On July 4, 1972, Ornette Coleman debuted Skies of America, a composition for jazz quartet and orchestra, at the New York Philharmonic Hall. Those in attendance had reason to expect something explosive, or at least memorable, from the musicians onstage. Provoking audiences had been Coleman’s guiding principle ever since the 1950s, when he emerged with confrontationally titled albums like The Shape of Jazz to Come and Change of the Century, full of squealing, searing improvisations. The roll call of people who were infuriated by Coleman’s music at one time or another is an impressive list. Miles Davis once said Coleman was “all screwed up inside.” Max Roach was said to have punched him in the mouth after seeing him perform.
With Skies of America, Coleman was doing more than challenging the prevailing conventions of hard bop; he was reframing—rephrasing—the notion of America itself. The piece enacts a world of swirling chaos, in which minor-key woodwinds, moving swift and ominous as storm clouds, provide the backdrop for Coleman’s blistering alto saxophone. Compared with the triumphalist bonanzas of Aaron Copland (the most celebrated American composer of Coleman’s time), with their connotations of vast landscapes and pioneer spirit, Coleman’s vision of America is anxious, tragic, and fiery. In his absorbing biography of Coleman, John Litweiler quotes two different instances in which Coleman describes the inspiration behind the piece. In one explanation, Coleman harkens to his childhood in the Jim Crow South:
I grew up in Texas, in the South, where there was lots of discrimination, lots of problems for minorities. Sometimes the sun is shining and beautiful on one side of the street, and across the street, just maybe three feet apart, there’d be big balls of hail and thunderstorms, and that reminded me of something that happened with people. In America you see them all enjoying themselves and next moment they’re all fighting. . . . When I titled that piece, it was to let me see if I could describe the beauty, and not have it be racial or any territory. In other words, the sky has no territory; only the land has territory. I was trying to describe something that has no territory.
In the second, he offers a different origin story, this one based on time he spent in the 1960s with Native Americans in Montana:
I participated in their sacred rites, and it made me think about the many different elements existing in America, in relation to its causes, purpose and destiny. For some reason, I got that feeling from the sky. I feel that everything that has ever happened in America, from way before the Europeans arrived, is still intact as far as the sky is concerned.
Characteristically opaque and contradictory, Coleman seems to be saying two things at once: (1) the sky is fickle and shifty, as quick to punish as it is to reward, and (2) because it’s above us, and separate from us, it maintains a kind of purity. Coleman’s piece, then, seems to embody the convulsions and dissolutions of American history while simultaneously attempting to erase that legacy altogether: Let me see if I could describe the beauty . . . still intact as far as the sky is concerned.
A few months before the live debut of Skies of America, Coleman went to England to make a recording of the piece with the London Symphony Orchestra. Due to union rules, the other members of Coleman’s vaunted quartet—Charlie Haden, Ed Blackwell, and Dewey Redman—were unable to participate. Further, certain sections had to be cut to fit the piece within the standard playing length of a vinyl record. For years the recording made in London has been ridiculed by Coleman fans, mostly for the LSO’s tepid accompaniment, as the stodgy classical players fail to match Coleman’s edge. While I am more sympathetic to the LSO recording than its harshest critics, finding something intoxicating and woozy in the Europeans’ failure to make sense of Coleman’s composition, I agree with many that the definitive document of Skies of America comes in bootleg form, in a recording made from somewhere in the audience on that July 4 in New York.
The biggest difference between the London and New York versions of Skies of America is not the relative skill of the symphonic players but the presence of Coleman’s quartet. Listening to the bootleg one realizes that the commercially available Skies of America presents only half of the story. In New York, Ornette and his quartet engage in a kind of dialogue with the orchestra—or maybe a boxing match is the right metaphor. After a dozen or so minutes dominated by the swelling, straining strings, the quartet takes over in a blitz of squalling, rhythmic exaltation. The Philharmonic Hall becomes a jazz club; the audience applauds after each solo. Then it’s back to the orchestra. And then back to the jazz. Sometimes the sun is shining and beautiful on one side of the street, and across the street, just maybe three feet apart, there’d be big balls of hail and thunderstorms.
The sky on the morning of July 4, 2022, in Highland Park, Illinois, where I live, was one worth contemplating. Imagine a cool, misty blue the color of a breath mint, with faint streaks of cirrus. After a decade of living in the Midwest, I have come to appreciate the richness of the summer spectrum here—periwinkle skies, bright-green foliage, coffee-colored soil—even as I grumble that the season always seems to arrive about six weeks late. In Mississippi, where I grew up, one hardly bothers looking up at all during summer, unless you are wearing sunglasses or a hat, preferably both, and trying to catch a fly ball. By mid-June, the colors of nature are bleached and dried out. The sky is less pure blue than bluish white, almost like a bone. (When it comes to sunsets, though, the South still has the upper hand.)
