Ornette Coleman - Town Hall, 1962 (1975 Japanese ESP-Disk' Vinyl LP)

Vinyl: VG+
Sleeve: VG+
Obi: None

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Ornette Coleman - Town Hall, 1962 | Vinyl LP - 1975 Japanese ESP-Disk' Reissue (BT-5001, Nippon Phonogram)

Coleman had barely performed in 1962. He hadn't recorded in a studio since March 1961. He was in the middle of a dispute with the music industry over compensation and had pulled back from public life almost entirely. In December 1962 he rented Town Hall himself, hired Jerry Newman to engineer, and put on a concert that documented two distinct projects. The trio with Izenzon and Moffett was new. Izenzon had classical training alongside his jazz instincts, and his bass playing on "Doughnut" sits somewhere between the walking lines of conventional jazz and the bowed, arhythmic approach of contemporary classical music. Moffett, a fellow Fort Worth native, provides percussion that shifts between hard swing and free noise depending on what the music needs. "Sadness" is the shortest piece at four minutes, spare and lyrical. "The Ark" takes the entire second side and runs past 23 minutes, the trio building through extended passages where the three musicians seem to be listening to each other so intently that the distinctions between soloist and accompanist dissolve.

"Dedication To Poets And Writers" sits between the trio pieces on side A and is a different project entirely. The string quartet (Selwart Clarke and Nathan Goldstein on violins, Julien Barber on viola, Kermit Moore on cello) plays alone, without Coleman, Izenzon or Moffett. The piece is rooted in modernist classical conventions but develops with a freedom that pulls it toward what Coleman would later call harmolodics. The album was not released until 1965, when Bernard Stollman picked it up for ESP-Disk'. By then, Coleman had returned to performing and recording, but the concert material from that December night remained the only document of his music between the final Atlantic sessions and his return.

This is the 1975 Japanese reissue on ESP-Disk' BT-5001, from the ESP Disk' 1500 Collection, manufactured by Nippon Phonogram Co.