Ornette Coleman would rehearse James “Blood” Ulmer for eight hours a day. Coleman would call out chord changes continuously: “Blood, play B flat, Blood, play E flat, go to F, F sharp, F minor, go to diminished, go to everywhere in the world.” For six months, Ulmer tracked whatever Coleman called, all day, every day, “trying to find out how the guitar went for his own music.” “He wore me out with that shit,” Ulmer recalled. One morning, in frustration after six months of this exhausting harmolodic education, Ulmer woke from a dream. He tuned all six strings on his Gibson Byrdland to the same note. When Coleman called out B-flat, Ulmer said: “I got no B-flat.” When Coleman called out E-minor-seventh: “I ain’t got that either.” So they just started playing. Coleman listened for a long time. Then he said: “Blood, you have moved the tone center, making the treble clef a transposing note for the guitar.” Later, after Ulmer had further developed the tuning, Coleman reflected: “Blood Ulmer studied with me for a long time. He created his own theory, but nobody knows what it is yet! He scientifically broke down playing notes in unison. He knows that shit backwards!” The all-strings-to-one-note tuning that Ornette Coleman’s eight hours a day of chord-change drills had — through the specific frustration of six months of exhaustion — driven Ulmer to discover in a dream: this is the foundational gear story of James “Blood” Ulmer. The cherished black Gibson Byrdland. All six strings tuned to E. The wah-wah pedal adding the “gooey” expressive frequency filtering. The Roland Jazz Chorus amp providing the clean stereo platform. The “gooey wah-wah and ethereal swoosh” of the Roland Jazz Chorus. The Diddley Bow — the one-string wire between two nails on a Southern barn — as the specific conceptual ancestor of the all-strings-one-note approach. The “most original guitarist since Jimi Hendrix and Wes Montgomery” (Newsweek, 1981), playing the Gibson Byrdland tuned to a single note, with the wah and the Roland, through the avant-gutbucket blues-funk-free-jazz that no existing critical vocabulary has fully captured in the forty-plus years since Newsweek tried to name it.
Willie James Ulmer was born on February 8, 1940, in St. Matthews, South Carolina — the rural South Carolina of the Diddley Bow, the one-string instrument stretched between nails on a barn wall that he would later cite as the conceptual ancestor of his all-strings-one-note tuning approach. He was performing in a popular youth gospel band, the Southern Sons, by the time he was six years old — the church music of the South Carolina gospel tradition as the foundational musical education, the specific freedom of gospel improvisation and congregational participation as the first musical context. “I think church music inspires freedom more than anything. It gives you the right to participate in what exists in your atmosphere,” he later told PostGenre. The church freedom was the first freedom. The harmolodics was the second. He moved to Pittsburgh in 1959 and played soul jazz ensembles there through 1964, then to Columbus, Ohio, through 1967, working with organists Hank Marr and Big John Patton. He recorded with Hank Marr in 1964 — one of the first available documents of the Ulmer guitar voice. He moved to New York in 1971, played nine months at Minton’s Playhouse in Harlem (hired to play the blues, played his originals instead), worked briefly with Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers in 1973 as the first guitarist the Messengers had employed, and met Ornette Coleman in 1972 through drummer Rashied Ali. He moved into Coleman’s loft. The eight hours a day of chord changes began. The dream came. The tuning changed. The music began.
The Wes Montgomery shadow is part of the Ulmer biography in the specific sense that the Wax Poetics profile records: after a perceived snub from his hero Montgomery, Ulmer “eschewed his hero Wes Montgomery’s licks” — the specific psychological pivot from admirer to independent voice that the encounter with the most celebrated jazz guitarist of the 1960s produced. The Montgomery influence had shaped the early Ulmer approach; the perceived snub liberated him from it; the Coleman harmolodic education provided the alternative vocabulary. The three-stage development: gospel freedom in South Carolina, Wes Montgomery jazz in Pittsburgh and Columbus, Ornette Coleman harmolodics in New York. The Byrdland carries all three of these stages: the gospel freedom in the unison tuning’s harmolodic liberty, the jazz archtop guitar tradition of the Byrdland’s design ancestry, and the harmolodic specific technical approach of the all-strings-one-note configuration. The Byrdland is the correct guitar for all three stages simultaneously.
