Ornette Coleman

1930—

Jazz musician, saxophonist, composer

Best known for a series of highly experimental albums and performances in the late 1950s and early 1960s, saxophonist and composer Ornette Coleman has been recognized as one of modern jazz's great innovators, a man who has pushed his music to extremes where even other highly progressive musicians refused to follow. Coleman's pioneering work in what would later be called Free Jazz polarized the musical community, between those who thought his work represented Jazz's future and those who considered him a musical con man who didn't know his chords and couldn't stay in tune. Despite considerable resistance from the jazz establishment, Coleman has carved out a durable career through sheer persistence and belief in his own unique artistic vision, one that now affords him the accolades reserved for jazz's most revered elder statesmen.

Taught Himself to Play the Saxophone

Born on March 9, 1930, in Fort Worth, Texas, Coleman once saw his father in a baseball uniform but otherwise could remember little about him; he died when Coleman was seven years old. His mother made a living as a seamstress; although she was a strong disciplinarian, Coleman showed the classic marks of a free spirit from an early age. "One day a teacher spanked me because I told her she was wrong," Coleman told People. "I was hurt, because I knew I was right. So I started playing hooky from school. I stayed out for six weeks one time, and when my mother found out, she beat me for days."

Coleman told Howard Reich in the Chicago Tribune that it took him "three or four years" saving money from shining shoes to get his first saxophone. Because his family did not have money for lessons, he taught himself to play along with the songs he heard on the radio. This self-education process may have been the key to Coleman's experimental view of jazz. "I could play and sound like Charlie Parker note-for-note, but I was only playing it from method," he told Robert Tynan Down Beat in 1960. "So I tried to figure out where to go from there."

Soon he was contributing to the family income by playing with bands in Fort Worth bars, but the violence he saw there dismayed him. "I'd be playing some real honky-tonk, and before I knew it, people would be fighting and cutting each other up," he told People. Sadly, it would not be the last time he would be exposed to violence, in life or even on stage.

Was an Outsider in the World of Jazz

Coleman signed on with a traveling carnival show band (he was later fired for trying to push the group's music in a more modern direction), kept playing rhythm and blues, and finally made his way to Los Angeles, where he was so poor that he reached the brink of starvation. His mother kept him going by sending him loaves of bread in the mail.

Finally Coleman landed a job as an elevator operator and began reading music theory texts during slack moments. In the evenings, plastic saxophone in hand, he began to experiment with a radical new brand of jazz that rejected the traditional idea of improvising on a tune, in favor of free responses to what the musician felt was the tune's mood or essence. In the process, such jazz basics as harmony and chord progressions might be partially or completely disregarded. Coleman antagonized even cutting-edge musicians like saxophonist Sonny Rollins and drummer Max Roach, who walked off the stage when Coleman began playing during a jam session they were leading.

Some like-minded musicians, however, were profoundly influenced by Coleman even while he was a relative unknown. Bassist Charlie Haden went to Coleman's home one day and emerged amazed by what Coleman could draw out of him creatively. "It was spontaneity like I had never experienced before," he told People. "Each note was a universe. Each note was your life." Another admirer was Jayne Cortez, whom Coleman married in 1954. They divorced in 1964, but their son, Denardo, grew up to become Coleman's business manager and musical collaborator on drums.

Coleman's big break came, not from a fellow jazz radical but from the conservative-leaning John Lewis, the leader of the classical-influenced Modern Jazz Quartet, who heard in Coleman's work a musical analogue to the chaotic modernist novels of Irish writer James Joyce. Lewis recommended Coleman for an influential summer concert series in 1959, held at the Lenox School of Jazz in Massachusetts, and following that summer series, Coleman moved to New York City. He and a band consisting of Haden, trumpeter Don Cherry, and drummer Billy Higgins were booked to play at a club called the Five Spot Café.

At a Glance …

Born on March 9, 1930, in FortWorth, TX; married Jayne Cortez, 1954 (divorced 1964); children: Denardo. Education: Largely self-taught; studied music theory and history independently, Los Angeles, CA; attended School of Jazz, Lenox, MA, 1959.

Career: Played in barroom rhythm-and-blues bands and with a traveling carnival show, mid-1940s and 1950s; performed with experimental musicians; began recording, 1958; appeared with quartet at Five Spot Café club, New York, NY, 1959; toured Europe, 1965; wrote classical works, including Skies of America symphony, 1960s and early 1970s; traveled to Morocco, 1973; formed Prime Time double quartet, mid-1970s; reunited with original quartet for album In All Languages, 1987; created arts center, New York City, early 1980s; started Harmolodics label, 1994-97; started Sound Grammar label, 2006—.

