ABSTRACT
Harmolodics is an approach that attempts to value each element and each participant equally. Melody is the “source of the music,” as Ornette told me years ago in an interview that predates this material.2 From melody all other elements are implied: groove, intervallic content, harmony. If one were to trace David Izenson or Charlie Haden’s bass notes accompanying Ornette Coleman over the years, it would prove difficult, even fruitless, to attempt to codify the harmony for any given composition. Each repetition of the form, if there is a repetition, uses a consistent harmony. The bass line, seeming to contain the harmony, is actually a result of the melody: in the same way, the bass line of a Bach two-part invention seems to contain the harmony, but is actually a result of the melodic material that generates both treble and bass lines. The melody is the source code for all the other musical events, harmonic or contrapuntal. It is simply bizarre that music schools still teach the bass line as being the generator of the melody (figured bass instruction is endemic to all classical Western European music education). Ornette’s approach is much more straightforward: “top down” instead of “bottom up.”