Newsweek’s 1981 profile hailed Ulmer as “the most original guitarist since Jimi Hendrix and Wes Montgomery” — the specific peer comparison that captures both the tradition he was departing from (Wes Montgomery’s jazz archtop) and the tradition he was extending (Hendrix’s psychedelic electric). Ulmer’s own terms for his music are the most precise available: “black rock” — a term later popularized by his admirer Vernon Reid of Living Color, to whom Ulmer’s specific fusion of blues, funk, free jazz, and rock was the foundational reference. Also “harmolodic diatonic funk.” Critics have tried: “punk jazz” (Chip Stern in Musician), “avant gutbucket” (Bill Milkowski in Guitar Player — “conjuring images of Skip James and Albert Ayler jamming on the Mississippi Delta”). None of these fully captures it, which is the specific quality of an approach that Ornette Coleman observed with: “He created his own theory, but nobody knows what it is yet!”
Background: St. Matthews, Gospel Freedom, Minton’s, and the Loft on Coleman’s Floor
The St. Matthews, South Carolina origin is the specific geographic context that produced the Diddley Bow reference: the rural South Carolina tradition of the Diddley Bo(w) — the single wire stretched between two nails hammered into the side of a house, reverberating when plucked or struck — is both the most primitive available form of the guitar and the conceptual ancestor of the all-strings-one-note tuning that became Ulmer’s harmolodic guitar identity. “No one plays the guitar tuned with all strings tuned to one note,” Ulmer told Perfect Sound Forever. “The concept is about that, being that we are trying to play a special music that shows the difference in the structure of the instrument of getting the sound.” The Diddley Bow has one string. The Ulmer Byrdland has six strings all tuned to the same note. Between the two: the same harmolodic principle, the same commitment to the single sound as the foundational tonal resource.
The gospel tradition of the Southern Sons and the South Carolina church music is the specific foundational musical education that gave Ulmer the specific quality of freedom in improvisation that Coleman recognized as “natural harmolodic” when he first heard Ulmer play. “When Billy took me up there and I met him, I knew he was a genuine person; I knew he was for real. He listened to me play and told me, ‘You play natural harmolodic.’ I was glad to hear that. He made me think that what I was doing was important.” The “natural harmolodic” designation: the specific quality that Coleman heard in the Ulmer guitar before the eight-hours-a-day chord change drills began. The gospel freedom had given Ulmer the specific approach to musical improvisation that the harmolodic theory subsequently formalized.
The Minton’s Playhouse nine-month stint in 1971 — hired to play the blues but playing his originals — is the specific professional statement that characterizes the Ulmer artistic identity: the musician who, when given a commercial framework (play the blues for a club audience), chose instead to play what he was creating, accepting the practical difficulty of the artistic commitment over the commercial ease of the expected product. The nine months at Minton’s playing his originals for a blues-expecting audience is the specific professional formation of an artist who understood from the beginning that his music was not the music that was expected of him and who committed to it regardless.
The Art Blakey Jazz Messengers engagement — briefly, in 1973, as the first guitarist the Messengers had employed — is the specific professional credential that established Ulmer’s position in the mainstream jazz world before the full development of his harmolodic approach. Blakey’s Jazz Messengers were one of the most celebrated training grounds in jazz history; being the first guitarist hired by Blakey was the specific institutional validation that the jazz world placed on Ulmer’s guitar capability before the harmolodic transformation fully distinguished him from that world. The Messengers. Then Coleman. Then the dream. Then the tuning.
