March 9, 1930 – June 11, 2015

"A highly compressed film will not yield its best at the first go. People see in it at first what seems like something they have seen before. (There ought to be in Paris one quite small, very well equipped cinema, in which only one or two films would be shown each year.)"

So wrote Robert Bresson in his Notes sur le Cinématograph. I enjoyed the music of Ornette Coleman the first time I heard it; what I found difficult was its lack of difficulty. With others – Cecil Taylor, Derek Bailey – I had to struggle, got great rewards from doing so, and as a result spent more time with them. But with Ornette, my historically uneducated ears simply could not hear what it was that caused such a fuss in the 1950s. It is still to those early recordings from the late 1950s and early 1960s that I return most often: it isn't possible to spend too much time with this music. Were there a room somewhere – preferably with a dancefloor – where it was played on loop with excellent sound, I would spend as much time there as possible whenever I was in the neighbourhood, alone or with friends.