Ornette Coleman

I thought I’d go with the great Ornette Coleman for my next entry. The autographs shown above are on Ornette’s Crisis! album. The album is a fairly rare Impulse! recording from 1969. The cover seems appropriate for today's times.

Old and New Dreams was an Ornette Coleman alumni band consisting of Don Cherry, Dewey Redman, Charlie Haden and Ed Blackwell. They played UCLA and I got their autographs. I found out that Crisis! was so rare that Don Cherry remarked that even he didn’t have a copy of it! (A few months after this encounter, I went to see him at a gig at McCabe’s and gave him a cassette of it. He greatly appreciated it.) My copy is signed by all six of the participants, plus Ed Blackwell.

(Ornette Coleman and his son Denardo signed at a later gig.)

My Jazzy Christmas Presents

Jelly Roll Morton: The Complete Library of Congress Recordings
An 8 CD collection of Jelly Roll! The sound is kind of rough, but if you’re into the roots music, it’s a must have. (It’s only the second jazz item in my collection with an explicit lyrics warning label!)






Louis Armstrong: The Offstage Story of Satchmo
I saw this book several years ago at the Grove in LA and had never seen it anywhere else since then. A really good book!