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| Ornette Coleman says what he wants to. |
I love UbuWeb. Whenever I'm feel myself drifting into that connect-the-dots, paint-by-the-number, rote rotation through the moments in my life, whenever I need a jolt, I dial up UbuWeb. What is UbuWeb? "UbuWeb is a completely independent resource dedicated to all strains of the avant-garde, ethnopoetics, and outsider arts." What can you find there? Stuff weird, stuff wonderful, stuff weirdly and wonderfully perplexing.
But his isn't a post about UbuWeb, it's about something I found on UbuWeb (though it's been circulating around the web recently) -- an interview that Jacques Derrida conducted with Ornette Coleman in 1997. Unfortunately, it's not recorded; but we do have a transcript (you'll have to download the PDF -- it's there now under the "New Additions" column).
When I saw it on the UbuWeb home page, I seized it immediately. A couple of times now I've brought up Ornette in the same context -- the language games, the evasions, of artists when asked to explain what they do. And I cite the same panel discussion I heard three years ago at the Portland Jazz Festival, most recently in a post on Gerhard Richter's language games. Back in 2008, I hypothesized that Ornette uses language to aid his music making, not to reach an understanding of the world with his interlocutors (at least not those on the panel).
After reading this interview, however, I'm thinking that maybe he talks to people the way he makes music: He poses problems; they are difficult problems, so difficult that he himself can't solve them; he encourages his companions to take a run at the answer or at least respond to the problem in some way; he takes what they say, extends it maybe and then twists it into another puzzle; and so it goes. Despite the questions of his interviewer (if that's the situation he's in), he returns to the theme of the problem that's on his mind: The question is just part of the structure.