The Music Revelation Ensemble — with drummer Ronald Shannon Jackson, saxophonist David Murray, and other free jazz musicians — is the key ensemble vehicle of the mature Ulmer career alongside the Odyssey Band (with violinist Charles Burnham and drummer Warren Benbow). The Odyssey album (Columbia, 1983) — “one of the epochal albums of the 1980s,” as Pi Recordings describes it — is the canonical Ulmer recording of the post-Coleman period: the harmolodic guitar applied to the blues-rock-funk ensemble context with the Odyssey Band’s specific rhythmic and melodic sophistication. The Odyssey is where the unison-tuned Byrdland with the wah and the Roland Jazz Chorus is most completely realized.
The Rig: James Blood Ulmer’s Guitars, Amps, and Effects
Guitars
A pair of Blood’s axes lay on the kitchen table — an odd-looking headless Steinberger (tuned traditionally) and his cherished black Gibson Byrdland, in an open tuning with all six strings pitched to E. The Gibson Byrdland — the thin-body, shorter-scale archtop guitar that Gibson introduced in 1955 as a collaboration with country guitarists Hank Garland and Billy Byrd — is Ulmer’s primary and most celebrated instrument. The Byrdland’s specific character: thinner body than the L-5 or Super 400 (thus the Thinline archtop designation), shorter scale length (23.5 inches vs the standard 24.75 inches) for easier chord voicing in the jazz context, dual humbuckers in the floating pickup tradition of the jazz archtop. The Byrdland was designed for jazz and country guitarists who wanted the warm archtop tone in a more physically comfortable, less acoustically resonant format than the full-depth archtops. In Ulmer’s context, the Byrdland’s specific warm humbucker character combined with the all-strings-to-E unison tuning produces a different sonic character from what the guitar’s original design anticipated: the six strings all pitched to E create specific overtone relationships across the strings that the chord-based application of the Byrdland doesn’t produce, and the harmolodic playing approach produces melodic and rhythmic textures that are simultaneously jazz-adjacent (the archtop warmth) and fundamentally outside the jazz guitar tradition (the unison tuning’s elimination of chord voicing in the conventional sense). The Byrdland with the unison tuning is both a jazz guitar and something that the jazz guitar tradition has no previous example for. The Byrdland’s warm, full humbucker character through the wah-wah pedal and the Roland Jazz Chorus: this is the specific “gooey” sonic environment of the Ulmer sound that the Wax Poetics description captures.
The “odd-looking headless Steinberger” tuned traditionally is the secondary guitar — the alternative to the Byrdland when the conventional tuning and the Steinberger’s specific solid-body character serve the specific musical context better than the unison-tuned Byrdland. The Steinberger’s headless design, composite body, and active EMG pickups provide a completely different acoustic and tonal character from the Byrdland’s archtop warmth — brighter, more present, more compact — in the specifically different format of the conventionally-tuned guitar. Ulmer’s use of both the Byrdland and the Steinberger reflects the pragmatic multi-guitar approach: the unison-tuned Byrdland for the harmolodic approach; the Steinberger for the contexts where conventional tuning serves the music’s specific requirements.
Amps
“Blood adds his special sonic seasoning of one part gooey wah-wah pedal to one part ethereal swoosh, courtesy of his Roland Jazz Chorus amp.” The Roland Jazz Chorus — the JC-120 or a closely related model — provides the specific clean, solid-state amplification with the built-in stereo chorus effect that is the “ethereal swoosh” of the Wax Poetics description. The JC-120 appears in multiple entries in this series: John McGeoch’s Siouxsie and the Banshees rig, Charlie Byrd’s classical guitar amplification, Herb Ellis’s live setup — and in each case, the specific clean solid-state character of the Roland Jazz Chorus provides the transparent, warm, non-saturating amplification that allows the guitar’s acoustic character and the effects processing to be heard without the tube amplifier’s harmonic coloration. For Ulmer, the Roland Jazz Chorus’s built-in chorus adds the specific “ethereal swoosh” — the stereo width and harmonic shimmer of the chorus effect — to the Byrdland’s unison-tuned humbucker output, creating the specific spatial ambient quality of the Ulmer amplified sound. The “ethereal” quality is the Jazz Chorus’s specific contribution: the clean solid-state amplification and the built-in chorus together produce a guitar sound that is simultaneously warm (the Byrdland’s archtop humbucker character) and spacious (the chorus’s stereo width) without the saturation that would muddy the harmolodic lines.
