Date: April 1972 (recording)
Release: Columbia/Legacy #63568
Cover Art: view / download
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Recorded in April 1972, Ornette Coleman’s social-political rant Skies of America was a highly flammable LP. A composition, like Lazarus, rising out of the new cotton fields, the album was saturated in the lighter fluid of racial upheaval, the late-’60s assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and Robert Kennedy, and the less-than-racially diverse frontlines of the Vietnam war. From the start it’s like a loaded gun, defying classification, even by avant-garde standards. In the America of the early ’70s, King’s dream gave way to Ornette’s nightmare—a horrific vision by a prophet whose pen was a brass horn, and the apocalyptic monster of inspiration, the mighty bald eagle.
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