MONTREAL - Fifty years ago, the jazz world should have belonged to Miles Davis, who released the coolest and most seductive album in its history, Kind of Blue, which also revolutionized the music with improvisations upon vaguely exotic-sounding “modal” scales (albeit drenched with a blues feeling).

But just two months later, on Nov. 17, 1959, Ornette Coleman blew in from Los Angeles and unleashed so-called “free jazz” on Manhattan, opening a two-week stand at the Five Spot Café that stretched into six months and fractured the jazz community in the process. The intense controversy surrounding the gig became the jazz version of the riotous reception accorded Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps in 1913. Davis sniffed: “If you’re talking psychologically, the man is all screwed up inside.” But Davis’s saxophonist John Coltrane – to whom Kind of Blue owed no small measure of its success and who recorded his own epochal album Giant Steps that year – attended Coleman’s gigs almost nightly, spiriting him away into the night afterward to talk heavy music, the preamble to Coltrane leaving Davis.

These two seminal musicians are being celebrated at the 30th anniversary edition of the Montreal International Jazz Festival. This year’s fest features Coleman’s first appearance here in 20 years, and a Sketches of Miles show by Kenny Garrett, Davis’s last major saxophonist, who is reaching his own heights in this millennium.

The fact that others were creating an inordinate number of important, iconic albums in 1959 – Coltrane, Charles Mingus, Bill Evans, Dave Brubeck, Thelonious Monk, Duke Ellington – makes the impact of Davis and Coleman even greater.

The Coleman controversy arrived four years after the premature death of patron saint Charlie Parker – from which the jazz world was still reeling with a “What now?” anxiety – and 15 years since the emergence in 1944 of its previous revolution, bebop.

Coleman and his pocket-trumpeter Don Cherry dispensed with harmony altogether and played off the melody. His bassist Charlie Haden described the new improvisational language as “playing on the tune of a composition rather than (its) chord structure. … There aren’t too many people who were raised in that way of playing.” He led his cohorts through copious

rehearsals, then let them loose. Coleman maintained: “Let’s play the music and not the background.”

His approach at the Five Spot was a lightning rod among the jazz community. Armed with two recently released albums – Tomorrow Is the Question and The Shape of Jazz to Come – the attendant publicity and controversy was overwhelming (even mainstream magazines, from Newsweek to Harper’s Bazaar, covered the event). Coleman’s use of a toy-like white plastic alto, born years earlier from lack of funds for a new horn, only added to the hubbub. He explained that it responded “more completely to the way I blow into it. There’s less resistance than from metal. Also, the notes seem to come out detached, almost like you could see them.”

Some could see, others couldn’t. John Lewis, austere leader of the chamber-styled Modern Jazz Quartet and seemingly his stylistic antithesis, had convinced Atlantic Records to sign them up, throwing down the gauntlet: “Ornette Coleman is doing the only really new thing in jazz since the innovations of Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk.”

Gillespie: “I don’t know what he’s playing but it’s not jazz.”

Monk: “Man, that cat is nuts!” but added: “This is a gang of potential.”

Commented trumpet giant Roy Eldridge: “I’ve listened to him all kinds of ways. I listened to him high and I listened to him cold sober. I even played with him.

I think he’s jiving baby.”

The always opinionated Mingus expressed his own ambivalence by saying that while he doubted Coleman “could even play a C scale in tune, the fact remains that his notes and lines are so fresh. ... I’m not saying everybody’s going to have to play like Coleman. But they’re going to have to stop playing like Bird (Parker).”

He caught on as classical chic: composer-critic Virgil Thompson, composer-arranger Gunther Schuller and Leonard Bernstein himself made the scene down at the Five Spot. Schuller (who played tuba on Davis’s original Birth of the Cool sessions a decade earlier) said: “His playing has a deep inner logic, based on subtleties of

reaction ... of timing and colour that are, I think, quite new to jazz.”

His most notable supporter among jazz critics was Whitney Balliett (then starting a long and distinguished career at The New Yorker), who sized up the “harum-scarum air” of The Shape of Jazz to Come on first hearing, at the end of 1959: “Listen to Coleman; he is unique, he is new.”

(Other critics who supported him included Nat Hentoff, Martin Williams and A.J. Spellman.)

The genesis of the new sound was born in a band led by the great Montreal-born free-jazz pianist Paul Bley, who wryly recreates the time he fired regular vibraphonist Dave Pike to make room for Coleman for a regular gig at the Hillcrest Club in Los Angeles, 1958, in his memoir Stopping Time (Véhicule Press). Bley’s reaction went like this: “After the first set, (then-wife) Carla and I went out to the parking lot to have a talk: ‘If we fire Dave Pike and hire Don Cherry and Ornette Coleman, we won’t last the week. What should we do?’ We both looked at each other and smiled and said: ‘Fire Dave Pike.’

“For the duration of that gig, if you were driving down Washington Blvd. past the Hillcrest Club, you could always tell if the band was on the bandstand or not. If the street was full of the audience holding drinks in front of the club, the band was playing. If the audience was in the club, it was intermission.”

