Biography of Ornette Coleman

Alto saxophonist Ornette Coleman is a soft-spoken, unassuming man whose music reflects playful, almost child-like simplicity and fascination with melody. Contrary to his sweet nature, Coleman has provoked more critical schizophrenia and outright hatred than almost any other jazz figure. Anecdotes about his formative years are the stuff of tragicomic legend -- getting physical threats on the bandstand, having his horn confiscated and destroyed by an angry mob, or being left behind in Los Angeles after an ill-fated tour out West with bluesman Pee Wee Crayton. Legends aside, it is true that a progressive underground existed in Los Angeles when Ornette arrived, and in 1958 he made his first record there for Contemporary. This was the beginning of the free-jazz movement, and immediately the critics were split into two warring camps. Some proclaimed him to be the most important stylist since Charlie Parker, to whom he was indebted stylistically (and perhaps also for his use of a plastic alto); others found his music unlistenable, boring, or dismissed it as a novelty. With the help of admirer John Lewis of The Modern Jazz Quartet, Coleman soon found himself recording for Atlantic Records and playing an extended engagement at the prestigious Five Spot in New York.Ornette's most sympathetic bandmates during these years were also his students back in Los Angeles, where he first devised his revolutionary concept of melodic and harmonic improvisation without the use of prearranged chord changes. Trumpeter Don Cherry, bassist Charlie Haden, drummer Billy Higgins, and (later) bassist Scott La Faro and drummer Ed Blackwell have contributed to many of his best performances over the past three decades. All of the aforementioned, plus multi-reedist Eric Dolphy and trumpeter Freddie Hubbard, recorded the landmark Free Jazz album in December 1960; this album-length piece documented the "Double Quartet" improvising collectively in the studio without written music. Many forward-thinking musicians seized on the free-jazz concept, and this influential work sounds tame today when compared to the many varieties and extremes of freedom it propagated. But after Free Jazz and a handful of other records on Atlantic, Ornette's career faltered, and his output of the next few years was inconsistent.There were more advances and outrages in the mid '60s -- new ensembles, pieces for classical chamber groups, challenging film soundtracks, recordings with his preteen son Denardo, and unschooled solos on trumpet and violin. Ornette seemed to pick up steam again in the late 60s, reuniting with his former bandmates and discovering a sympathetic new voice in tenorist Dewey Redman, who joined him on two Blue Note sessions with Coltrane alumni Elvin Jones and Jimmy Garrison. His classical ensemble writing continued to thrive into the '70s -- his orchestral masterpiece Skies of America was premiered at the Newport Jazz Festival on the 4th of July, 1972. This triumph was followed by more years of relative inactivity and the emergence of Coleman's theories of harmonic, melodic, and rhythmic improvisation, called "harmolodics." The exact meaning of harmolodics varies from one interpreter to the next, but this approach to pan-tonal collective improvisation has been a major feature of Ornette's music since the mid '70s. Various incarnations of The Prime Time band, typically an electric rock sextet of drums/bass/guitar pairings, ply their high-density harmolodics on hip young audiences, further polarizing both fans and critics. But despite the endless debate, or because of it, his music lives on -- in his own occasional projects, in the acoustic jazz homages of Old And New Dreams, through younger sidemen like Ronald Shannon Jackson, Jamaaladeen Tacuma, and James Blood Ulmer, and in the efforts of Coleman converts like Pat Metheny. ~ Myles Boisen