Don Ellis: The Jazz anarchist – That crazy bastard broke the clock and it ain’t fixed yet: Videos, Photos

We features an unknown hero, when talking about jazz musicians. Aside from the translation, I had fun adding videos from YouTube, the same ones that the author quotes and recommends.

I wonder if, reading these few lines, my many friends who wouldn’t miss a concert by the national trumpeter will be moved by curiosity and try to delve into history. They might discover hidden and, for them, unheard-of wonders.

When Don Ellis played the last note in 1978, the trumpet was still smoking. You don’t just play music the way Ellis did: you tear it off the walls of the concert hall and reconstruct it in your own unheard-of image, like a mad architect of polyrhythmic Babylon. And Ellis wasn’t content to push jazz forward. He wanted to make the entire genre explode, and then dance barefoot on the rubble playing in 19/8.

It wasn’t just jazz. It was a risky rhythmic game. A harmonic sacrilege. A sonic coup.

Born in 1934 in Los Angeles, Don Ellis was a model student of tradition, until he realized that it was all deadly boring. After playing with the big bands of Ray McKinley and Maynard Ferguson, he found himself in the crucible of experimentation: the George Russell Orchestra. That’s where the virus took hold. He caught the fever of asymmetry. He looked at 4/4 time and saw a cage. So he picked the lock.

Ellis wasn’t trying to be different for the sake of being different. He was possessed. Obsessed. He studied Indian music as if it were the Rosetta Stone. He took a scalpel to slice Western harmony. He wrote compositions that sounded like math homework from an alien race.

Then he made it all swing.

Let’s get one thing straight: Don Ellis didn’t just experiment with odd meters. He made them his gospel. He wasn’t counting “one-two-three-four.” He was whispering arcane incantations: “three-three-two-two-two-one-two-two-two.” That’s the count for “33 222-1-222.” Try tapping your foot to that rhythm and see what kind of seizure it gives you.

Ellis’s scores were rhythmic obstacle courses. The musicians had to be Olympic-caliber to survive. But they did more than survive: They went wild. There’s something wild and beautiful about watching a 21-piece orchestra jam into a 19/8 and make it sound like a Motown jam session.

The drums clank like a thousand caffeinated gods. The horns scream. The bass slips into the shadows, syncing to a beat you didn’t know your body could feel.

You don’t dance to this music. You submit to it. You let it ruffle your internal metronome and rearrange your nervous system.

Most trumpet players made do with three valves. Ellis didn’t. He added a fourth so he could play quarter tones, those little bastards that slide between notes. It was like hearing a ghost whisper from inside a melody.

He wasn’t afraid of technology, though. Before Miles was even connected to electronics, Ellis was playing with echoplexes, ring modulators, and phase shifters, bending time and tone like Dali on acid. His trumpet sounded like a spaceship having a religious experience.

He didn’t just want you to hear the trumpet. He wanted it to haunt you in your dreams.

Ellis’s band was a circus of sound: sitars, electric violins, multiple drum kits, and tablas clashing with jazz snares as if they were fighting over a sacred rhythm. On Electric Bath, his 1968 masterpiece, he fused psychedelic freakouts with Ellington swing, acid rock fuzz with Bollywood glamour. It’s as if Coltrane had tripped on acid and started a marching band in space.

In the early ’70s, Hollywood came knocking, and Ellis answered with a megaphone and a whole lot of grenades. His score for The French Connection (1971) didn’t win an Oscar, but it rewrote the rulebook for action scores. Those screeching, paranoid brass instruments? That frenetic rhythm that makes you feel like you’re running to your death? That’s Don Ellis.

You know the car chase scene that every other action movie tries to copy? It’s Ellis’s jazzy heartbeat under the hood. His music doesn’t accompany the movie, it attacks it. It growls. It chases you. It drags you down into the sewers and dares you to get out.

Then came The Seven-Ups (1973), another gritty crime drama with Ellis’s sonic fingerprints all over it, and another incredible car chase. Funk, jazz, paranoia, urban decay: it’s all there on the soundtrack, lurking in the rhythm section, unleashing the horns.

He even dabbled in television. Have you ever seen Brannigan with John Wayne? The music was tighter than Wayne’s toupee. Ellis managed to inject jazz into places it didn’t belong, making it sound like it had always been there.

Ellis wasn’t just a wild-eyed composer with a passion for odd meters. He was a theoretician, a teacher, a brass shaman whose classroom had more time signatures than chairs. His book Quarter Tones was a bible for brass lunatics who wanted to blow notes through cracks.

He taught workshops, led clinics, and drove music students crazy who thought jazz was just swing and standards. To Ellis, jazz was a verb. A living beast. You didn’t study it. You beat it into submission.

His students? Many went on to become pioneers themselves: some in jazz, some in film and television, some probably in psychiatric therapy after surviving a semester of Ellis’s rhythm exercises.

Let’s talk about the band.

The Don Ellis Orchestra was not a jazz group. It was a battalion of sound. A syncopated tactical assault unit. Trumpets, trombones, strings, bass, keyboards, ethnic percussion from three continents, and more drummers than a Haitian carnival.

Live, they were explosive. They’d open with something like “Pussy Wiggle Stomp” (yes, that’s a real song title), and within two minutes the audience was in rhythmic shock. By the sixth minute, their souls had left their bodies.

Ellis didn’t conduct, but he lit the fire. He flailed like a madman, eyes wide, sweat pouring, trumpet shrieking. It was as if he were physically trying to keep the music from breaking down the walls.

And sometimes he failed. Gloriously.

Don Ellis had a heart that beat too fast, literally. His arrhythmia was well known. Irony? Maybe. Cosmic joke? More likely.

In 1978, he was still pushing, innovating, convincing musicians to count to 11 and a half. But his heart couldn’t keep up. At just 44, Don Ellis died of a heart attack. Rhythm finally conquered him.

He left a crater where the rules used to be.

What comes after Don Ellis?

There’s Weather Report. There’s Mahavishnu. You have Frank Zappa writing scores in 13/8 and smirking the whole time.

Film composers like Lalo Schifrin, Jerry Goldsmith and even Hans Zimmer explore dissonance, asymmetry and texture, with the ghost of Ellis buzzing in their ears.

But more than anything, you get freedom. Don Ellis proved that jazz can be anything: tribal, futuristic, mathematical, emotional. That it doesn’t have to sit politely in a club or dance like in 1955. It can scream, it can shine, it can stumble, it can fly.

Don Ellis was a sonic anarchist in a world of jazz bureaucrats. He didn’t want your approval. He wanted your attention. He was the one who painted the Sistine Chapel and then set it on fire to see what the smoke would sound like.

There’s a quote that goes around in jazz circles: “True innovators are never understood until after the funeral.” Ellis didn’t just prove it. He orchestrated it. He recorded it in 27/16, with a tabla breakdown and a light-bending trumpet solo.

So next time you hear a band pushing beyond 4/4, descending into chaos, or channeling apocalypse through a brass section, give Don Ellis a shout out.

That crazy bastard broke the clock and it ain’t fixed yet.