The composer enters into a brilliant dialogue with his time, an exchange rather than a prescription for change. In 1961 Free Jazzthe release that named the genre, used two quartets playing simultaneously. Science fiction it abounds with overstuffed, ill-formed ensembles, but they feel like ideas of what a band can be, not final destinations. Blackwell and Higgins hit their drum kits simultaneously on the raucous title track and some soulfully explosive vocal features, “What Reason Could I Give” and “All My Life.” Fusion conquers “Rock the Clock,” which precedes a multi-reed attack as Redman blows a musetta along with his tenor. The song trades overdubs and, for the first time in Coleman's recorded output, electric instruments: Haden's wah-wah bass takes center stage, accompanied by Coleman's unlearned fiddle, a shout-out to the fiddle customs of the American West. However, “Rock the Clock,” like the record it surrounds, refuses to rely on fusion's signature 4/4 backbeat. Instead, Science fiction it offers a mix of approaches, temporalities and traditions, combining the old with the new, the Texan and the Yankee, and especially the cosmopolitan and the rural. At heart, this is a suite of urban transplant songs, tracing a variety of styles that people—especially people of color—brought to the cultural melting pot of Lower Manhattan.
Opener “What Reason Could I Give” features Asha Puthli, a fresh-faced New Yorker from India who would go on to be an eclectic and often sampled disco diva. Coleman had never recorded with a singer in the studio, but in a proto-loft spirit he lifted an archetype from an earlier iteration of jazz, the once prized role of the singer, often shunned by composers in the late 1960s and 70s . . Puthli brings to her two songs the trappings of raga tradition as well as simmering, hungry emotion. Her vocals on “What Reason Could I Give” sound like the laments of a recent arrival in town sitting by their fire after a hard day: tired, homesick, melancholy. She sighs beside a double brass section, alternating between dissonance and sweet harmony, her melody in search of a place to rest. The title track samples a baby's cries, a sound familiar to every inhabitant of a cramped dwelling. “My mind belongs/to culture,” recites the astonishing poet David Henderson, raised in embattled Harlem, a man trying to hear his own thoughts by speaking them out loud.