That morning my family and I had set up our lawn chairs in downtown Highland Park to watch the annual July 4 parade. We were two rows back from the street, near a large brick-paved square. It was going to be one of those days when we would be outside almost continually until after dark. After the parade, we would go to the town carnival, then to a neighborhood cookout. The fireworks were scheduled to start at nine that night. The weather had obliged the execution of these activities with an almost absurd acquiescence; it was just gorgeous out.
As we waited for the festivities to begin, we snacked on Goldfish crackers and chatted with a friend from Maine who was visiting family in Illinois and had brought her two daughters to the parade. My two sons, aged three and seven, needled each other and argued over who had the better vantage. I suggested to my older son that he try watching from the raised area of the brick-paved square, which was about ten yards away from us. He could see better there, I thought, and he wouldn’t have to worry about his little brother pestering him. Maybe he would find a friend from school to run around with. Highland Park’s the kind of town where kids are usually safe to wander out of eyeshot of their parents. As long as we had a general sense of where he was, he would be fine. But my son declined my offer to run free. He wanted to stay close to us.
The parade began with a blast of squawking noise that would not have been out of place on an Ornette Coleman album. A procession of fire trucks, police cars, and ambulances passed by, with the sirens on full blast and the drivers leaning into their horns. My boys, their sense of hearing not yet pulverized by decades of attending concerts as mine has been, covered their hands with their ears even as they grinned at the blitz. Next came the high school marching band, the mayor, and a color guard. It may seem hard to believe that such a banal civic exposition can still occur in today’s broken country, with its fierce arguments over history and patriotism. And Highland Park is no typical slice of small-town America; it’s a racially homogenous, affluent suburb perched at a safe distance from one of the country’s most segregated cities. But this Independence Day celebration was about as innocent and quaint as such events can be.
A few seconds after the mayor and color guard walked past, a barrage of rapid, high-pitched explosions rent the scene. They seemed to come from above, somehow. I looked up at the sky. My wife and I exchanged confused looks. Was the color guard firing off a few celebratory rounds? Was someone setting off fireworks?
Then I heard someone say, “Shooter,” and we were swept up in a mass of fleeing humanity.
A question I’ve never asked myself, until recently: Why do we shoot fireworks on the Fourth of July? There are plenty of reasons why we shouldn’t: the finger-decimating accidents, the stress caused to pets, the pollution contributed to the atmosphere. But where did it start?
Fireworks and firearms come from the same source: gunpowder. The Chinese are generally credited with the discovery of gunpowder—a mix of saltpeter, sulfur, and charcoal—sometime in the early tenth century, and they used it for spectacles and celebrations before they incorporated it into weaponry. With the adoption of gunpowder in Europe, explosive-laden festivals and artillery battles emerged in tandem, reinforcing one another. Fireworks celebrations partially began as showcases put on by gunners, once thought to be lower in rank than the common infantryman, to impress their princely benefactors. State leaders in turn recognized the power of such events to wow the public and intimidate potential enemies. As Simon Werrett writes in his monograph Fireworks: Pyrotechnic Arts and Sciences in European History,
By the 1630s, “strange fires” for “courtly sports” became one of the principal and most spectacular means of political celebration and theater, a playful but potent rendition of the raw power of the state’s warmaking capacity, and a fearful yet pleasurable experience that fascinated early modern audiences.
By the time of America’s founding, these “fearful yet pleasurable” experiences had become a potent means of instilling unity and patriotism among European populations. It is fitting, then, that when July 4 was enshrined in America as a national holiday, we followed the lead of the Europeans and began to blow stuff up as a way to commemorate the occasion.
Over the succeeding centuries, the use of gunpowder has come full circle, as fireworks celebrations are likely the only place you’re going to encounter the original Chinese concoction nowadays. Most modern firearms employ smokeless powder, usually the chemical compound nitrocellulose.
The first half of the year 1972 was marked by ongoing violence at home and abroad, political tensions pulling at the seams of the national fabric, and vibrant cultural production—it was, in other words, a fairly typical stretch as far as American history goes. In the months prior to the debut of Coleman’s Skies of America, the US military resumed bombing the cities of Hanoi and Haiphong in response to a North Vietnamese offensive in South Vietnam, the activist Angela Davis was tried and found not guilty in the murder of Judge Harold Haley, Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather premiered, and five Republican operatives were arrested for breaking into the offices of the Democratic National Committee inside the Watergate Hotel complex.
