Before we enter the current world of drummer, producer, and curator Denardo Coleman, a funny story from the past.
In 1996, the year after the Coleman family had established the Harmolodic record label through Verve/PolyGram, Denardo’s father, saxophonist/composer Ornette Coleman, dropped two new albums, Sound Museum: Three Women and Sound Museum: Hidden Man, while his mother, spoken-word artist Jayne Cortez, released Taking the Blues Back Home. At the same time, Harmolodic put out several of the saxophonist’s earlier works once solely offered through the indie Artists House, including 1978’s Body Meta with Ornette’s electric band Prime Time and Soapsuds, Soapsuds, recorded in 1977 with bassist and longtime friend Charlie Haden. Denardo helped work through the new label’s minutiae, as well as dealing with all of its press.
Assigned to interview Denardo about the rhythmic role he’d played in many of his father’s ensembles since childhood, as well as discussing his new entrepreneurial efforts, this writer phoned Harmolodic’s Harlem office, only to get a man on the line who was obviously disguising his voice, insisting that “no one’s home” and that he was “the janitor.”
After a minute, sensing I was being pranked, I asked the obvious question: “Is this Ornette Coleman?”
The saxophonist laughed and said, “Hang on. I’ll go get my son. He’s expecting you.”
Given Ornette’s history—the way he set the avant garde on, his pioneering work in the land of the free, his creation of the harmolodic theory of music (which, among other things, de-emphasizes the concept of keys or tonal centers)—it can be easy to conclude that he was never anything but serious. But that’s not true at all. Reminded of this story now, the 66-year-old Denardo says, “My father was a funny man.”
