Thriving on a Riff 97

melodic, and rhythmic backbone for improvisation to unfold. For in-

stance, many jazz tunes come from early Tin Pan Alley, Broadway, and
Hollywood songs, which jazz musicians use as base material to blow
and solo. The father of the tenor saxophone, Coleman Hawkins, was a
master of improvising on the harmony of a song. Lester “Pres” Young,
whose light, airy, yet intense style contrasted with Hawkins’s rough-
edged approach, was a study in brilliant melodic improvisation. The
father of jazz, Louis Armstrong, and bebop genius Charlie Parker were
grand masters of improvisation on the melodic, harmonic, and rhyth-
mic level.
But in harmolodics, Ornette would deliberately change the chords
in his improvisation. Unlike classic jazz where, generally speaking, har-
monic movement throughout tonal centers guides the music, in har-
molodics, melody, harmony, and sound all play an equal role in the
improvisation; like a symmetry principle, all of the elements of mu-
sic are on the same footing. Sound is a difficult word to reduce to a
well-defined set of concepts; it is more of a metaphor, indicating how
each jazz musician has his or her own voice. Ornette Coleman and
Charlie Parker both play the alto sax, but each has his own sound or
signature—the distinct tonal quality and sonority, the way notes are
bent and placed rhythmically. A true jazz aficionado can hear a jazz solo
and identify who is playing.
When Ornette makes spontaneous changes, the band’s reaction
would generate new structures in the music. Standard jazz guitarist
Marc Ribot observed how Ornette based these structures on motifs.

Although they were freeing up certain structures of bebop, they were in

fact each developing new structures of composition . . . The sets of rules
for Ornette’s harmolodic music . . . it’s clear that it is based on taking
motifs and freeing it up to become polytonal, melodically and rhyth-
mically, it is tied very strongly to the motifs in the [main melody].2

A motif is a short melody that often repeats itself or recurs through-

out a song. Perhaps the most famous motif is the beginning three notes