Ornette at the Five Spot
The National Endowment for the Arts posts its own account of the 2026 Jazz Masters celebration in Los Angeles, where Airto Moreira's daughter and a 2011 Jazz Master accept for two honorees who cannot attend, and the free Walt Disney Concert Hall tribute is up on demand. Today's record is Ornette Coleman's "The Shape of Jazz to Come," which the Library of Congress holds twice and dates two different ways, and the Count Basie Orchestra takes Pittsburgh.
LioraThe nation's highest honor in jazz got handed out in Los Angeles, and two of the four honorees were not in the room. Today's record is in the Library of Congress twice. Later, a bar on the Bowery, 1959, and a white plastic saxophone. It's Saturday. Let's go.
LioraIt's Saturday, October 3rd. This is The Daily Quintet. I'm Liora. Five stories from the world of jazz, in about ten minutes. Here we go.
One. The Lead: The National Endowment for the Arts posts its own account of the 2026 Jazz Masters
LioraThe National Endowment for the Arts posted its own account of the 2026 Jazz Masters celebration yesterday, and the story in it is two empty chairs.
The class: the jazz broadcaster Rhonda Hamilton, and the musicians Carmen Lundy, Airto Moreira and Patrice Rushen. The Endowment has given this fellowship every year since 1982. Twenty five thousand dollars, once in a lifetime.
It opened with a dinner and a trophy for each honoree. Airto Moreira could not be there, so his daughter, Diana Purim, accepted for him. Patrice Rushen could not be there either. Her friend and collaborator Hubert Laws, a Jazz Master himself from 2011, spoke on her behalf. The Endowment says it gave Rushen her award over the summer, after she played the Montclair Jazz Festival.
LioraThe next evening was the concert. Walt Disney Concert Hall, September fifteenth, free. The agency calls Los Angeles a fitting place for it. Hamilton, Lundy and Rushen all live there.
Here is the part you can still use. The whole concert is up on demand, at arts dot gov slash jazz.
Two. Listen to This: Ornette Coleman's "The Shape of Jazz to Come" sits in the Library of Congress twice
LioraToday's record is in the Library of Congress twice, and the Library's two files disagree about the year.
"The Shape of Jazz to Come," Ornette Coleman, on Atlantic. The Library put it in the National Recording Registry in 2012. The registry page says 1959. The catalog record says 1960.
The band, off the Library's own card. Ornette Coleman, alto saxophone. Donald Cherry, cornet. Charlie Haden, bass. Billy Higgins, drums. No piano.
Six titles, and the first one is the tip. Start with "Lonely Woman" and count the clocks. The registry essay, by Stephen Rush, hears a plaintive folk melody over a wickedly fast swing groove from Billy Higgins, and Charlie Haden's bass underneath it as a drone.
LioraThe Library's own blurb quotes the critic Ralph J. Gleason, who said the musical and critical world was split neatly in two by this record. And then: for all its iconoclasm, it swings.
One new one. Out yesterday on ECM, a three record box, the three Steve Reich albums the label released between 1978 and 1982, for his ninetieth birthday, which is today.
Later, on The Bridge: New York, 1959. Ornette Coleman brings a white plastic saxophone to a bar on the Bowery, and the press can't agree whether he's a fake or a genius. Sekou has the story.
Three. The Bridge: New York, 1959: Ornette Coleman brings a white plastic saxophone to a bar on the Bowery
LioraOne true story from this music's history, every day. Sekou tells it, I ask the questions. Sekou, where are we?
SekouNew York. The Bowery, then the city's skid row. Tuesday, November 17th, 1959. The Five Spot Cafe, a small, shabby bar at Five Cooper Square.
Two bands make their debut here tonight. One is the Jazztet, led by Art Farmer and Benny Golson. A British critic who was there wrote that the club had rarely seen a Tuesday night audience that size.
The first set is for the press. The owners, the Termini brothers, have called an early evening preview for the other band, a quartet from Los Angeles: Don Cherry on pocket trumpet, Charlie Haden on bass, Billy Higgins on drums. The leader is 29, an alto player from Fort Worth, Texas, named Ornette Coleman, and this is his first job in the East. His saxophone is made of white plastic.
LioraA plastic saxophone?
SekouBy his biographer's account, he bought it in Los Angeles in 1954, when he couldn't afford a metal horn, and it still cost him the price of a used Selmer. He liked it. With the plastic horn, he said later, "you could almost see the shape of the breath."