The 1972 debut of Skies of America was mounted as part of the Newport Jazz Festival, during a period in which the event had temporarily relocated to New York. Although I have found no evidence specifically tying the performance to the July 4 holiday (it fell on a Tuesday that year), I have to believe that it wasn’t a coincidence, that Coleman wanted to unveil his evocation of the national firmament on the most American of holidays. He wanted to launch his own fireworks into the sky.
As the shots rang out, I ran while carrying our seven-year-old—out in front of me, gripping him under the armpits, in the same way I carried him when he was a baby and had a dirty diaper. He never dropped the bag of crackers he had been holding when the shooting started. My wife had our three-year-old. Our friend from Maine followed with her two daughters. We veered around a corner and toward the parking garage where we had left our car. By the time we made it to the garage, the shooting had stopped. We huddled in a corner as an exodus of parade spectators continued past us. Confusion reigned, if in a supremely suburban way; hardly anyone ran or screamed. Imagine an orderly evacuation, an office building’s fire drill.
We told the kids that someone must have set off fireworks, as a prank. They were confused—Why would someone want to do that?—but they bought it. After all, we hadn’t witnessed any carnage or felt any bullets whizzing past us. I even started to believe the story myself. After a few minutes of waiting in the eerie silence, watching people file past, we decided to drive home. The first messages relayed to family members reflected my delusional hope: “Something happened at the parade. We think someone shot off fireworks as a prank. We’re safe.” Within a half hour, though, we learned what had really happened. Someone had been trying to kill us. He had set up on the roof of a downtown building, with an automatic weapon and at least three magazines of ammunition. He waited for the parade to begin, and once it had, he sprayed eighty-three rounds on the unsuspecting families gathered to watch the parade. Seven people died, and dozens were injured.
In the days and weeks after the shooting, I experienced a dizzying playlist of emotions—guilt, anger, depression, panic attacks, sleeplessness—as I tried to reorient myself to what is supposed to be the cream of the midwestern calendar. This is what we suffer through the bitter winter for—those long sunny days when all the neighborhood kids are outside, the water at the Lake Michigan beach is finally swimmable, and wide-open picture windows make it feel like the indoors and outdoors are mingling. But all these regular joys came to me muted and askew.
Being a white person of liberal leanings, I learned to deflect questions about how we were doing by pointing out that the violence we had just experienced was nothing new in nearby Chicago, where over the same July 4 weekend eight people were fatally shot and sixty-eight more wounded. I relied on a mordant observation: “In this country, it’s not even that special anymore to be involved in a mass shooting.”
And yet I still couldn’t get the experience out of my mind. I kept revisiting those moments when we heard the gunfire, looked at the sky in confusion, and ran away. In some weird, sick way, I longed for the ability to go back in time so that I could live it all over again. Maybe then I could understand it. Or maybe I wanted to stop it before it started. It was as if there was some loop, still open, that I wanted to go back and close. Unlike other witnesses I knew, who wanted to avoid the subject of the shooting altogether, I couldn’t help myself from consuming every bit of media I could find—every cell-phone-camera video, every obituary, every article about the killer and his family. I made myself nauseated staring into this void but still couldn’t stop. Meanwhile an awareness of how lucky we had been was never far away.
I first listened to the London recording of Skies of America in the autumn after the shooting, and I instantly thought of that morning in July. In its terror and charm, its clamor and hush (Let me see if I could describe the beauty), the piece captures how it felt to be there on that day far more accurately than I could describe it in words. I don’t doubt that a big part of this stems from the fact that Coleman grew up a Black man in segregated America. He had a familiarity with violence that I can hardly fathom, even after having been forced to flee a gunman with my family. One night early in his career, after a gig in Louisiana, Coleman was assaulted by some fellow musicians who didn’t like the way he played. Going to the police was no help either. He explained the whole incident in a later interview, also included in Litweiler’s biography:
And all of a sudden a guy kicked me in my stomach and then he kicked me in the ass and I had my horn cradled in my arms and I blacked out cause blood was everywhere. . . . They were just beating me to death. One guy took my tenor and threw it down the street. Then Melvin [Lastie] and the band came out and discovered I was beat up and they took me to the police department. The cops said, “What you doing with that long hair?” And they started calling me n—— and they told me that if them other n——s didn’t finish me, they were gonna.
When I think about all that Coleman went through—for the color of his skin, for the length of his hair, for the way he played—I’m amazed that he didn’t quit music before he was thirty years old. The way he maintained his self-belief in the face of invective, abuse, and scorn was simply heroic. This resilience is as important to his story as his soaring musical genius.
