But most of all I noticed Mr. Coleman's calm. I could almost feel Mr. Haden planning where to aim his bass, and I smiled at Mr. Higgins's whims, as if I'd heard him saying "Hey, why don't I play this solo entirely on the cymbals?" (He sounded remarkably fresh and playful for a man of 61 who was all but fatally sick just months ago.) Mr. Coleman, however, didn't reveal himself at all, and didn't need to. He played with no fuss. Music emerged from him fully formed, sounding both surprising and inevitable. Sounds curled and dived, explored and twisted, sometimes drifting on a silent inner breeze -- but never hesitating, never doubtful, never putting on a show. The crowd at Avery Fisher Hall responded with a standing ovation, appropriate but strangely incidental, since Mr. Coleman's quiet certainty had somehow outshouted it.
This concert -- which continued almost as impressively with younger guest artists joining the trio -- might have been the highlight of the musical season in New York. Certainly the jazz critics thought it was; one said he wept. But the Lincoln Center Festival offered still more of Mr. Coleman, a four-concert series, in fact, packaged under the name "? Civilization."
And the question mark, I'm sorry to say, may have been appropriate. Genius soars on peculiar winds, which sometimes waft it toward lands that aren't fully nourishing. Lincoln Center began its tribute with a journey to one of Mr. Coleman's less convincing destinations, the abode of the symphony orchestra. Not that it shouldn't have; in the early 1970s Mr. Coleman wrote an epic orchestral work called "Skies of America," which was preserved shortly afterward on a now unavailable recording, and has been heard only twice in this country since then. It's one of the best-known unperformed monuments of American music, and by mounting two readings of it with the New York Philharmonic, Lincoln Center did exactly the kind of artistic good deed you'd expect from a major urban festival.

Which isn't quite the same as saying I enjoyed being there. "Skies of America" pits Mr. Coleman's current ensemble, a unique eight-piece electric funk band, Prime Time, against the orchestra. The metaphysics of this opposition may or may not help us understand the piece; the orchestra, Mr. Coleman has written, should create "a very clear earth and sky image," leaving the improvising soloists to, perhaps, convey the endless march of troubled history under our skies, leading someday toward goodness.
But after hearing the work twice I'm ready to say that the sound isn't decisively conceived. What an orchestra offers is diversity -- trombones, violins and flutes, bassoons, oboes and cellos -- each instrument bringing a touch and soul of its own. Mr. Coleman chose to mass these forces, writing most of the time as if the orchestra was one huge instrument, a great thick voice that sang a single song.
That's unusual, but not impossible; the question then is how that voice is tuned, how each instrument is placed within it. And while Mr. Coleman writes that he wanted "very high parts," I've studied the score, and I can't say it looks to me as if he'd precisely imagined the force of every note. When I look at music by a master of the orchestra (Berg or Mahler, Wagner or Strauss), I see vivid specificity -- each instrument placed exactly where it does the most good. In Mr. Coleman's score, I saw not much more than a vague impression of each sound, and when I heard the piece, I lost interest in what did work -- the stately stasis of the sky -- because the orchestral sound proved indigestible.

Prime Time, of course, was magic -- skipping from rock to rock, just as Mr. Coleman's trio did, but this time far more unpredictably, and in three (or maybe four or five or six) dimensions. The group was magic, too, in the festival's last Coleman event, but here I have to say "enough." In 1995, Mr. Coleman and Prime Time released an album called "Tone Dialing." Since then, Mr. Coleman has enjoyed performing the music as a multimedia circus, with video, dancers and more or less anything else that crosses his mind.
I could be cruel and say that "Skies of America," compared to Mr. Coleman's jazz performance, was like Michael Jordan playing baseball. But "Tone Dialing" -- no exaggeration -- was Michael Jordan going bowling. I don't mind watching video of Nelson Mandela, even if the Dalai Lama and Martin Luther King Jr. predictably followed. I don't mind watching women lie on beds of nails, or walk on broken glass. (I said this was a circus.) I don't mind Lou Reed or Laurie Anderson, who somehow joined the troupe. But why Ornette Coleman -- who plays like an inspired force of nature -- wants to share random scribbles from his thoughts is something I'd rather not try to understand.

Wall Street Journal, July 16, 1997