Amazon.com Culled from the same 1975 session which produced Ornette Coleman's lone A&M release, Dancing in Your Head, the music on Body Meta bears a striking resemblance to Captain Beefheart's Magic Band on Trout Mask Replica, whose clashing guitars and ritualistic rhythms were an obvious corollary for Coleman's new band Prime Time. And while Coleman, like Beefheart, also maintained a tacit relationship to traditional rural blues (as on the Bo Diddley-styled changes of "Voice Poetry"), in truth, the raucous, parallel streams of rhythm, melodic counterpoint, and clashing chordal figures, as featured on "Home Grown" and "Macho Woman," more nearly resemble the collective fury of the Master Musicians of Joujouka than any rock or funk band you care to name. Still, electric bassist Jamaaladeen Tacuma and drummer Ronald Shannon Jackson manage to imply traditional backbeats and melodic vamps without necessarily falling into any discernible grooves for too long, even as guitarists Bern Nix and Charles Ellerbee function as a mini-string section, feeding Coleman a continual stream of melodic echoes and harmonic juxtapositions. But for all the ensemble density, it is the clarion call of Coleman's alto saxophone that provides most of the interest on Body Meta. --Chip Stern