Polygram Records
1976
Body Meta
About This Album
The establishing of Ornette Coleman's self-determining Artists House label and his electric double-trio Prime Time coincided with the release of Body Meta, which changed many of the business and musical contours of jazz in the mid- to late '70s. Coleman proved that jazz musicians could determine their own fate and market their music without a major-label contract. He also advanced the orientation of jazz away from swing rhythms and into a deeper blues driven by funk and angular electric guitars inspired by the precepts of Thelonious Monk. A music that turned out to be crazier than most while attempting to be more people-oriented resulted in controversy. It was an indisputable new music amalgam that Coleman could claim as his own, yet which sprung forth into the so-called M-Base music movement of New York City. Jamaaladeen Tacuma on electric bass guitar, Bern Nix and Charlie Ellerbe on electric guitars, drummers Denardo Coleman and Ronald Shannon Jackson comprised the first Prime Time band heard here. They are loud, boisterous, imaginative, unfettered by conventional devices, and wail beyond compare with Coleman within relatively funky, straight beats. "Voice Poetry" sets the tone, a boogaloo funk with an unmistakable kinship to the churning Bo Diddley beat, Coleman's obtuse alto sax between the guitarists' obtuse castings create incessant, passionate, and obsessed music.
Track List (try tracks 1,2 and 5)

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