Effects
“One part gooey wah-wah pedal.” The wah-wah is Ulmer’s primary documented effects pedal — the frequency filter sweep that applies the “gooey” vocal, expressive character to the Byrdland’s unison-tuned output. The wah-wah is described as “gooey” rather than the more precise “cutting” or “vocal” of the standard wah description — the specific quality of the wah in the Ulmer context is the sticky, thick, saturated character of the filter applied to the jazz archtop humbucker output, producing a sound that is simultaneously the jazz guitar tradition’s warmth and the free funk tradition’s expressive extremity. The wah is the emotional expression tool: where the unison tuning provides the harmolodic conceptual framework, the wah provides the moment-to-moment expressive modulation of the frequency content, making individual notes speak with the specific “gooey” quality that the avant-gutbucket description’s “gutbucket” implies.
The most foundational “effect” in James “Blood” Ulmer’s guitar approach is not a pedal but a tuning — the specific decision to tune all six strings to the same note (E, in the case of the cherished black Byrdland). “The tuning I use totally eliminates sounding like a piano, and that’s what I’m reaching for,” Ulmer told Bandcamp Daily. The piano — the tempered-scale, chord-voicing, harmonically determined instrument — is the specific musical model that the unison tuning escapes: without the chord voicings that the standard guitar tuning enables, the guitar cannot function as a piano-adjacent harmonic accompaniment instrument; it must function as a melodic, timbral, rhythmic voice in its own right. This is what harmolodics requires: “you don’t want to be playing in a key because if the musicians go on the stage they don’t know what the key is. With Harmolodic music, you don’t fight to find the key. The key is in yourself. You have to create your own key.” The unison tuning forces the creation of one’s own key because the conventional key-defining function of the guitar — the chord voicing that establishes harmonic context — is removed. What remains: the single note, repeated across six strings at different octaves and different timbral positions, available for the melodic, rhythmic, and timbral manipulation that the Diddley Bow’s single wire demonstrated was possible without chord voicing. The Diddley Bow was the conceptual ancestor. The Byrdland with all strings to E is the harmolodic descendant.
“I think church music inspires freedom more than anything. It gives you the right to participate in what exists in your atmosphere.” The gospel church tradition’s specific approach to musical participation — the congregation’s collective improvisational response to the preacher’s or choir’s musical statements, the specific quality of freedom in the communal musical context — is the foundational “effect” that preceded all of the specific gear choices. The church freedom that Coleman heard as “natural harmolodic” in the young Ulmer’s playing before the Coleman education formalized it. The “natural” harmolodic quality: the freedom that the South Carolina gospel tradition had given Ulmer in the Southern Sons gospel band at age six. The Byrdland and the wah and the Roland Jazz Chorus provide the technical tools. The church freedom provides the musical orientation that makes the tools serve the specific Ulmer purpose rather than the conventional jazz guitar purpose.
The specific genealogy of the harmolodic guitar that Ulmer developed from the Coleman education is worth tracing in more detail because it connects the most apparently abstract available guitar approach in this series to the most foundational available guitar tradition. The Diddley Bow — the one-string instrument that Ulmer cites as the conceptual ancestor of the unison tuning — is itself the specific connection between the rural South Carolina blues tradition and the harmolodic avant-garde. The Diddley Bo(w) is named for Bo Diddley (whose own guitar rhythms are among the most foundational in the rock and roll tradition), but the instrument predates Bo Diddley and the name by generations: it is the simplest possible string instrument, available to any child who can find a wire and two nails, producing sound through the most direct possible physical relationship between tension and vibration. When Ulmer tunes all six strings of the Gibson Byrdland to E, he is not abandoning the blues tradition; he is returning to it in its most concentrated form — the one note, the one sound, the infinite expression available from the single string of the Diddley Bow applied to the six-string electric archtop. The harmolodic is the avant-garde. The Diddley Bow is the blues. Between them: the cherished black Byrdland with all strings tuned to E, the gooey wah, and the ethereal swoosh of the Roland Jazz Chorus. The South Carolina church freedom in the New York loft. The single note that contains all the music that nobody knows what to call yet.
