Lonely Woman

I have always had a hard time with Ornette Coleman, but I love “Lonely Woman”, because it manages to be both extremely weird and extremely catchy.

Notice that at 2:09 during Ornette’s solo, someone goes “Woo!” Rightly so.

Ornette never notated “Lonely Woman”, and even if he had wanted to, it is not at all obvious how he could have. But I wanted to learn it, and to get the nuances down, I needed to transcribe it somehow. The pitches are not the hard part, aside from a few unusual note choices. The real challenge is the rhythm. It defies easy analysis. People sometimes approach it as totally unstructured, sometimes as very loosely structured, and sometimes as tightly structured in some complex and non-obvious way.

The most thorough musicological study of the tune I could find is a conference paper by Lindsay Vickery and Stuart James, “The Enduring Temporal Mystery of Ornette Coleman’s Lonely Woman” (2017). They point out the seeming conflict between the slow, rubato, hymn-like melody played by the horns and the fast, skittering beat in the drums.

From the outset it would appear that the horns are playing a stately 120 BPM whilst the drummer is playing a fast breakneck bebop-style groove in 4/4 at approximately 320 BPM; mathematically this would represent a more distant metric relationship of 8:3, however the extent to which this might represent a deliberately cultivated polyrhythm is difficult to determine. This metric displacement is most evident in the B section of the head where the trumpet appears to be playing 3/4 per note whilst the drummer is playing two bars of 4/4. However, an analysis of the tempo of the drummer indicates a tempo that is pushing and pulling against the other elements.

Vickery and James offer two transcriptions, one from the rhythmic perspective of the horns, and one from the rhythmic perspective of the drums. I like this idea in the abstract, but neither of their charts are very readable for me, and neither fits my intuition. So I decided to take my own approach.

My first decision was to ignore the drums completely, fascinating though they are, and instead try to feel the pulse implied by the bass and horns. Rather than aiming for a definitive transcription, instead I made a remix that splits the difference between Ornette’s rhythmic feel and a metrical grid that is intelligible to me. I warping out the recording over a beat in Ableton by finding a tempo that seemed to generally fit the opening phrases, 107 BPM. I added a hip-hop beat and tempo-synced delay, since those help me hear the rhythms. Then I identified melody notes that felt structurally important and aligned them to the closest strong beats. I left the rest of the timing as intact as possible, doing a bit of quantization here and there only when it was necessary for my notation to be legible. Here’s the result:

Then I went through my remix one bar at a time and transcribed everything as accurately as possible. Here’s what I came up with.

Here’s my transcription in guitar tab. The tune sounds great on guitar! Drop that D and drone it underneath.

The tune is generally in D harmonic minor, but there are some interesting wrinkles. Measure two implies A7/G, or maybe G7(#11). Measure five combines the natural and flat seventh, which is not typical. I hear it as evoking A7#9. In measure six, the leading tone C-sharp resolves to D like you’d expect, but there’s a B natural underneath. I hear this as either Dm6 or G7. It’s extremely cool how that B leads into the Bb arpeggio that follows. Measures eight and nine are the most harmonically dramatic, with the big bluesy sixths that descend chromatically. This sequence evokes a standard blues figure, but out of context. I hear the sixths as spelling out D°7 to Gm, then Gm to D7. That last chord makes no sense in a D minor context, but we aren’t really in D minor, we’re in D blues tonality. The form is eleven bars long! The second A section is the same melody but with a slightly different rhythm and a bluesier version of the ending that leaps up to A-flat instead of A.

The B section is a deeper mystery. It generally sounds like the blues, but the rising chromatic line in the trumpet is from somewhere else. In the first measure, Ornette arpeggiates Gm starting on D. He does the same thing in the second measure, but he ends on E-flat. In the third measure, he continues the pattern, but this time he ends on E natural. Meanwhile, Don Cherry is playing a rising chromatic line on trumpet that doesn’t line up with these final pitches at all; he plays E-flat when Ornette is on D, he plays E when Ornette is on E-flat, and he plays F-sharp when Ornette is on E. That is mysterious! In the second half of the B section, Ornette plays a lovely winding blues riff with an added flat sixth, natural seventh, and flat seventh, unspooling the tension that the first half built up.

I like it when people write weird music over drones and pedals. Ornette’s surprising note choices are easier to follow and understand against the unvarying D. The hypnotically static harmony also frees up bandwidth for following the multilayered rhythm. When everything is up in the air, I find it really hard to stay focused. This is my limitation as a listener, not a problem of Ornette’s, but it does limit my willingness to engage with him. If there are other drone-based Ornette tunes that I don’t know about (and I’m sure there are), please tell me in the comments.

Aside from the original, my favorite recording of “Lonely Woman” is this meditative version by Don Cherry, Dewey Redman, Charlie Haden and Ed Blackwell. I can’t embed it, just go listen. In a similar vein, check out this recording by Charlie Haden, Paul Motian and Geri Allen suggested by a commenter, also gorgeous.

The Modern Jazz Quartet gave the tune a more conventional harmonization and a more straightforward rubato ballad feel. It’s okay, but I like the weird versions better.

There are several vocal versions in circulation; here’s a good one by Freda Payne.

John Zorn did a pretty wild rock version using the bassline to “Pretty Woman” by Roy Orbison (get it?) As a Twitter friend puts it, “Everything is in 4 if you don’t count like a nerd.”

I love Sam Shalabi’s abstracted version on unaccompanied oud.

Ornette’s recording has shown up in some hip-hop tracks too. The best sample flip is “Human Language” by Aceyalone, produced by Mumbles.

“U-Informe” by Black Alien uses the opening notes of the melody.

“Lonely” by Jana Rush ft. DJ Paypal uses the intro bass and drums, and also flips the beginning of the melody.

A couple of years ago, Wayne Marshall posted this:

Lonely Woman but it's Gregorian chant

— wayne&wax (@wayneandwax) October 30, 2020

I did my best to make the idea a reality.

Finally, here is a completely unrelated Horace Silver ballad called “Lonely Woman”, which I also love.