Town Hall, 1962

Town Hall, 1962 is a live album by Ornette Coleman, recorded on December 21, 1962 at New York City's Town Hall and released in 1965 by the ESP Disk label. It was the first recording of Coleman's new trio, featuring rhythm section David Izenzon and Charles Moffett.

1962 was a difficult year for finding work for Coleman and his trio; that year, after an engagement at the Jazz Gallery, Coleman was dismayed to see Dave Brubeck follow him and earn a significantly higher fee. As a result, Coleman decided to charge more for appearances, leading to repeated rejections by club owners and concert presenters. )—began composing classically oriented works, and, with financial assistance from Irving Stone, rented Town Hall in order to present a full length concert of his works. while A. B. Spellman stated that the piece "must stand, with Coleman's Free Jazz, as one of the two most important works that he has ever performed".) The concert was a success in that several hundred people attended and responded enthusiastically, and the proceeds allowed Coleman to break even. However, it did not receive much attention, leading Coleman to recall: "I'll never forget that night there was a subway strike, a newspaper strike, a taxi strike, I mean everything was strike, even a match strike, know what I mean? Not only that, I hired a guy to record it for me, and [later] he committed suicide." According to Bernard Stollman, founder of ESP Disk, Coleman gave him a tape of the Town Hall concert when the two first met. However, Stollman soon discovered that the bass track was distorted, rendering the recording unusable. Stollman took the tape to engineer Dave Sarser, who was able to compress the bass track, removing the distortion and laying the groundwork for the ESP Disk release.

The AllMusic review by Scott Yanow states, "Ornette Coleman's decision to temporarily retire from music was unfortunate. His alto playing was getting stronger, and on evidence of this CD, he had plenty of original ideas that should have been documented Although Ornette's string writing (which leaves no room for improvising) is pretty well outside of jazz, his playing on the other tracks holds one's interest throughout." The Penguin Guide to Jazz Recordings called "Sadness" one of Coleman's "most plangent and affecting themes deeply marked by the blues," while "Doughnut" "catches Ornette in his most demonstrative form, punching out notes like a bar walking R&B man." "The Ark" is described as "a seething troublous piece that refuses to cohere," and "Dedication" "points the way forward to what would be even more troubled projects in the future." Lyn Horton, writing for All About Jazz, awarded the album 5 stars, commenting, "In the stream of its apparent freedom, this trio acts with constraints, imposed not by restriction, but by genius. To know what later transpired could only underscore the appreciation of what already exists." In a separate review for the same publication, Stuart Broomer also awarded it 5 stars, writing: "This concert is one of the essential Coleman documents, an extension of the raw, angular music he had developed in the early years of his public career and an increasing sense of fluid group dialogue."