The Art Blakey Jazz Messengers engagement is the specific professional credential that places Ulmer in the direct mainstream jazz lineage before the harmolodic transformation distinguished him from it: the Jazz Messengers were the most celebrated “school” in jazz, the training ground through which Art Blakey developed and deployed the next generation of jazz musicians for thirty-plus years. Being the first guitarist Blakey hired is the specific institutional recognition of the pre-harmolodic Ulmer’s jazz quality. The guitarist who was good enough for Blakey’s school then went to Ornette Coleman’s loft for six months of eight-hours-a-day chord drills and came out the other side with a tuning that eliminated chord voicings entirely. The Messengers trained him. Coleman liberated him. The Byrdland with all strings to E is the liberation’s specific instrument. The wah adds the gooey expression. The Roland Jazz Chorus adds the ethereal swoosh. The dream adds the tuning. The theory, which nobody knows what it is yet, adds the music.
Playing Style & Tone Philosophy
James “Blood” Ulmer plays guitar as a musician for whom the guitar’s conventional applications — the chord voicings, the scale-based improvisation, the key-centered melodic approach — are the specific limitations that the harmolodic approach is designed to transcend. The unison tuning removes the chord voicings. The harmolodic theory removes the key-centered approach. The church freedom provides the specific improvisational liberty that allows playing without the conventional scaffolding. The Byrdland’s warm humbucker character through the gooey wah and the ethereal Roland Jazz Chorus: this is what remains when the conventional guitar limitations are removed. “Jagged” and “stinging” is Wikipedia’s specific description of the guitar sound. The jagged quality: the specific abrasive, rough-textured character of the harmolodic lines that the unison tuning produces — not the smooth jazz guitar melodies of the archtop tradition but the specific angular, unexpected, rhythmically disjunctive phrases that the harmolodic approach generates. The stinging quality: the specific wah-enhanced attack of the Byrdland’s humbucker notes through the filter sweep, the guitar literally stinging the air with the specific frequency-modulated sharpness of the wah’s vowel sound.
“Blood’s” big limber fingers run in linear patterns up and down the neck, evoking a mystical Imam’s haunting call to prayer more than the typical licks of a Saturday night blues burner,” as the Wax Poetics description captures. The Imam’s call to prayer: the specific comparison that captures the modal, melodically sustained, emotionally direct quality of the Ulmer linear approach. Not the Saturday night blues licks of the three-chord tradition, but the specific tonal and melodic character of someone who grew up in the gospel tradition and who studied with the musician who had broken the piano-determined harmonic system of Western music. The Byrdland’s all-strings-to-E through the wah and the Roland Jazz Chorus evoking the call to prayer: this is the specific Ulmer tone quality that the standard jazz guitar criticism vocabulary doesn’t have the conceptual framework to capture.
The Vernon Reid connection is the specific legacy documentation: Ulmer’s “black rock” terminology, which Reid later adopted and popularized through Living Color, is the specific cultural bridge between the Ulmer harmolodic approach and the subsequent generation of Black rock musicians who found in the Ulmer guitar approach the specific precedent that demonstrated that the Black rock identity was neither an anomaly nor an appropriation but a tradition with historical depth. Reid produced two Ulmer albums — Memphis Blood: The Sun Sessions (2001) and No Escape from the Blues: The Electric Lady Sessions (2003) — the specific collaborative acknowledgment of the influence running from the South Carolina gospel guitarist through the Ornette Coleman harmolodic education to the Vernon Reid and Living Color tradition.