In Los Angeles he ran an elevator and tried to get a hearing at jam sessions. Then John Lewis of the Modern Jazz Quartet heard him and told Atlantic Records. That summer, Atlantic paid for Coleman and Cherry to attend the School of Jazz at Lenox, Massachusetts. Gunther Schuller, who taught there, recalled that "he could have taught any of the faculty at Lenox."
Some of the critics who heard him there, Martin Williams most prominently, talked Joe Termini into a two-week booking.
LioraSo, opening night. What does the press make of him?
SekouIt can't agree. A. B. Spellman wrote that everyone at that first press conference "came prepared to form a lasting opinion." George Hoefer's account in DownBeat called the comments mixed-up, and listed them. "He'll change the entire course of jazz." "He's a fake." "He's a genius." "I can't say; I'll have to hear him a lot more."
SekouCharlie Haden remembered fights breaking out right in the club. "People would be putting us down. People would be praising us." One night, Coleman said, a musician "kicked in the door with his feet and tried to hit me." He didn't say who.
By Coleman's own count, Coltrane came by, and Sonny Rollins. The trumpeter Roy Eldridge told a friend, by Nat Hentoff's account, "I listened to him high and I listened to him cold sober. I even played with him. I think he's jiving, baby."
LioraDidn't Leonard Bernstein make a speech?
SekouThat's the famous version. As Miles Davis later heard it, Bernstein, then conductor of the New York Philharmonic, jumped up one night and said, "This is the greatest thing that has ever happened to jazz!" Miles wrote that in 1989, after the words "they tell me." The earliest account I've read, Nat Hentoff's, has Bernstein lunge at Coleman after a set, roar "You're a genius!" and lead him to his table. Coleman remembered a hug, not a speech.
Booked for two weeks, the quartet stayed about ten. In 2007, forty-eight years after the Five Spot, Coleman won the Pulitzer Prize for music, for a recording called Sound Grammar. His music wasn't even among the 140 nominees. The panelists bought the CD and nominated it themselves.
LioraIn 1959, the room couldn't agree on him. In 2007, a Pulitzer panel bought the record itself.
That's The Bridge. Back to today, right after this.
Four. On the Road: MCG Jazz has the Count Basie Orchestra with Nnenna Freelon in Pittsburgh
LioraTonight, coast to coast.
Tonight's ticket is in Pittsburgh.
MCG Jazz bills the Count Basie Orchestra with Nnenna Freelon, six and half past eight. Eighty dollars for a reserved seat at the late one. For the six o'clock, the hall's own button says join the waitlist.
Now the sweep.
In New York, the Birdland Theater has "Bouncin' With Bud," a Bud Powell birthday celebration, seven and half past nine. Tardo Hammer on piano, Pasquale Grasso on guitar, Lonnie Plaxico on bass, Steve Smith on drums.
In Chicago, the Jazz Showcase has the Chico Freeman Quintet, eight and ten. Thirty five dollars, fifty for the preferred seats. The club's own page calls Von Freeman his father, and Von Freeman was born in Chicago on this day in 1923.
LioraIn New Orleans, Snug Harbor has Davisito Navarro's birthday party and album release, with special guest Yissy Garcia, half past seven and half past nine.
In Los Angeles, the Catalina Jazz Club has Artur Zakiyan playing solo piano, half past eight. Sixty seven thirty for the ticket.
Five. One More Note: George Wein was born on October 3, 1925, and the Arts Endowment says he was invited to
LioraOctober third. George Wein was born on this day in 1925, in Boston, and died in 2021. The Endowment's own page calls him a producer and a pianist, and says he was invited to organize the first Newport Jazz Festival in 1954. Leonard Feather said it started the festival era.
And on this same day in 1958, the first Monterey Jazz Festival opened. The bill, off Monterey's own history page. Louis Armstrong. Dizzy Gillespie. Sonny Rollins. Dave Brubeck. And Billie Holiday, in her only Monterey performance.
Outro
LioraThat's the Quintet. If today's show earned it, follow The Daily Quintet wherever you listen.
The Daily Quintet is an AI-crafted production, researched and checked by humans. Every listing you heard came from the venue or the festival's own organizer.
That's your Saturday. I'm Liora. See you tomorrow.