Freeing the Lion: A Conversation with James Blood Ulmer on Harmolodics and the Black Rock Trio

Great artists have honed a sound that is identifiable regardless of the environment surrounding them. The truly brilliant, however, are not satisfied with a mere voice. Instead, they create their own language entirely. This is best seen with Ornette Coleman and the invention of Harmolodics, a system that frees musical compositions from needing a tonal center.  Despite Coleman’s stature as one of the greatest musical minds of the Twentieth Century, very little authoritative text is written on Harmolodics itself. In the 1970s he started writing a book called The Harmolodic Theory that would expound its concepts in full. But the work has never seen the light of day. The closest thing was his release of an article in 1983 titled  “Prime Time for Harmolodics.” Given the dearth of theoretical literature on the subject, it is imperative that the concepts of Harmolodics pass by aural tradition. With his Black Rock Trio – with G. Calvin Weston on drums and Mark Peterson on bass- James Blood Ulmer keeps the Harmolodic vernacular alive. Lucky listeners can hear the group expand the vocabulary on June 20, 2024, at Roulette Intermedium, as part of the indelible Vision Festival.

But, what exactly is Harmolodics? Coleman defined it as “the use of the physical and the mental of one’s own logic made into an expression of sound to bring about the musical sensation of unison executed by a single person or with a group.” This perspective results in “harmony, melody, speed, rhythm, time and phrases all have equal position in the results that come from the placing and spacing of ideas.” Democratizing sound in this way is incredibly novel in a Western tradition that far too often gives melody and rhythm top billing. This sonic liberation effectively allows harmonic progression without concern for the traditional tension and release prevalent in European music. And Ulmer – the first electric guitarist to record and tour extensively with Coleman – is arguably the most prominent proponent of Harmolodics, after Ornette himself. Ulmer’s best-known record, Tales of Captain Black (Artists House, 1979), was co-produced by Coleman and featured the saxophonist and his close collaborators, Jamaaladeen Tacuma and Denardo Coleman. But Ulmer is no mere Ornette copycat. His idiosyncratic approach places him among the most distinct artists on his instrument since Jimi Hendrix. Blood’s scraggly sharp voice and strings bring the raw soulfulness of Delta Blues to the bold improvisational freedom of jazz. The exuberant purity of gospel to the dirty irresistible grooves of funk. Key to this sonic expansiveness is Ulmer’s unique method of tuning in which, true to the egalitarian ethos of Harmolodics, no note is given priority over another. 

The result is groups like the Music Revelation Ensemble with a shifting membership which has featured David Murray, Ronald Shannon Jackson, and even Pharaoh Sanders. It is not only one of the first free funk bands; it is also one of the finest. But the guitarist particularly shines in the trio format. Odyssey (Columbia, 1983), with drummer Warren Benbow and violinist Charles Burnham, is one of his purest and most beautiful recordings. That legacy continues with his longstanding Black Rock Trio, which is set to enter the studio.

PostGenre:  You will perform at the Vision Festival with your Black Rock Trio. What do you enjoy most about that group? 

James Blood Ulmer: That it’s real. We all believe in the same thing. Calvin Weston, Mark Peterson, and myself, all reach for the same mark. We’re all reaching for the same thing. The other two guys drew me in. I didn’t draw them in.

PG: You have been playing with that trio for many years. Do you have any plans to record the group at some point? 

JBU: Yeah, I’m looking into recording the trio pretty soon. I hope I can get a session done before the concert. 

PG: Given their shared name, do you see a connection between your album Black Rock (Columbia, 1982) and the trio other than you and Calvin being on both? 

JBU: Yeah, yeah, the trio is a development upon that album and the ideas in it. Before that, I was playing with Ornette Coleman a lot. The group came at a point in time for me to go right on exactly what I wanted to do. These guys answered the question. Everybody was reaching for the same voice every time.

PG: Is that how you met Calvin, through Ornette?

JBU: No, no. I met Calvin before he played with Ornette. Calvin was playing with me when he was still in [Philadelphia]. He started playing with me when he was only seventeen. I used to go down to Philly, get Cal, and rehearse with him there. But we got deep into the music and started playing concerts. The music was starting to connect into exactly what it was supposed to be, Black Rock. It became clear we would have to tour and could not stay in Philly. Calvin’s mother made me promise I would take good care of him if he was in my band.  So, I watched after Calvin when we were on the road.

PG: And then, how did you first meet Ornette?

JBU: The first time I met Ornette. Wow. I was living on Sixth Street and Third Avenue in New York. One day, I was looking out the window and saw Coleman walking from the Lower East Side back down to Soho. I called out to him and he came by our house. He knew the house because of the woman he was married to [Jayne Cortez] and introduced me to her. So, Coleman came in and saw that we were rehearsing my band of six people.  He must have thought it was a good thing because I ultimately ended up living with Ornette for a year.

