Critics reviews

It eschews historical context for the immediacy of performance, making it more of a piece for fans rather than newcomers to Coleman's work. But it is a rare peek into Coleman's artistic process – which means it is a glimpse into the mind of one of the greatest and most influential artists of the twentieth century.

Though Ornette: Made in America is hardly a straight-up biographical doc — its looping structure and three-legged-dog rhythms make it more like an Ornette composition than a conventional movie — it's the place to go to unlock some of the most precious secrets of Ornette.

Clarke spent over twenty years filming and collecting footage of Coleman at vividly different stages of his life and career, recording everything from raucous concerts and prestigious gala events to experimental re-enactments of his childhood and an avant-garde music video made by artist Kit Fitzgerald. Clarke's film isn't a biography in any conventional sense, but one that adopts Coleman's freewheeling, exploratory and intuitive approach to his music and applies it to cinema.

I'm not sure [Clarke's filming style] entirely captures how strange a listen [Coleman's] music is, mainly because the experimental properties of music and cinema don't particularly match up. But the attempt is more than worthy, if only for avoiding a simple presentation of Coleman as someone who could be understood.

Ornette: Made in America is a restless film befitting its ever-evolving character, but in such moments it comes closer than any biography to concisely conveying the joy of Coleman's canon.

A proudly promiscuous film, ORNETTE explodes the documentary form by paying lip service to its conventions before scrambling them into something new.

The result is both an immersion in Coleman's music and philosophy, and a remarkable non-linear mosaic. A triumph of editing, at once jagged and fluid, "Ornette" skitters back and forth in time, with side trips to Morocco and Nigeria, integrating Clarke's ‘60s footage, as well as other material shot on video, with newer Super-16 and 35mm material from the ‘80s.

Dramatized reconstructions of [Coleman's] youth, filmed performances from the sixties onward, and discussions with him and other musicians and associates (including William Burroughs and Brion Gysin) mesh with Clarke's diverse array of video manipulations and her flamboyant, rapid-fire editing, which break through the reportorial evidence to evoke the visions and fantasies from which Coleman's music arises.

Ornette: Made in America tinkers with and discards the conventions of the bio doc just as its pioneering musician subject exploded those of jazz.

In one particularly inventive scene, [Clarke] counterpoints a Coleman tune with the beeps and blips of arcade games—an aesthetic masterstroke that manages to capture this vital performer's essential alienness as well as sum up both artists' incessant originality.

One could do much worse for a narrative foundation than propulsive concert recordings of Coleman and his 1970s backing group, but Clarke's flimsy abstract flourishes seldom achieve the nuance and density of Coleman's playing.