There is a humanity and even a lyricism at the heart of the music of Ornette Coleman, as the audience in the Whitla Hall, Belfast, on Tuesday night experienced. Finding it involves journeying through a strange, wonderful and constantly changing landscape of light and shadow.
There were, effectively, two concerts here, the most accessible and popular of which was Coleman, and his rhythm section teamed up with a fine septet of Irish traditional musicians, including Michael McGoldrick, John McSherry and Jonjo Kelly, as well as soulful traditional vocalist Karan Casey. They collaborated on Coleman's very loosely composed Belfast Suite. While this patriarch of free jazz has successfully drawn influences from Africa and India, his experiment with Irish music was less accomplished.
Certainly, there was a joyful anarchy about this odd collision of idioms that conjured thoughts of the riotous disorder of a band like Loose Tubes. But if the ambition was some new territory between the two musical forms it didn't quite work. The dominant voice was the Irish music while Ornette's, although contributing to the exultant cacophony, was swamped amid the uileann pipes, fiddle, bodhran, flute, guitar, whistles and keyboard. The musicians needed longer together for the project to succeed.
More complex, but far more satisfying, was the opening section of the night, which belonged to just Ornette and his coasting, freewheeling rhythm section - his son Denardo on drums and Charles Moffett on double bass. Here we had the Ornette Coleman motifs: free jazz, intense and challenging for sure but with a special depth and vision, and always that distinct, beautiful, clear-belled tone from his alto-sax playing. Whether brisk or slow or mid-tempo, or all three in the one number, we were brought in a line through dissonance, melody, order, disorder, note surges, snatches of swing and blues, and numerous jazz musical moods.
Searching, difficult music of great mastery, emotion and conviction, it was altogether as unpredictable as it was unforgettable.
