When Will The Blues Leave

"When Will the Blues Leave" is a composition by Ornette Coleman, first recorded in February 1958 and released that September on his debut album as a leader, "Something Else!!!!" on Contemporary Records. The session, cut at Contemporary Studio in Los Angeles, featured Coleman on alto saxophone alongside Don Cherry, Walter Norris, Don Payne, and Billy Higgins. All nine tracks on the album were Coleman originals, and this tune stands out as a deceptively simple blues head that poses its central question right in the title. The phrasing suggests not weariness with the form but genuine curiosity about it, as if Coleman were turning the blues over in his hands to see what it might become. The composition occupies an important transitional place in Coleman's output. It belongs to the period when he was still working within conventional harmonic structures, before the full arrival of his free jazz innovations, yet his melodic sensibility already sounds restless and searching. The piece bridges bebop tradition and the more radical vocabulary Coleman would soon develop on albums like "The Shape of Jazz to Come" and "Free Jazz." Over the decades the tune has drawn a wide range of interpreters. Paul Bley recorded it in 1962 and returned to it nearly four decades later for ECM. The New York Contemporary Five, with Don Cherry, performed it live at Jazzhus Montmartre in Copenhagen in 1963. The SFJAZZ Collective took it up in both 2014 and 2018. It has become a standard in jazz education and repertoire, valued for its openness and the space it offers improvisers to explore.