It was, as the title of his first album (from 1958) indicated, Something Else! Bley described the dizzying atmosphere at the Five Spot whipped up by the piano-less Coleman quartet in a 2007 Gazette interview: “When Ornette and Don came to New York, there was a lot of speculation and fear – people would stop me on Broadway and ask, ‘Paul, what are these guys

doing, what’s going on,’ because it shook the jazz world to its foundation.

“The night Ornette played the Five Spot, when they finished the first set, I asked the bartender to dance. Because the band that played two nights before was Art Farmer and Benny Golson, and they sounded like the hotel band at the Taft Hotel. Two nights before that they were at the top of their game, being bona-fide wonderful jazz musicians. But after Ornette’s first set, right then they became just a cover band. So there was a tectonic shift literally overnight.

“You had to be there: it caused fear and consternation amongst all the players. They thought I was going to help them out (in understanding). Well, it wasn’t my job to teach for free. I was just fortunate enough to have been there a couple of years earlier, so I had faced all the challenges.”

Coleman’s talent for unfettered melody made Les Koenig (founder of the Contemporary jazz label in L.A.) believe his tunes might be good for other musicians, but an ad-hoc audition prompted Koenig to record them.

“If Ornette hadn’t been a composer,” Bley said, “it would have taken him a great deal longer to be accepted by the critics, and then by some musicians. In fact, when Ornette went to New York, the more erudite critics performed a yeoman service in giving some kind of validity. They didn’t only acquaint the public with the music, they acquainted a lot of musicians with the music. In fact, what the critics were saying was the only thing that gave him any chance of getting a gig, because on a one-on-one basis, everybody was very much in a hurry to dismiss him. It was a lot easier to dismiss Ornette than it was to figure out what was going on.”

His most alarming and epochal concept was Free Jazz, recorded in late 1960, a

double-band octet that pitted Coleman and Cherry with bassist Scott Lafaro and drummer Billy Higgins against Eric Dolphy, Freddie Hubbard, Charlie Haden and Ed Blackwell. Jazz historian Ted Gioia wrote: “With Free Jazz, Coleman not only gave a fitting name to the movement, but effectively captured the essence of its sound.” True, some of it “would become a cliché of free jazz, with even the most impassioned performances tending toward a certain sombre sameness. Then again, all successful revolutions become convention – this is the very sign of their success.”

The most recorded tune in his repertoire is the haunting Lonely Woman, made famous in pristine fashion by the Modern Jazz Quartet. Fifty years later, Coleman’s first albums for Atlantic sound as evergreen today as, well, the MJQ’s. They couldn’t be more different stylistically, yet both quartets were classicists in their own way.

Born in 1930 in Fort Worth, he absorbed roughhewn Texas rhythm & blues and worked as a barroom R&B honker. But when he played on the far side of Bird’s bop, he got beat up, walked-out on and otherwise threatened. He worked his share of odd jobs to support his music: elevator

operator, stock boy, babysitter, janitor.

The years of scuffling and rejection gave him an edge. The resulting sound was for the ages: skittering yet succinct, elastic yet melodic, turn-on-a-dime springy.

First things went astray business-wise. He figured that since he was getting so few offers for gigs that he might as well set astronomical fees. In his attempt at self-producing a concert with strings at Town Hall in 1962, he barely broke even. He retired, then returned in 1965 with the outstanding trio of bassist David Izenzen and drummer Charles Moffatt chronicled in the great Stockholm date Live at the Golden Circle Vol. 1 & 2 (on Blue Note). He put together a great quartet with fellow Fort Worth schoolmate Dewey Redman.

By 1969, he shocked many by hiring his 10-year-old son, Denardo, as his drummer. He earned classical accolades for his orchestral Skies of America (1972, with the London Symphony). He hired thundering electric guitarist James Blood Ulmer to play in his new band Prime Time, and tinkered with the violin and trumpet. He played a blistering record date, Song X, with Pat Metheny. He hired Jerry Garcia to play guitar on Virgin Beauty (1988) and frequently performed with the Grateful Dead. He preferred the term “harmolodic theory” over “free jazz” and earned a Guggenheim “genius” award. His live album Sound Grammar (2006) – accompanied by Denardo with dual bassists Greg Cohen and Tony Falanga – won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Music.

In December 2008, he told Downbeat: “I’ve been playing music since I was a teenager, and I’ve gotten better. I’ve gotten clearer, but the timing is still the same. You still have to stay up, work, make mistakes and clear them up. That’s not gonna ever change because the idea doesn’t have an agenda. The idea is just in you, the same thing that your brain is doing. You can’t cure it in a moment, you can’t change it. You have to deal with it as well as you can if it makes logic about something you believe. It’s not dangerous, it’s just human.

“Humans have always been raising the ante of how life could be expressed in so many different forms. It’s never going to die, it will only get better.”

Pure Ornette – something else!

 

Ornette Coleman performs July 9 at Théâtre Maisonneuve of Place des Arts as part of the Montreal International Jazz Festival.

