Ornette Coleman

Which of you remembers the ending of "Sunset Boulevard", Billy Wilder's masterpiece, in which Norma Desmond, a former silent-film star, descends the staircase of her Hollywood mansion as if she were about to play a leading role in some major picture ("Alright, Mr. De Mille, I'm ready for my close-up"), rather than turning herself in to the police for killing the writer Joe Gillis?

Since last night I consider Ornette Coleman the Norma Desmond of jazz: seventy-three years old, a career behind him that is frankly intimidating (besides being the first musician to use the term "free jazz", he composed and played on dozens of albums fundamental to the evolution of jazz and, I believe, of rock too) and, above all, he's still alive. But he won't accept having grown old. And, just to prove he's still the great Ornette, he puts together barren tours in which he pours out on the audience clusters of icy notes that clash with the music he gave us long ago. There was a time when jazz musicians didn't have the bank-clerk faces that populate modern album covers: in all likelihood, having lived music to the point of exhaustion has carried our man into the arms of old age completely burnt out. It's already something just to see him standing. But not enough.

At the Auditorium del Lingotto in Turin I witnessed a merciless, moving spectacle, in which this elderly gentleman, flanked by two top-notch musicians (Tony Falanga and — believe it or not — Greg Cohen on double bass) and a wretched, thoroughly nepotistic drummer (better known as The-Son-Of-Coleman), showed that he could no longer stand properly, could no longer play, and could no longer remember the music that made him unique and irreplaceable.

The Great Ornette is no more, and as I listened to the endless stylistic exercises with which he delighted the ears of the usual snobbish old dears in the front rows (who left the theatre far happier than I did), the notes of "Invisible", "Focus On Sanity", "Change Of The Century", "Ramblin'", "Joy Of A Toy", "Free Jazz" and, paradoxically, "Beauty Is A Rare Thing" played in my head. Beauty, indeed, is a rare thing. Very rare, dear Ornette. Irreplaceable.

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