Fifty years ago today, at 10 o’clock on the morning of Monday 17 April 1972, the photographer Val Wilmer and I arrived at Abbey Road Studios to hear Ornette Coleman recording The Skies of America with the London Symphony Orchestra. It was the first of four three-hour sessions, held on consecutive days, during which the entire work was committed to tape. (r.w.)
And what an album that was – and still is, with some strange folk spheres and distant echoes of the blues sent up into American skies with a sense of yearning, lament, and danger. The idea of the piece came to Ornette while visting an Indian reservation in Montana in the 1960s. The album had countless admirers of musical visionaries, from Scott Walker to Mark Hollis or Gavin Bryars. Richard Williams is back again on his blog The Blue Moment (see our blog roll) and remembers. (m.e.)