Tickets: $49.50, $59.50, $69.50.

There is a commonly held perception that the Montreal World Film Festival (WFF) is exhausted and under-attended, and of interest mainly to old people.

That would be wrong.

According to data gathered in 2009 by Leger Marketing and relayed this week by festival director of communications Henry Welsh, more than 428,000 souls attended the event last year. Of those backsides in seats, the largest single demographic -38 per cent -belonged to those between the ages of 35 and 45. Not spring-chicken material, but hardly ready for assisted living, either.

One further stat of some interest: A full 42 per cent of those in attendance possessed some kind of university degree, or at least said they did, the better to understand and appreciate films from nearly everywhere on Earth that will never see the inside of a local suburban multiplex.

The numbers suggest the WFF is relevant to at least a viable segment of the population -a segment large enough to sustain the festival's position as the most popular annual dedicated event

for film in the city.

There is no reason to think the 34th edition will be any different, when 430 films from a record 80 countries screen in four downtown venues between Thursday and Sept. 6. The ranks will be further swelled by the popular free nightly films under the stars, featuring classics like Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, recent Quebec hit Dede a travers les brumes, and Euro staples like 1990's Cyrano de Bergerac, starring Gerard Depardieu. (Speaking of the famed French actor, the 2010 model Depardieu is coming to the festival for a master class Sept. 6.)

These films, we know. We can also navigate our way around films in the World Greats section, including the closing film, Bertrand Tavernier's Princess of Montpensier, and Zhang Yimou's A Woman, A Gun and Noodle Shop. But the vast majority of new product screening in nine categories are complete unknown quantities. As the festival increasingly becomes a vehicle for first films from young directors in emerging markets, so the public takes a leap of faith when buying the ticket.

What, for instance, can I tell you about Manila Skies (Himpapawid), from the Philippines? I can tell you this, from a printout of the schedule that will be invaluable when it hits the streets sometime next week:

"Young Raul comes from the province to Manila to fulfil his father's hopes, but jobs are hard to find and even those don't last long." So maybe it's not a comedy. Beyond that, nothing. It, like so much else, is a crap shoot. But this much is certain: Local expat natives of that country will fill the room, eager for a taste of home.

Films from places like Poland, Uruguay, Georgia, Norway and Australia help drive this festival as surely as the 100-odd expected from the Francophonie. For every recognizable name -like venerable Spanish master Carlos Saura, back with his flamenco sequel, aptly titled Flamenco, Flamenco; or Le Mariage a trois, by France's steady Jacques Doillon -there are 30 that come completely unannounced, hoping to find an audience.

This is how the festival wishes it, now it has emerged from the financial dark ages of the mid-decade, and again takes its place as one of three major Canadian film fests, as recognized by the federal cultural funding agency Telefilm Canada. (The others are in Vancouver and Toronto).

"We had nearly 3,000 submissions this year," says Welsh, who is on the programming team, and speaks for founder Serge Losique and VP Daniele Cauchard. "And that's not counting the films we saw in other festivals. There are a total of 53 world premieres. I think viewers will find a lot of happy surprises.

"Like wine vintages there are good years and bad years for film production. This has been a very good one for us. There are more short films than usual, perhaps as a result of the new technologies making it more affordable to get started. And the documentary section is vibrant, a reflection of the state of the world and access to the Internet."

Welsh mentions the opening-night film, Route 132, by Louis Belanger, local director of Gaz Bar Blues. With some prodding, he's drawn into the ongoing local media bitchfest about the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) skedding a press conference announcing its Canadian lineup on the same day (Aug. 10) WFF unveiled its program.

"I don't believe it was deliberate, but we traditionally hold our press conference on the second Tuesday in August, every year, so someone must have been aware. This kind of thing is always bad, especially when some local newspapers play Quebec films at Toronto larger than our own here, but what can you do?"

What Welsh won't say is that the festival is less than pleased Belanger's distributor Alliance is refusing all interviews with the director here until the film's commercial release in October. If they agreed to have it open the festival, why not surround it with a little razzle-dazzle?

No doubt Belanger will be talking to the English media when he takes the film to Toronto, which will be like shouting into the void. In the same way that English-Canadian features die a horrible death in Quebec, exposure at prestigious TIFF is good for a Quebec film's CV, but little else.

The time when comparisons can be made between the film festivals in these two towns has long since past. They are what they are.

"Toronto is huge from a Hollywood point of view," Welsh says. "But we present film from all over the world. We have a strong presence from South America and Japan. The festival was the first to champion film from China, years ago. There are terrific films from Italy this year. Serge is on record as saying Bartabas's Zingaro Revisited, about the 25th anniversary of the equine troupe, is a masterpiece.

"We don't dwell upon the past. In the same way we support young filmmakers and their first films, it's all about the future."

The Montreal World Film Festival begins Thursday and continues until Sept. 6. Advance tickets go on sale today from noon until 7 p.m. at the Imperial Theatre, 1430 Bleury St.; Place des Arts; and the Quartier Latin cinema, 350 Emery St.