guitars and funk rhythms in the later Prime Time. While the pure cry of the blues is an integral part of his music, he has also immersed himself in formal composition, writing for wind and string ensembles as well as large orchestra. Skies of America is his most ambitious work, a full-length symphony in one movement. This CD reissues the 1972 version performed by the London Symphony Orchestra with conductor David Meaghan, the work's only commercial recording. It was a performance fraught with problems. While the work was planned to include Coleman's quartet, British musicians' union regulations prevented their appearance. The time limits of the LP format required that the piece be slightly abridged, and for the original issue, Columbia decided to break up the immense single movement into 21 parts. Listening to it 28 years after the original release, however, you'll find that none of that matters. Instead, it's the breadth of Coleman's vision that emerges, as he shifts and combines the playful, the somber, and the chaotic, blurring any convenient notions of the simple and the complex. Some moments will suggest Charles Ives, and others hint at inspirations in Anton Bruckner and Béla Bártok, but the cumulative impact and the evolving musical language are Coleman's own. His use of two drummers playing contrary rhythms is a brilliant stroke, one that demonstrates the rewards of the improvisation laboratory. And Coleman's own alto saxophone soars on some key movements, such as "The Artist in America" and "The Men Who Live in the White House." This CD issue has removed the brief spaces that once separated the 21 parts, restoring the single-movement work that Coleman intended. Stuart Broomer

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