Chronology

The story behind

Chronology sounds as if time itself were folding back on itself. The trumpet of Ornette Coleman advances with a melody that seems to dismantle and reassemble at the same time, while the bass of Charlie Haden and the drums of Billy Higgins trace a rhythm that never stays still. It is not jazz of precise notes or fixed structures: it is as if the song were breathing in a time signature that never quite settles, where each instrument plays at following and getting lost at the same time.Recorded in May 1959 at Radio Recorders in Hollywood, this piece was born in a session that lasted a single day. Coleman arrived with the idea of calling the album Focus on Sanity, but the producer Nesuhi Ertegun preferred Chronology, convinced that the title better captured that sense of constant motion. The song itself, at six minutes and four seconds, is a journey in which the quartet—completed by Don Cherry on trumpet—improvises over a foundation that never repeats the same way. Thirty-three years later, in 2012, the Library of Congress included it in the National Recording Registry, an honor for recordings that have left their mark through innovation.