Spy vs. Spy: The Music of Ornette Coleman

Holy fuck! This blew my mind. Absolute assault on the senses. So who’s forming the wall of death during the John Zorn concert with me? Perfectly controlled chaos.

Not available on Apple Music

Not on any streaming platform so wasn’t the easiest to listen to. Wasn’t worth the effort in the end. Awful noise

You know what, if you're into this sort of stuff, I take my hat off to you. One of the most insane albums I've ever listened to, and I'm a death metal fan.

Blistering, abrasive front half leaves the back end tough to appreciate. Very cool sounds but I think the structure of the album could be mixed around to give some push and pull rather than saturating your ears for 20 minutes.

genijalno! još ovakvih albuma molim

Deso pas mon style

This is #day468 of my #1001albumsyoumusthearbeforeyoudie challenge, and… here we are, back to square one: album blocked on Spotify, not available on YouTube Music, so I found a random YouTube upload with the full thing. It's been a hell of a day, literally. Russia's missile strike killed 34 civilians in the neighboring city of Ternopil; a direct hit on an apartment block, a couple of the top floors gone in a flash. With all that in my head, I finally put this record on. Frantic, relentless, an absolute jazzcore... Even though it's hard to follow what's going on here most of the time, I'm oddly inclined to embrace it. Now I need to check out some Ornette Coleman. Wow. This is a 4 out of 5. Looking forward to #day469.

I hated some bits of this, maybe most of it, but I actually enjoyed other bits of it quite a lot. "Ecars" was pretty great, for example. But on the whole, pretty hard listening.

I don't care how technically proficient this is. I dont like it.

Look I knew what I signed up for when I started 1001 albums, I was going to get weird stuff, and I wanted to widen my musical palette. That being said, this is a no for me, this is not fun to listen to in any capacity. This is what people refer to when they jazz is pretentious and then they make fun of you for ‘not getting it’. I’m sorry no, there are better jazz albums on this list that don’t and I’m quoting family guy insist upon itself.

I couldn't listen to the album on Spotify. However, I found the description interesting. I might have liked it. Maybe I'll get around to listening to it later.

Its just so one note. Loud and abrasive it kind of had the opposite effect. Because there was no real variation it became white noise quite quickly. The only real jolt was the start of the last album when the drum style changed slightly. Basically noise music to study to.

That was a tough listen. Jazz with a heavy metal backbone? Glad I’ve heard it once, but I promise that will be the only time.

I finally found Spy Vs. Spy: The Music Of Ornette Coleman, something extremely rare on streaming, but it’s overwhelming. Though I like experimental sounds, this chaotic grindcore feels like two out-of-tune saxophones and two drummers clashing in a metal shop. It strips the swing, soul, and melody I love from Coleman’s free jazz, making a wild idea that quickly loses charm. Including this while omitting Coleman himself is a crime.

Where do I get my "I survived the Spy Vs. Spy album" T-shirt? It sounded like someone threw a couple of jazz bands down a 40 minute long staircase with just a few flat spots to play music during. Like I get it, they had a concept and they hit it, but it was not all that fun to listen to.

A simples junção dos nomes Ornette Colleman e Joh Zorn já causam apreensão. É difícil imaginar a desconstrução comumente promovida por Zorn para a obra de um músico cujo conteúdo já é anárquico. Mas os temas escolhidos são até um tanto quanto convencionais e estruturados, em suas versões originais e Zorn promove o caos com sua música aleatória e desconexa, facilitando um pouco as coisas para o ouvinte na segunda metade do disco, a partir de "Enfant".

Woahhhhh

Could you mosh to this? Enjoyment is the wrong criteria for evaluating this. Of course it isn't enjoyable - it's free jazz played with the pummelling abrassiveness and agression of hardcore punk. Each song is surprisingly tightly structured, you can hear them racing through the head before erupting into the cacophony of free improvisation and then, somehow, wrapping it all back together with a synchronized refrain. It kind of chills out half way with peices that have a bit of a groove and more approachable lead lines - even sounding like a deranged version of an early 90s sitcom theme song for a minute.

It’s one of the most fascinating 2’s I think I will give.

This is album 627. We’ve done a lot. I’ve never heard an album like this before, and I can’t say I want to listen to it again. However, I found myself utterly captivated by this thing as an experiment in what constitutes music.

Oh, trust me; this isn’t good. I wouldn’t recommend it with headphones in (take it from me), but in a weird way, I think I would genuinely recommend listening to this before you die & I think its presence on the list is a wondrous experiment. My brain is imaginative at times, and for this album, once it revealed itself as a cacophonous mess of unstructured, yet structured chaotic jazz, my brain immediately went to Eric Andre’s intro where he just destroys his fucking set.

Effectively, that chaos is this album. This is a rage room for session musicians, captured with full improvisation, in different audio channels, at different tempos & with reverb caked on top. It’s the type of chaos that you cannot truly put into words & only feel. In a weird way, I think this may be the most potent example of chaos ever put onto tape in an audio sense, at least from what I’ve heard. I’m sure there’s something else utterly baffling out there that qualifies as even better / worse, but I don’t think I’ll try to seek it out.

Since I can’t put it into words, I can only say… give it a listen & just feel it. I found a comedy to it; beyond Eric Andre, I thought of the one scene in "Band Geeks" from SpongeBob (yes, the one with "Sweet Victory") where they decide to play loud & contort Squidward’s face to hell. It’s a baffling album, and I think it’s certainly taking a spot away from one that deserves it more, but it’s a fascinating 2, and one that I would recommend listening to, if only for the experiment of one’s reaction. This could be someone’s 5 if it clicks like that, and in some way, I can’t possibly argue with that. It’s also just as easy to give it a 1. It is a raw, unfiltered album, a complete mess, and yet there is JUST enough of a semblance of the typical jazz one might know that it clings onto a sense of normalcy that never truly arrives, but is always just pertinent enough in the background to keep a bit of a hook, if you can tolerate this thing for any more than the first 5 minutes. I didn’t hate it, and I almost have half a brain to give it a 3 just for the hell of it, but from a purely musical standpoint, I think I have to stay at a 2.

P.S.: If nothing else, it makes for great noise to clean your ears out afterward. Literally. I used a Q-Tip (not the rapper) and it worked really, really well. Make of that what you will.