Prime Time

From HitStory, the pop encyclopedia of School of Rock · Artist

Prime Time was an American free-funk band, founded in 1975 by Ornette Coleman. The music followed his theory of harmolodics, in which melody, harmony and rhythm have no fixed hierarchy. The first members included the guitarists Bern Nix and Charles Ellerbee, the bassist Jamaaladeen Tacuma and the drummers Denardo Coleman and Ronald Shannon Jackson. Later the bassist Albert MacDowell and the drummer Sabir Kamal, among others, joined.

Music and breakthrough

Coleman's first album with Prime Time was Dancing in Your Head. The album Virgin Beauty from 1988, with guest appearances by Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead, was their most successful. It reached number two in the Billboard jazz album chart and in its first year sold more than any previous record by Coleman. In 1993 Prime Time played as the opening act for the Grateful Dead at the Oakland Coliseum. In 2017, two years after Ornette's death, his son Denardo brought the group together again for a concert at Alice Tully Hall, as a tribute to Ornette and to Bern Nix, who had died earlier that year.

Influence

With Prime Time, Coleman brought free jazz to electric instruments and funk rhythms. The group had two guitarists and two drummers, who played in and out of each other. In this way he linked up with electric jazz and the rock world, and the group became a bridge between the avant-garde and a wider audience.

Listening

Discography

Studio albums

• 1988Virgin Beauty
• 1995Tone Dialing