Old and New Dreams

I may have said this before, but jazz tributes and reunions don’t do much for me. I’d rather hear the music moving on, using its past as the basis for further development. There are exceptions, including the welcome rediscoveries and reinterpretations of Herbie Nichols’ compositions by various musicians, Ryan Truesdell’s meticulous reconstruction of Gil Evans’s lesser known pieces, Alan Skidmore’s lifelong homage to John Coltrane and — of course — Old and New Dreams, four players who convened in 1976 to continue the work they’d done as members of Ornette Coleman’s acoustic quartets.

The trumpeter Don Cherry, the tenor saxophonist Dewey Redman, the bassist Charlie Haden and the drummer Ed Blackwell made three albums together, all for European companies. The first was for Italy’s Black Saint label. The second and third were for ECM, and the first of those will shortly reappear as part of the German company’s vinyl series under the general rubric ‘Luminessence’, along with Gary Burton’s New Quartet. (The first two albums in the series were Kenny Wheeler’s Gnu High and Nana Vasconcelos’s Saudades.)

In the case of Old and New Dreams, it’s good to have the album’s cover, designed by Barbara Wojirsch around the photograph by Herbert Wenn, back in 12-inch form: the calm austerity of the image and the controlled informality of the hand lettering are echt ECM. So is the sound, engineered by Jan Erik Kongshaug at Oslo’s Talent Studio under the supervision of Manfred Eicher, a combination that produced some of the label’s finest recordings throughout the 1970s.

The album begins with a 12-minute version of “Lonely Woman”, the classic ballad Coleman first recorded in Los Angeles in 1959 for The Shape of Jazz to Come, to which it also provided the lead-off track. Cherry and Haden were present for that momentous session (Billy Higgins was the drummer), and their historic connection to the song contributes to the extraordinary richness of this interpretation. If the original was a five-minute miniature in which every note could be committed to memory, here the framework is stretched to incorporate new perspectives. If I could only keep half a dozen tracks from the five decades of ECM, this would be one of them.

The remainder of the album maintains the standard: another Coleman tune (the previously unknown bounce-tempo “Open or Close”) plus Blackwell’s African-flavoured “Togo”, Cherry’s lyrical desert-blues “Guinea”, Redman’s musette feature “Orbit of La-Ba”, and Haden’s eco-anthem “Song of the Whales”, the bassist using his bow to create the sound of the endangered marine leviathans as an introduction to his gorgeous descending theme, which manages to be simultaneously mournful and uplifting.

All four of these musicians are gone now, as are Ornette and Higgins. But the unique music they made lives on, not least in this priceless reincarnation and the epic “Lonely Woman” it contains.

* Old and New Dreams is out in a vinyl edition on the ECM label on June 23. I don’t know who took the photo of the quartet — Charlie Haden, Don Cherry, Ed Blackwell and Dewey Redman — playing together; if anyone has that information, please tell me and I’ll provide a credit.