In an attempt to market the LSO recording of Skies of America to a broader audience, Coleman’s record label decided to break up the composition into separate, individually named tracks, each around the length of a standard pop song. But Coleman had envisioned the work as a symphony, with a handful of longer movements. As a result, some of the song divisions seem arbitrary; unified themes are broken up into halves or thirds. Skies of America was never going to break through on the radio, but if I had to select a “lead single” from among the sliced-down “songs” on the LSO album, the choice would be easy. “The Artist in America” begins with an eerie, solemn melody, like gray clouds crawling, before erupting into a thunderstorm. While the strings play a rapidly repeating, hair-raising phrase that sounds like a mix between a horror-movie climax and a heavy metal riff, Coleman’s alto saxophone does kickflips and 360s in midair. Then the orchestra drops out, leaving only Coleman and the percussionist in a bluesy gallop. The rest of the orchestra comes back in, and the fit resumes. Then it drops out again; the cycle repeats. Storm, calm. Storm, calm. Dissonance, harmony. Dissonance, harmony. Finally, the entire orchestra goes silent, leaving only Coleman to effect a lilting, lively improvision—among the most beautiful thirty seconds of recorded sound I have ever encountered. In the bootleg of the New York version, the “Artist in America” section begins at around the twenty-six-minute mark, and the sequence is even more riveting, as the rest of the quartet joins Coleman’s side in the chaotic orchestra-jazz duel. Part of Coleman’s concluding solo is cut out as the recorder switches the sides of their tape, which is somehow fitting to me—the memory of this moment of bliss remains the sole property of those who were there.
“The Artist in America” is another of Coleman’s exceedingly obvious titles, and yet I want to give him the benefit of the doubt. Heard one way, the song enacts a battle—between a lonely outcast and a vicious mob. Or perhaps it exemplifies a collaboration, however unruly, between nominally antagonistic forces. Does the act of shooting fireworks on July 4 represent a celebration of peaceful community (For some reason, I got that feeling from the sky)? Or is it an acknowledgment of violence’s total control (In America you see them all enjoying themselves and next moment they’re all fighting)?
Many have asked how could something like this happen in Highland Park. But maybe a better question is, How can something like this happen anywhere? I am sometimes tempted to look at the shootings plaguing all manner of “normal, safe” places like elementary schools, shopping malls, and Independence Day parades as karmic redistributions of violence. This is fate spreading the suffering around so that everyone gets a taste. This is the sky firing back at us—in response to all the explosives we have lobbed at it over the centuries, out of greed, cruelty, or boredom. But I don’t believe in karma or fate. I don’t believe that history has a penchant for revenge. The July 4 shooting doesn’t mean anything, on its own. It takes survivors and witnesses, aided by works of art like Skies of America, full of their own gaps and contradictions, to make sense of the senseless.
As the first anniversary of the shooting approached, I figured that my family would hang around town and participate in our community’s bid to reclaim part of the normalcy that had been shattered on that beautiful and bloody July day. Following a silent walk along the parade route, we would attend the carnival that had been canceled the previous year. Then there would be the neighborhood cookout. The fireworks show, thankfully, would not occur.
But when I talked to my older son about the upcoming events, reminding him of how much fun he’d had the last time we had gone to the July 4 carnival, he paused thoughtfully before asking me whether we would be safe. Even though I told him that of course we would be safe, he wasn’t convinced. My wife wasn’t keen on going, either—she had yet to become fully comfortable attending any sort of public event with crowds—so we changed our plans. We spent the night of July 3 at a hotel a few towns away and spent the bulk of the holiday swimming in a pool amid strangers who had no knowledge of our glancing association with tragedy.
At the time I felt guilty about abandoning our town during an important moment of healing. You might have called it a cop-out, an act of surrender to the forces of evil and fear. Perhaps we were letting the “bad guys” win by not reverting to our normal holiday traditions. But those holiday traditions—saluting the colors as they pass in a military-style procession, gazing up at a bombardment reminiscent of our greatest wars—don’t appeal to me in the way they once did. I think about the bruising ecstasy of Skies of America, and Ornette Coleman’s words about the way violence and beauty are interwoven into our national culture. I wonder what would happen if, instead of watching fireworks explode, we looked into the sky on July 4 and imagined a country in which a deluge of automatic weapons and an epidemic of mental illness weren’t assumed to be unsolvable problems. I wonder what a July 4 devoted to peace and progress, instead of bombast and boosterism, would look like.
As the second anniversary of the parade shooting approaches, my family and I have yet to solidify our plans. The sense of ambivalence surrounding the holiday has yet to subside, and I don’t know if it ever will. Maybe this year we’ll take a road trip to Canada, where July 4 is just another day. Maybe I’ll make my kids listen to Skies of America and see how long they can take it. No matter where we are, and what we are doing, I know I will be thinking about the violence—whether random, systemic, or simulated—that is our national birthright and our national burden. 
Wilson McBee lives in Highland Park, Illinois. He is an adjunct instructor in English at the College of Lake County.
Illustration: Glennray Tutor.
