Behind the Scenes: On Style
An Anti-Mimetic Approach to Audience Capture—Defying Expectation
This is the first installment of a new “Behind the Scenes” series. Paid subscribers will get periodic sneak peeks into my upcoming book, THE ONE AND THE NINETY-NINE (St. Martin’s Press/2026). This series will cover everything from the writing process, to my personal life, to offshoot ideas that either didn’t make it into the book—or they did, but they need to be developed further somewhere. That place is here.
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I tracked down a copy of The Village Voice from June 1987 because there was a “Jazz Special” insert dedicated to the great Ornette Coleman. I wrote an essay about him and the problem of audience capture in this newsletter last year, but I wanted to develop his story further to fit it into my manuscript and eventually my forthcoming book.
It became clear early in my research that the only way I was going to get the best stuff was to track down a few rare hard copies of stuff from the 60s and 70s—the content simply doesn’t exist online. And now, after a decent amount of effort, it sits on my coffee table. I’ve been digging through it this past week.
Inside the Jazz insert is an unexpected essay by Greg Tate on Coleman’s philosophy of fashion. “Fashion figures into Ornette’s educational program as a way of seducing folk into getting on board his version of the freedom train,” he writes.
The most unexpected part of the interview was what Coleman had to say about the relationship between fashion and art—and how personal style shapes expectations, not only about the kind of art someone might produce, but even about their political views or personal beliefs.