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Double Bass Ornette's "Lonley Woman"

#4
I don't think it's in a time signature, I'm pretty sure it's in a couple of different time signatures/tempos with a number of sections of the melody that are loosely phrased together.
You got Charlie's ostinato figure up top that the melody comes in over, there's a sort of pause and then the second "part" of the melody in a time stream that's a little quicker than the original statement. I'm only hip to the Ornette recording and the Allen/Haden/Motian recording, but they both seem to follow that format.

I haven't seen the Ornette tune in any fakebook, what I've seen is the Horace Silver LONELY WOMAN.

Which is a nice tune too.
In 4/4.
With a 3 bar bridge...
 
#5
Interesting question about transcribing free music: If I was writing a paper about Ornette, I'd try and create an exact transcription from the record, try to quantify all the 'looseness' in it in terms of meter and tempo changes, etc., etc. If I was playing the tune with a band, I'd probably create a very different score - some kind of non-standard notation, lead sheet type of thing. I can't remember exactly how I transcribed the tune but I may have written it without barlines, for that floaty feeling - heh.

That Geri Allen "Etudes" is one of my favourite piano trio records - great version of Charlie's "Silence" on it too.
 
#7
I recently put together a band for a few gigs playing Ornette tunes, so transcribed a load of my favourites, including 'Lonely Woman'. As a major part of Ornette's approach involves doing away with the constraints of phrasing in traditional divisions of 4 or 8 bars, you are pretty much left with writing the tunes out without barlines, or writing a lead sheet that keeps changing time signature. Personally I think you should learn the tunes by ear, and that writing them down is of very limited value, but there was insufficiant time/money to just ask the band to do that...
Its also very instructive, in my opinion, to listen to Ornette playing his tunes on recordings over a long period of time (which in the case of Lonely Woman gives you almost 50 years!), which gives you an idea what he hears as the 'core melody', and what is simply the way he played it on the date in question...
 
#9
Ed Fuqua said:
what I've seen is the Horace Silver LONELY WOMAN.
Which is a nice tune too.
Click to expand...
I love that tune, and even though I'm not the hugest Pat Metheny fan, his version with Charlie and Higgins from "Rejoicing" is really beautiful. On acoustic guitar no less!
Oh yeah, FWIW I have two other versions of Ornette's Lonely Woman. One is from the ECM "Old And New Dreams" record, and it's in the same general neighborhood as the original (Charlie has his E string tuned down to D for the drone). The other is from the first "Quest" record with George Mraz and Al Foster. Their version is much different, and with Liebman on flute and with Al not playing the fast ride pattern, it's very evocative in it's own way.
 
#10
I have Ornettes chart for it that I got off of Pat Labarbera, there was an Ornette book of tunes in the work in the 70's that Ornette and Gunther Schuller were apparently putting together but it never got out there except for a few copies that got circulated, I have most of it photo copied somewhere in a box in at our new house, if anyone is looking for anything I'll see what I can do
 
#11
I've got a book that I got back in the early '60's . . . all (or most) of the tunes on 1959's "The Shape of Jazz to Come" and "Change of the Century" . . . in score form. IIRC, the book was prepared from OC's own charts . . .

I'll look for it when I'm at home tomorrow morning (I'm at the studio, now) and scan . . . and post . . . the pages asap.
 
#16
My impression is that Gunther Schuller transcribed the published Ornette songbooks. Ornette's own notation is a lot less precise - there's some in the booklet that came with the LP Body Meta.

For you book collectors, there are two different Ornette songbooks published in the 1960s by MJQ music. One, A Collection of the Compositions of Ornette Coleman, has the tunes from Change of the Century and The Shape of Jazz to Come in outline scores, the other, A Collection of 26 Compositions, has all the originals Ornette recorded for Atlantic as leadsheets. Happy hunting!
 

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