How to Sound Like James “Blood” Ulmer
The James Blood Ulmer tone requires: a Gibson Byrdland (or equivalent warm-humbucker thinline archtop) with all six strings tuned to the same note (E is the documented Ulmer preference); a Roland Jazz Chorus amplifier for the clean stereo chorus “ethereal swoosh”; a wah-wah pedal set for maximum expressive “gooey” filter character; and the harmolodic approach — the specific freedom from chord voicings and key-centered improvisation that Coleman’s eight-hours-a-day chord drills, followed by the dream-tuning breakthrough, produced. The tuning is available in five minutes. The harmolodic freedom is the work of a lifetime.
| Control | Setting (0–10) | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Roland Jazz Chorus (Ethereal Swoosh) | Volume: 6; Treble: 5; Bass: 5; Chorus: engaged (medium rate) | “One part ethereal swoosh, courtesy of his Roland Jazz Chorus amp.” The clean solid-state JC-120 with the built-in chorus engaged at medium rate provides the specific spatial width and harmonic shimmer of the Ulmer amplified sound. The JC-120’s chorus adds the “ethereal” quality — the stereo width and pitch modulation that makes the Byrdland’s unison-tuned strings sound larger and more atmospheric than the direct signal would. |
| Wah-Wah Pedal (Gooey Expressive Filter) | Slow, deliberate sweeps; expressive; “gooey” — thick and warm | “One part gooey wah-wah pedal.” Not the rhythmic funk-guitar wah but the expressive, melodically aware sweep that makes individual notes bloom with the specific frequency-modulated character of the Ulmer “jagged and stinging” sound. The wah’s filter applied to the Byrdland’s warm humbucker output with the unison tuning produces the specific “gooey” quality: thick, warm, and expressively varied as the pedal sweep follows the melodic content. |
| Unison Tuning (All Strings to E) | Tune all six strings to E; accept that there are no chords | “The tuning I use totally eliminates sounding like a piano.” Tune all six strings of the Byrdland to E. Remove the chord-voicing capability. Begin playing without the conventional jazz guitar’s harmonic scaffolding. “No one plays the guitar tuned with all strings tuned to one note.” This is correct. It is also the specific starting point of the harmolodic guitar approach. The Diddley Bow had one string. The Byrdland has six, all the same. Begin there. |
| Gibson Byrdland / Warm Archtop Humbucker | Both humbuckers; Volume: 9; warm, full output | The Byrdland’s warm thinline archtop character through both humbuckers provides the specific warm, full foundation of the Ulmer sound that the wah and chorus then modify. The shorter scale length (23.5″) makes the unison-tuned strings slightly more flexible and easier to control. The warm humbucker character through the gooey wah through the ethereal chorus: the complete Ulmer signal chain. |
| Harmolodic Freedom (Coleman Education) | No key; no chords; no scales — play your own key | “The key is in yourself. You have to create your own key.” Coleman’s eight-hours-a-day chord drills produced the frustration that led to the dream that produced the tuning. The tuning led to the freedom. “When Coleman called out B-flat, I said: ‘I got no B-flat.’ When Coleman called out E-minor-seventh: ‘I ain’t got that either.’ So we just started playing.” This is the harmolodic guitar approach. The Byrdland’s unison tuning forces it. The church freedom enables it. |
| The Diddley Bow Principle | One sound; infinite expression; the original guitar | “The original guitar, the Diddley Bow, as his inspiration for the unique tuning.” The Diddley Bow: one string, one note, infinite expressive possibility through the manipulation of the single sound — bending, hammering, picking, sliding. The Byrdland with all strings to E is the electric archtop version of the Diddley Bow’s single-string principle. From the South Carolina barn wall to the SoHo loft. The wire between two nails and the six strings all pitched to E. The same sound. |
Influence & Legacy
James “Blood” Ulmer’s influence on rock, jazz, blues, and avant-garde music is the influence of the specific individual who took the guitar to the next level after Jimi Hendrix in the specific territory of the free jazz and free funk context — who demonstrated that the electric guitar could serve as the primary voice in the harmolodic ensemble without the conventional chord-voicing function that jazz guitar normally provides, and that the unison tuning was not a limitation but a liberation from the piano-determined harmonic system that Western music had imposed on the guitar. Newsweek called him “the most original guitarist since Jimi Hendrix and Wes Montgomery” in 1981 — the specific peer comparison from the most mainstream available critical source, at the moment when the harmolodic approach was most fully realized in the Freelancing/Black Rock/Odyssey Columbia Records period.
