Ornette's 'Crisis'

One of my favorite things about Ornette is one of my least favorite things about him: the fact that a handful of his albums never made it to CD and therefore required that I hunt them down. These include two albums I love very much--'Ornette and 12' (Impulse, 1969) and 'Crisis,' (Impulse, 1972) both live recordings from the late 1960s featuring Charlie Haden on bass and Ornette's then very young son Denardo, who doesn't quite know how to play drums, on drums.

Here's a little AllAboutJazz article about this pair of albums.

'Crisis' is my favorite of these two. It's dark and frantic, and Denardo's frenzied, intuitive playing makes sense only because there's exactly the right space for it in Ornette's music.

Ornette feels free and untethered, melodic, looping, joyful, even as the air on the record sounds dark and foreboding. Denardo conveys the anxiety that I think is the album's true subject.

Few jazz musicians have "subject matter" in their music the way Ornette does.  He's all about melody on top and roiling feeling underneath.  Ornette's playing is helplessly buoyant, and all that anxious messiness he coaxed from his bandmates creates a kind of tension, each song's subject, the distance between happiness and worry.  'Crisis' is a prime example.  It's worth hunting down.