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1967 and 1973; "Genius" grant, MacArthur Foundation, 1994; Praemium Imperiale Award, Japan Art Association, 2001; Gish Prize, 2004; inducted as officer in French Order of Arts and Letters; named Jazz Artist of the Year, 46th Annual Down Beat International Critics Poll; named Jazz Artist of the Century, Texas Monthly magazine; top of Village Voice jazz critics' poll, 2006, and Grammy Award nomination and Pulitzer Prize, both 2007, all for Sound Grammar; Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, 2007.

Addresses: Label—Sound Grammar, c/o Phrase Text Inc., PO Box 20071, London Terrace Station, New York, NY 10011. Web—http://www.ornettecoleman.com/.

Fistfights Occurred at Performances

The results were controversial, even by the contentious standards of modern jazz culture. Coleman was alternately hailed as a genius (by New York Philharmonic conductor Leonard Bernstein, among others) and denounced as a fraud. Coleman seemed to shred tunes—when they were recognizable at all—with unpredictable melodic leaps, dissonant harmonies, squawks and growls. Coleman's rhythm section did not provide a beat in the conventional sense, but operated with as much freedom as the rest of the band. In a sense, Coleman had returned African-American music to its earliest roots, redefining jazz as an ensemble music where individuals had their own distinct voices within a larger whole, rather than as a vehicle for virtuoso display. To some ears, the result sounded like atonal chaos, but many critics noted that no matter how advanced the musical idiom Coleman adopted, his playing retained a raw quality evocative of the honky-tonk blues that he performed at the beginning of his career.

On a few occasions fistfights broke out between Coleman's admirers and detractors. Roach was alleged to have punched Coleman in the mouth after one performance in New York City, and an angry crowd in Baton Rouge stormed the stage and destroyed his sax after one of Coleman's solos brought activity on the dance floor to a screeching halt. The controversy his music generated fueled sales of his albums the first of which, Something Else!, was released in 1958. That album, and others such as 1959's The Shape of Jazz to Come, are considered classics today. In 1960 Coleman released Free Jazz, an album containing performances by eight musicians that essentially consisted of forty minutes of free group improvisation. Executives at Atlantic Records gave the album its title and selected a cover—featuring art from Jackson Pollock—that drew the explicit analogy between the conflict caused by Coleman's new style and the controversy abstractionists like Pollock had caused in the art world a decade earlier. "Free jazz" became the popular name for the movement pioneered by Coleman and followed by a number of his admirers. The pioneer himself resisted the label. "I never said I was playing ‘free’ anything," he told Mike Zwerin in the International Herald Tribune.

While Free Jazz intensified the controversy surrounding Coleman for a while, in the late 1960s and early 1970s talk in the jazz world turned to new topics, such as the frenetic and equally radical free-improvisation experiments of saxophonist John Coltrane, and trumpeter Miles Davis's forays into jazz-rock fusion. Coleman is often said to have dropped out of sight during this period, but perhaps he was simply doing what he had always done—following his own artistic path, without regard for the whims of public opinion. He toured England, France, and Sweden in 1965, setting in motion an avant-garde jazz movement in Europe that continued unabated for decades, and he began to write fully notated classical compositions that in turn were influenced by European experimenters in that field. Guggenheim fellowships in 1967 and 1973 helped pay the bills. One of Coleman's classical pieces, an eight-movement symphony for jazz band and orchestra called Skies of America, led to increasingly frequent performances as classical orchestras opened their program lists to new influences.

It was around this time that Coleman began, mostly in a series of characteristically quizzical interviews, to express aspects of his theory of music, which he called "harmolodics" (the word is derived from "harmony," "movement," and "melody"). His ideas centered on the equal importance of all aspects of music, as well as the creative freedom players have in responding to each other using different musical parameters. In the 1970s Coleman helped set in motion another trend in jazz—the incorporation of music from around the globe—when he traveled to Morocco in 1973 and collaborated with Berber tribal musicians there. Some of the results were heard on the 1977 album Dancing in Your Head.

Formed Group Prime Time

That album was one of the first to feature an ensemble Coleman would employ for many years to come, the "double quartet" he called Prime Time. It consisted of paired guitars, bassists, and drummers, along with Coleman's own alto sax. The group, reported Scott Yanow on the Web site allmusic, "featured dense, noisy, and often witty ensembles in which all of the musicians are supposed to have an equal role, but the leader's alto always ended up standing out." Coleman's playing retained the same qualities it had always had, but he was now surrounding himself with musicians such as drummer Ronald Shannon Jackson and bassist Jamaaladeen Tacuma, who brought elements of 1970s and 1980s jazz-funk to the group's sound.

Coleman hit a financial low point around 1980, living in a series of unheated apartments and cheap hotel rooms, and suffering two robbery attempts in an abandoned Manhattan school that he tried to turn into an arts center. After one of those attempts, he was left for dead by teenagers who had attacked him with a hammer. In the 1980s and 1990s, however, Coleman's music began to resonate with audiences, more than a quarter century after he had come on the scene. The Real Art Ways festival in Hartford, Connecticut, presented a week-long retrospective on Coleman's career, and he reunited his original quartet for the acclaimed 1987 album In All Languages. An album collaboration that year with the popular fusion guitarist Pat Metheny showed how his music could find common ground with more accessible forms of jazz, and brought him a host of new fans.