The Vernon Reid and Living Color “black rock” legacy is the most specifically documented downstream influence: Reid absorbed Ulmer’s “black rock” terminology and brought it to the mainstream rock audience through Living Color in the late 1980s, giving the Ulmer harmolodic tradition its most commercially visible descendant. The harmolodic guitar tradition — Ulmer’s specific combination of the unison tuning, the wah, the Roland Jazz Chorus, and the church freedom — is the foundational tradition from which the entire “black rock” cultural identity that Living Color popularized derives. Reid producing two Ulmer albums is the specific reciprocal acknowledgment of that lineage.
For the Ornette Coleman context that shaped Ulmer’s harmolodic approach, the broader free jazz tradition of the 1970s and 1980s is the cultural environment — alongside the avant-funk of the Ronald Shannon Jackson Decoding Society (which also featured Vernon Reid) and the Music Revelation Ensemble. The guitar-in-jazz tradition that Ulmer most directly departed from connects to the jazz archtop guitarists documented in this series — Kenny Burrell at #94, Barney Kessel at #95, and the chord-voicing jazz guitar tradition that the unison tuning specifically eliminated. And the South Carolina gospel foundation connects to Charlie Byrd’s classical-jazz bridge at #97 — both guitarists finding in a non-jazz foundational tradition (gospel for Ulmer, classical guitar for Byrd) the specific musical freedom that the jazz guitar convention didn’t provide.
Coleman wore him out with eight hours a day of chord changes. He had a dream about the tuning. He tuned all six strings to E. Coleman said: “Blood, you have moved the tone center.” Coleman also said: “He created his own theory, but nobody knows what it is yet.” The cherished black Gibson Byrdland. The Steinberger for when he needed conventional tuning. The gooey wah-wah. The ethereal swoosh of the Roland Jazz Chorus. The Diddley Bow’s principle applied to the thinline archtop. Willie James Ulmer, born February 8, 1940, St. Matthews, South Carolina. The Southern Sons gospel band at age six. Pittsburgh and Columbus and New York and Ornette Coleman’s loft and Minton’s Playhouse and the Jazz Messengers and the dream that changed the tuning. Still playing. Still nobody fully knows what the theory is. That’s the point.
Frequently Asked Questions: James “Blood” Ulmer Guitars & Gear
What guitar does James “Blood” Ulmer use?
James “Blood” Ulmer’s primary and most celebrated guitar is his “cherished black Gibson Byrdland” — the thin-body, shorter-scale Gibson archtop, tuned with all six strings pitched to E in his unique unison tuning. He also uses a Steinberger headless guitar tuned conventionally for contexts where the standard tuning serves the music. The Gibson Byrdland’s warm, full humbucker character through the unison tuning produces the specific “jagged and stinging” guitar sound that Wikipedia documents as Ulmer’s primary tonal character.
What is the unison tuning?
Ulmer’s unison tuning — which he also calls “harmolodic tuning” — involves tuning all six strings of the guitar to the same note (E in the case of his Byrdland). He developed this tuning after six months of eight-hours-a-day harmolodic training with Ornette Coleman, which he found exhausting. One morning in frustration he tuned all six strings to the same note. When Coleman called out chord changes, Ulmer replied: “I got no B-flat… I ain’t got that either.” They started playing. Coleman heard what had happened and said: “Blood, you have moved the tone center, making the treble clef a transposing note for the guitar.” Ulmer cites the Diddley Bow — the one-string wire instrument of the rural South — as the conceptual ancestor of the single-note tuning approach.