PG: Did you feel a particular connection to Ornette because you both have ties to the Blues?

JBU: Well, no. Coleman was generally playing with bass and drums. The guitar always [raised] some questions. It was unclear how the group would work with guitar and drums instead of bass and drums. Those issues were further than the idea he had of whether or not to incorporate a piano. They ultimately figured out how to apply the concept to the piano. But I had a hard time making the guitar fit with the piano. The piano – Stanley Cowell was playing it – didn’t go well with the guitar.

PG: And things worked once the piano was removed?

JBU: Yeah, I thought it was much better once we lost that concept of the band. It made things easier. We could practice all night, every night, and keep this thing going. It made Coleman happy to be able to keep going. At the time, we were a trio – me, Ornette, and a drummer. Denardo [Coleman] played with us a lot. So did Billy Higgins. Over time, a few other musicians came and went but Ornette kept it going. He kept it going.

PG: So, was it difficult getting adjusted to making Harmolodic music?

JBU: Oh, it ain’t hard to get adjusted to because when you play with a band, you need accompaniment with you. Even if you’re watching a musician play solo, by themselves. Even if the music is different. It is all still a conversation.  One guy plays something and someone else answers. It’s all questions and answers. So it has something to do with what you are doing, and who you are playing with. With Harmolodics, your conversations are more interesting than someone else could make it.

PG: Do you have a sense as to why more people don’t use the concepts of Harmolodics? You are probably the person who, besides Ornette, has worked the most with the concepts of Harmolodics. 

JBU: You have to know the concepts to play it. You can’t take the concepts by themselves. There are so many different ways you can play an instrument. You have a different perspective whether playing Blues, jazz, or classical music. It’s the same when you play Harmolodic music. There is something that tells on you when you use an idea from a particular kind of music. And you can tell when a musician has changed to a different perspective or is taken to another place by his circumstances. I liked that a lot about working with Coleman. He would have people playing with you that didn’t lock you into anything you were doing. He would make everything freer. He made it free to do what you wanted to do. And if you weren’t free to do that, then it wasn’t Harmolodic. 

PG: Where does the unique tuning system you created fit into that?

JBU: Well, the tuning of the guitar – I call it unison tuning – tunes all the strings to the same note. When you tune the guitar in that way, then your finger will start looking for the different places that you can go because they’re there more than one time. It is another way to free yourself.

PG: You even extended Harmolodics to string quartet with Harmolodic Guitar with Strings (DIW, 1993). What inspired you to work with strings?

JBU: Well, I was inspired by playing with Coleman. He was working with a string quartet and I was inspired by that playing and the concept of the horn playing against the strings. I didn’t play horns, but for the guitar, I could more or less put together a system for myself to continue the modulation concept that we used to use. By modulating, you don’t stay in the same key all the time.You’re not playing in a key. That’s the main thing. You don’t want to be playing the key because if the musicians go on the stage they don’t know what the key is. With Harmolodic music, you don’t fight to find the key. The key is in yourself. You have to create your own key. 

PG: You grew up in the church. Do you feel that experience has entered into your music as well?

JBU: Yeah, I guess that’s the free part of it. I think church music inspires freedom more than anything. It gives you the right to participate in what exists in your atmosphere. In church, you don’t have to write down any notes to tell you how church music should go.

PG: And what about your time with Art Blakey or John Patton?

JBU: Wow. Playing with Blakey was different. No matter what group it is, once you start playing a certain way, you play that way. The best part was that Art Blakey seemed to like how I played the guitar. All I had to do was play the guitar how I played it, and he would be happy. He also didn’t worry about your style, his style, or some other style. He made the music go a certain way every time he played, regardless of style.

PG: You started playing the guitar over eighty years ago. Do you feel your relationship with the instrument has changed over the decades?

JBU: The instrument itself didn’t change. It’s still the same strings. They don’t change by themselves. You have to do something to make the instrument change. The guitar by itself is a lion, but he’s not free. Ornette’s Harmolodics music was a great way to free the lion. With Harmolodics, the lion could move anywhere and go in any hole and into any corner he wanted at any given time.  He didn’t have to be tied down with the chromatic scale, the C scale, the A scale, or whatever. He was free. When I started playing with Coleman, I was freed from playing any other style I had ever played.

People would say they heard what we were doing. That’s good. But I’m not trying to hear the freedom, I’m trying to feel it. Some people hear things. Others think about things. And others feel them. Feeling things is the deepest of the three.

James Blood Ulmer’s Black Rock Trio will be performing at the 2024 Vision Festival at Roulette Intermedium on June 20, 2024. More information can be found on Roulette’s website.

Photo credit: Julia Wesely