Things evolve when you work on a film.
You have ideas and you kind of follow them.
One thing I learned was to follow every idea you had.
Track it down...
and see why you had that dream or what was...
Don’t discourage ideas. Develop them.
And with Ornette it was just an idea. I remembered a recording...
I was working on
I went through all of Burroughs’s work,
trying to find musical references in the work.
There actually wasn’t very many.
And I was trying to create –
I knew I would want to create the world of Interzone in the film.
And I remembered a recording that Ornette did.
It was from the sixties. It was called
It was a collaboration with Ornette and The Master Musicians of Jajouka.
It’s one of the oldest orchestras in the world, over 400 years old.
It’s a Moroccan orchestra and they live in the Rif Mountains,
the Atlas Mountains in North Africa.
He journeyed there and did a recording with them, a remote recording.
With Robert Palmer, actually.
And I thought,
"That’s interesting. That’s a great jazz artist."
Like Burroughs recording with...
a Moroccan orchestra. Because...
a lot of
I played that for David and he said,
"That’s Interzone. That sound."
And it’s a wild sound. It’s an African orchestra.
I mean, they play rhaitas and ney flutes. It’s a Berber tribe.
They play percussion drumming and it’s a very wild,
very expressive type of music.
And...
So I thought, "Maybe, I’ll give Ornette a call."
I knew him from
I occasionally had the chance to...
put different artists on the programme and I had booked Ornette Coleman.
Because I was just a fan.
So I knew Ornette. I called him, he was in Copenhagen,
and he said he was interested. I met him in London and...
we had more talks about it.
And then I built a little trio with him,
with his son Denardo Coleman and a French bassist named Barre Phillips.
And...
we set to work.
The piece was written for the London Philharmonic and Ornette.
Well, I wrote a piece as if I was writing the score.
I wrote a symphonic score for it and then added Ornette to it.
I mean, I wrote it for him.
And...
The piece is...
I did one technique with him that I thought was interesting in that...
I had him in the studio with earphones,
but he was playing live with the orchestra.
And I had... Denardo was in a soundproof booth.
Some of the music, and actually quite a bit of it, was written in these...
very slow tangos to evoke, you know, the...
colonial aspect of Morocco and Tangier.
It had this slow...
tempos that the orchestra would play.
Denardo would be playing double and triple time on the drums.
Very fast. (MIMICS PERCUSSION SOUNDS)
I give this to Ornette and he would, of course, play to Denardo,
because he would hear his son playing these rhythms.
So he’d play this beautiful Charlie Parker-type bebop phrases...
over the slow-moving orchestration.
And because he’s a great jazz artist,
he would play into the orchestra.
He would find sections of the orchestra and he'd play into them,
relate to them.
You know, jazz musicians play against each other,
they play with it, against each other.
There is this constant flow of ideas that are going on.
So he would kind of work with the orchestra in that way.
It was a very...
It was a wonderfully creative session.
I was conducting it and Ornette was feeling...
you know, great playing with a symphony orchestra in that way.
So the results I think, as you know, are very...
[They] have a lot of freedom to them.
I think - I hope that they capture the essence of...
Burroughs’s world and