Became an Elder Statesman of Jazz

The 1990s and 2000s saw the former jazz revolutionary turning into something of an elder statesman as he achieved senior citizen status. He continued to record, releasing several albums on his own Harmolodics imprint in the mid-1990s that found distribution from the large Verve label. In the early 2000s Coleman assembled a new group called Global Expressions, and he performed live accompaniment to a film version of the William Burroughs novel Naked Lunch. He was also widely honored, winning, among many other laurels, a 1994 "genius" grant from the MacArthur Foundation, a 2001 Praemium Imperiale award from the Japan Art Association, a 2004 Gish Prize, induction as an officer in the French Order of Arts and Letters, and the designation of Jazz Artist of the Century by Texas Monthly magazine. Coleman shrugged off the honors, telling Down Beat, "I'm really tired of being sold as a product for being who I am, but not for what I really do."

The greatest accolades, however, would be saved for the 2006 release of Sound Grammar, Coleman's first album in a decade. Released under Coleman's new label of the same name, Sound Grammar found Coleman leading a quartet with his son Denardo on drums, two acoustic bassists, and Coleman alternately playing saxophone, trumpet, and violin. The critical reaction was overwhelmingly positive. In Entertainment Weekly Larry Blumenfeld announced that "Coleman, at 76, remains a fountain of sublime ideas," and Martin Johnson in New York magazine enthused, "Sound Grammar … doesn't sound like anything else in jazz today." The album topped the Village Voice jazz critics' poll for 2006, and in 2007 the album won a Pulitzer Prize, making Coleman just the second jazz performer to do so (after Wynton Marsalis). Sound Grammar was also nominated for a Grammy, in the same awards ceremony in which Coleman received the Lifetime Achievement Award.

Despite the belated acceptance and emeritus status he is now accorded, Coleman refuses to live in the past. Even though he collapsed from dehydration during a show in July of 2007, he continues to perform and maintains an aggressive touring schedule. "Jazz means two things: ‘unknown’ and ‘present,’" he told Reich. "In other words, you (bring) something unknown into the present, right?"

Selected discography

Something Else!, Contemporary, 1958.

Tomorrow Is the Question!, Contemporary, 1959.

The Art of the Improvisers, Atlantic, 1959.

The Shape of Jazz to Come, Atlantic, 1959.

Free Jazz, Atlantic, 1960.

At the Golden Circle in Stockholm (Vol. 1 and Vol. 2), Blue Note, 1965.

Science Fiction, Columbia, 1971.

Skies of America, Columbia, 1972.

Dancing in Your Head, A&M, 1973.

Body Meta, Verve, 1976.

The Unprecedented Music of Ornette Coleman, Lotus, 1980.

In All Languages, Caravan of Dreams, 1987.

Tone Dialing, Harmolodic, 1995.

Colors: Live from Leipzig, Harmolodic, 1996.

Sound Museum: Hidden Man, Harmolodic, 1996.

Sound Museum: Three Women, Harmolodic, 1996.

Sound Grammar, Sound Grammar, 2006.

Sources

Books

Gridley, Mark, Jazz Styles, 5th ed., Prentice-Hall, 1994.

Periodicals

Boston Globe, March 4, 2007.

Chicago Tribune, September 22, 2003.

Down Beat, February 1994, p. 44; February 1996, p. 22; August 1998, p. 46; October 2000, p. 69.

Entertainment Weekly, September 29, 2006, p. 78.

International Herald Tribune, September 19, 2001.

Jet, July 4, 1994, p. 36.

Nation, July 10, 2000, p. 41.

New York, August 27, 2006.

New York Post, March 17, 2001, p. 8.

New York Times, November 3, 1996; July 6, 1997; September 22, 2006; March 31, 2008.

New Yorker, April 14, 2008, p. 78.

People, October 13, 1986, p. 108.

Times (London), March 17, 2001, Features section.

Online

Kahn, Ashley, "Ornette Coleman: Decades of Jazz on the Edge," Morning Edition, NPR, November 13, 2006, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6449431 (accessed July 21, 2008).

"Ornette Coleman," Europe Jazz Network, http://www.ejn.it/mus/coleman.htm (accessed July 21, 2008).

"Ornette Coleman," Praemium Imperiale, http://www.praemiumimperiale.org/eg/laureates/cole_summary.html (accessed July 21, 2008).

Ornette Coleman Official Web site, http://www.ornettecoleman.com/ (accessed July 21, 2008).

Yanow, Scott, "Ornette Coleman: Biography," allmusic, March 14, 2003, http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=11:gvfpxqr5ldse˜T1 (accessed July 21, 2008).

—James Manheim and Derek Jacques