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Concept
Skies of America
Summary
Skies of America is the 17th album by jazz saxophonist Ornette Coleman, released on Columbia Records in 1972. It consists of one long composition by Coleman taking up both sides of the album, played by the London Symphony Orchestra and conducted by David Measham. Coleman himself only plays on a few segments, and there is no other jazz instrumentation.
Coleman had encountered third stream music in the 1950s, had played sessions for Gunther Schuller in 1960, and had composed two earlier orchestral works, Inventions of Symphonic Poems in 1967 and Sun Suite of San Francisco in 1968. Immediately prior to this album, he had done arranging work for Alice Coltrane on her album Universal Consciousness. He had initially envisioned Skies as a concerto grosso for jazz combo and orchestra, but owing to contractual disputes with the musician's union in England, his band would not be allowed to record at all, and Coleman limited his own contribution to solos over the orchestra for select segments of the music.
Disenchanted with the music business after a less-than-enthusiastic response to his music, Coleman took a sabbatical to Montana in 1965. Coleman witnessed a group of Native Americans and it inspired him.
"It was so cold," he said of that time in Montana. "It must have been 2 or 3 below zero, and when I saw the American Indians praying, doing their purity ritual, they looked like their bodies were transparent. All of a sudden, I saw the American Indian and the sky as the same people. It taught me something about religion, race, wealth, poverty, commerce. I said: 'Oh, I'm going to go over to the other side. I only want to be on the side of the consciousness that comes to people naturally.'"
Coleman began writing sketches of what became Skies of America. The work features what Coleman called "Harmolodics", a merger of harmony, melody, and movement.
The album contains nearly all of the music that Coleman wrote for Skies of America, though several repeated motifs and two other segments were removed from the work in order to accommodate the limited album playing time.
Official source
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