Ornette Coleman opens me up. Ornette Coleman gives me ideas. Ornette Coleman allows me to look at things from a different angle. It's an odd-looking angle. It's challenging. On occasion it may look like this angle is entirely cancelled by laws of physics. I had no concept of this angle before I first heard "Lonely Woman".
To describe this effect is to imagine a brain ripped out of your skull and smashed to pieces and scattered all over the places and the people. Who are now characters, who are now settings. He might rip the heart out of your ribcage, too, but that would need a little more time.
Hooks? Well, they never stop. They are these half-thoughts flirting with your imagination.
But earlier, there was Naked Lunch. A Kafka high and the greatest film about the process of writing. Burroughs, present during the Dancing In Your Head sessions, gets "Midnight Sunrise" as a way of an homage. Back then, however, I only heard it as some ear-splitting insanity juxtaposed against the restraint of Howard Shore.
Totally authentic, and something Ornette Coleman does to me now, regularly, somewhere along the way to Interzone decorated with bugs crawling up those white bathroom walls.
And then, even earlier, there was a short story I wrote. The short story was titled "Madeleine" and it was about a young boy who fell in love with an older woman and got trapped in her apartment. The older woman listened to jazz and I had to include a name of some kind. A jazz name.
Naturally, there was just one name that fit the passage. Back then, I had no idea that all along - it fit the narrative, too.
Because in the end - the boy did get out.
