Old And New Dreams, active 1976-87, was an Ornette Coleman tribute band comprising four former sidemen – tenor saxophonist Dewey Redman, bassist Charlie Haden, trumpeter Don Cherry and drummer Ed Blackwell. They played a mix of Coleman’s compositions and originals by band members.
Cherry was featured on over a dozen albums with Coleman, beginning with Something Else!!!!. Haden met Coleman shortly after that 1958 recording session. Blackwell joined Coleman’s band in 1959, replacing Billy Higgins, who’d lost his cabaret card, and first appeared with him in 1960 on This Is Our Music. Redman had attended high school in Fort Worth, Texas, where his classmates included Coleman, Charles Moffett, and Prince Lasha. He was featured on Coleman albums including New York Is Now! and Love Call (both 1968).
In the early 1970s, Redman and Haden joined Keith Jarrett’s band, while Cherry and Blackwell toured and recorded together. The four also appeared together on the Coleman albums Science Fiction and Broken Shadows, recorded in 1971. In 1975, Coleman formed Prime Time, and soon after, Jarrett’s group disbanded. The following year, after an abortive attempt to reform the acoustic Coleman quartet, came this Old And New Dreams debut.
The album was released in 1979, and its opening track was the first version of Coleman’s haunting composition Lonely Woman that I heard. I was transfixed by its wonderful polyrhythmic structure, though I doubt I knew that that’s what it was. The plangent “world music” composition Togo has spoken interjections, presumably by Cherry. In fact, the album could be described as a mix of Ornette Coleman and world music, but with the latter done in an Ornettish way.
The pieces by Cherry and Blackwell are inspired by African music, while Haden’s impressionistic Song For The Whales is an ecological delight. Haden illuminated the group’s procedure: “Instead of following a regular chord pattern, we use the melodies of the compositions as a guide and create new chord structures every time we play them.” On Guinea, Don Cherry does a Dizzy Gillespie, playing “arranger’s piano” – it must be him, since there’s saxophone, bass and drums as well.
It’s a wonderful release, and a superb recording – one of the albums of the decade. The live Playing followed on ECM (1980), and there were two discs on Black Saint: another self-titled studio record made in 1976, and 1987’s A Tribute To Blackwell, a birthday celebration. Old And New Dreams Live In Saalfelden, 1986, with Paul Motian substituting for Blackwell, was released by Condition West Recordings in 2017. This is a vinyl-only reissue.
Discography
Lonely Woman; Togo; Guinea; Open Or Close; Orbit Of La-Ba; Song For The Whales (46.49)
Don Cherry (t); Dewey Redman (ts); Charlie Haden (b); Ed Blackwell (d). Oslo, August 1979.
ECM Records 4505344
