Sound
Randolph Denard Ornette Coleman was an American jazz saxophonist, violinist, trumpeter, and composer. He was one of the major innovators of the free jazz movement of the 1960s.
Ornette Coleman is always asked, “what is Harmolodics?” Harmolodics is the term he coined to describe his music and his philosophy of life. He decided to do a short film about Harmolodics. A few artists were in enlisted, including Lou Reed, Thurston Moore, Yoko Ono and dancer Wunmi Olaiya. The film only went out to journalists as part of the Tone Dialing press kit. It was released publicly in honor of the occasion of Ornette’s 90th birthday March 9, 2020.
Shirley Clarke's frenetic documentary about multi-talented musician Ornette Coleman.
In this short, magical film experiment, Shirley Clarke interprets the musical universe of jazz giant Ornette Coleman in best Afrofuturist tradition. With breathless echo effects, superimpositions and artificial light reflections, younger versions of Coleman lose themselves in slot machines, turn gravel into glass marbles and vanish into video-animated supernatural light.
Sonny Rollins: Beyond the Notes uses his 80th birthday concert to look into the man and his music.
"Saxophonist, artist and Whitehot Magazine publisher Noah Becker visited music legend Ornette Coleman at his music studio in New York City. The following film is the result of that interaction."
"Jacques Goldstein goes on a quest for a spectre, a spectre that haunts Jazz. Who was Ornette Coleman, the saxophonist and composer ' If his seminal body of work is now - rightfully so - fully recognized, the man remained deliberately mysterious and enigmatic. The director visits and interviews musicians who owe him a lot. A portrait of Ornette takes shape as these sketches gradually unfold."
Berliner Jazztage 1971
This exhibition focuses on Jonas Mekas’ 365 Day Project, a succession of films and videos in calendar form. Every day as of January 1st, 2007 and for an entire year, as indicated in the title, a large public (the artist's friends, as well as unknowns) were invited to view a diary of short films of various lengths (from one to twenty minutes) on the Internet. A movie was posted each day, adding to the previously posted pieces, resulting altogether in nearly thirty-eight hours of moving images.
Live from Palalido, Milan Italy, March 4, 1980.
The Ornette Coleman Quartet performs lives in Barcelona in 1987.
Collection of Computer Graphic effects.
A young actor steps into the shadows of a Coney Island underworld where past, present, reality and fantasy collide.
Blank-faced bug killer Bill Lee and his dead-eyed wife, Joan, like to get high on Bill's pest poisons while lounging with Beat poet pals. After meeting the devilish Dr. Benway, Bill gets a drug made from a centipede. Upon indulging, he accidentally kills Joan, takes orders from his typewriter-turned-cockroach, ends up in a constantly mutating Mediterranean city and learns that his hip friends have published his work -- which he doesn't remember writing.
Insane asylum inmates escape their confinement and hole up in a deserted Belgian farmhouse, where they cook large quantities of eggs and condemn one of their own in an impromptu court. Accompanied by a frenetic original soundtrack by the great Ornette Coleman and starring The Living Theater.
The important L.A. Newsreel film about the Black Panthers that was rediscovered and written about by USC professor David James. Featured in the film is rare footage of many of the important West Coast Panthers such as Masai Hewitt, David Hilliard, Alprentice “Bunchy” Carter, Eldridge Cleaver, John Huggins, and as well as footage of the aftermath of the LAPD raid on the Los Angeles Panther Headquarters. Musically the film begins with the opening jazz music by Ornette Coleman and later features the call to arms anthem, “The End of Silence” written and sung by Panther Elaine Brown.
A film in cut-out animation depicting the demographic problems of the world. It shows that in many countries freedom from the old scourges of famine and disease has in turn created the new problem of more mouths to feed. The film suggests that wealthier nations might increase all forms of aid to struggling nations to create a better world.
The story centres on an orphaned quartet (boy, two girls, a baby) washed ashore on a desert island in what just might be the Bahamas. There, they encounter a pile of branches that transforms into a dubious Jesus-esque bearded man, as well as a doppelganger family of naked black children.
Emile Chenal and his wife, Françoise, leaned on boxing manager Jim Fox Warner to cough up the considerable sum of money that he owes them, with both the police and the mob circling the situation. In the same hotel, Inspector Neveu looks into a murder that took place years before, and his storyline overlaps with the arc of the Chenals.