What amplifier does James “Blood” Ulmer use?
James “Blood” Ulmer uses a Roland Jazz Chorus amplifier — the specific amp described in the Wax Poetics profile as providing “one part ethereal swoosh, courtesy of his Roland Jazz Chorus amp.” The Roland JC-120’s clean solid-state amplification and built-in stereo chorus effect produce the specific clean, spatially wide, harmonically shimmering amplification character that Ulmer’s signal chain requires: transparent enough to preserve the Byrdland’s unison-tuned humbucker output clearly, with the built-in chorus adding the “ethereal swoosh” of stereo width and pitch modulation.
What is harmolodics?
Harmolodics is the musical theory developed by Ornette Coleman that treats HARmony, rhythmic MOtion, and meLODIC content as equal, simultaneous elements — none dominant over the others, all free to develop independently and intersect organically. The name is a compound of the three elements: HARmony + MOtion + meLODICS. For Coleman, harmolodics freed musicians from the pianist’s role in determining harmonic context, allowing all instruments to function as primary melodic and harmonic voices simultaneously. Ulmer was the first electric guitarist to record and tour extensively with Coleman’s harmolodic approach, and subsequently developed his own harmolodic guitar theory — specifically the unison tuning that eliminated chord voicing — which Coleman acknowledged by saying: “He created his own theory, but nobody knows what it is yet!”
What is James “Blood” Ulmer’s musical style?
Ulmer’s music has been described as “punk jazz” (Chip Stern, Musician), “avant gutbucket” (Bill Milkowski, Guitar Player), “harmolodic diatonic funk,” and “black rock” (Ulmer’s own term, later popularized by his admirer Vernon Reid of Living Color). The music combines free jazz improvisation, blues and gospel feeling, funk rhythms, and psychedelic rock energy through the harmolodic framework — with no key center, no chord voicings from the guitar, and the unison tuning’s specific single-note approach. His guitar sound has been described as “jagged and stinging.” Newsweek called him “the most original guitarist since Jimi Hendrix and Wes Montgomery” in 1981.
What is Blood Ulmer’s connection to Ornette Coleman?
Ulmer met Ornette Coleman in 1972 through drummer Rashied Ali and moved into Coleman’s loft to study harmolodics. Coleman rehearsed him for eight hours a day calling out chord changes. After six months of this exhausting harmolodic education, Ulmer had a dream about a new guitar tuning and woke up to tune all six strings to the same note. This led to a breakthrough that Coleman acknowledged as moving “the tone center.” Ulmer was the first electric guitarist to record and tour extensively with Coleman, forming part of the first incarnation of Coleman’s electric band Prime Time. Coleman said of Ulmer: “Blood Ulmer studied with me for a long time. He created his own theory, but nobody knows what it is yet!”
What are James “Blood” Ulmer’s most important albums?
The canonical Ulmer albums are: Tales of Captain Black (1979, debut, with Ornette Coleman), Are You Glad to Be in America? (1980), Freelancing (Columbia, 1981), Black Rock (Columbia, 1982), Odyssey (Columbia, 1983 — “one of the epochal albums of the 1980s”), America — Do You Remember the Love? (Blue Note, 1987), Harmolodic Guitar with Strings (DIW, 1993), Memphis Blood: The Sun Sessions (2001, Vernon Reid producing), and No Escape from the Blues: The Electric Lady Sessions (2003, Vernon Reid producing). Odyssey is generally considered the peak — a record that the Pi Recordings label describes as “one of the epochal albums of the 80s, and arguably Blood’s evolution and impact on the guitar was the logical outgrowth of Hendrix and as just significant.”
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Wes Montgomery Guitars & Gear: The Complete Guide to the Jazz Master’s Rig
Wes Montgomery's guitars, amps, and effects — the complete guide. Gibson L-5 CES, Standel amps, thumb picking technique, flatwound strings, and how to nail that warm jazz tone.