ORNETTE COLEMAN, LIVE AT CHICAGO JAZZ FEST, 8/31/08. Living in a place like Chicago where there's great stuff to see/hear/do almost every night (at least during the warm months), you get used to the idea of missing most of it. For example, Ornette Coleman himself gets scheduled to close this year's Chicago Jazz Festival, a free show no less, and I was still thinking about skipping it. Then, I heard that the lineup was Denardo on drums and... two basses? One acoustic and one electric? And Ornette and that's it?? Suddenly I didn't think I would skip it anymore. That just sounded bold. The day of the show came, and our friends were having an awesome BBQ at 5PM. Ornette went on at 8:30PM, which meant we would have to leave the BBQ at 7:30, drive to the nearest train stop and park our car, take a 30 minute train ride downtown, and then walk a good five or six downtown blocks to Grant Park and join a few thousand people at the Petrillo Band Shell... sounds complicated but driving our car all the way downtown and trying to park it somewhere was even more impossible. (All this being another big reason great shows are often missed.) And of course, the BBQ wasn't easy to leave - they had a kid's pool set up and at 8:00 PM, 30 minutes after our scheduled departure time, the kids were still swimming. True to form, no one else there was interested in going to the show, even all the jazz fans (there were two other people going but they were on bikes and had no kids), but somehow we finally got out of there at about 8:10 and, after missing a train by seconds, waiting 20 minutes for the next one, and then getting downtown and walking down the wrong street for at least a block, finally got to the bandshell with about 20 or at most 30 minutes left in Ornette's set, aaaannnndddd..........

It was the best 20 or 30 minutes of live music I've seen all year, if not in years. After the hustle and bustle of getting downtown, the idea of time simply dematerialized once we got into earshot of the band. They were playing a ballad, Denardo sitting out and Ornette on trumpet. The two bassists, Tony Falanga on acoustic and Al McDowell on electric, were building up a gorgeous fragile misty dream fabric through which Ornette's horn cried and keened. Worth the "price" of admission already, and after that, Denardo got back on the drum kit and the pace picked up considerably - they played "Dancing In Your Head," among others - but the tone stayed fragile and delicate, elegant and dreamy, even as the chops and ideas got weird as they so often do when the Colemans are in the house. Denardo is simply not a normal drummer, and no one can pierce through the surface of a tune with pure love/cry/want like Ornette can. He is 76 years old and did seem like he was pulling his punches a bit, but the way he used this softness and delicacy to his advantage was stunning, as was his interaction with the rest of the band, feathery lines willowing in and out of bubbling and driving rhythms. That said, the closer was "Song X" and it rocked as hard as almost any rock band I've seen. Falanga played the gutbucket driving bassline, relentlessly pushed by Denardo, while McDowell brilliantly took on the role of pianist or guitarist, splashing flamencoid chord clusters and slippery single-note runs for Ornette to dance around and in. That sound is definitely still dancing in my head today and I'm sure it will for quite awhile....