Ornette Coleman

(b Fort Worth, 9 March 1930 ). American jazz saxophonist and composer. His early recordings, The Shape of Jazz to Come and Change of the Century (both 1959), were innovatory and he became the most important influence on avant-garde jazz during the 1960s. He performed as a trumpeter and violinist in the late 1960s and composed extended works for large ensembles, also exploring collective improvisation. In 1981 he founded Prime Time, an electric band. His improvisations are modal, independent of conventional harmonic sequences and melodic variations.

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jazz musician; saxophonist; composer

Personal Information

Born on March 9, 1930, in Fort Worth, 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, early 1950s; performed with experimental musicians; debut album Something Else!, 1958; appeared with quartet at Five Spot 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, 1990s-.

Life's Work

Ornette Coleman has been recognized as one of modern jazz's great innovators, who has pushed his music to extremes where even other highly progressive musicians refused to follow. Yet in another sense, Coleman 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. Many critics have noted that, no matter how advanced the musical idiom Coleman may adopt, his playing retains a raw quality evocative of the honky-tonk blues that he performed at the beginning of his career. Best known for a series of highly experimental albums and performances in the early 1960s, Coleman has carved out a durable career through sheer persistence and belief in his own unique artistic vision.

Born 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. 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."

Disliked Violence of Bar Scene

Coleman got a saxophone at age 14, and taught himself to play along with the songs he heard on the radio. 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. 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 an 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.

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 Cafe.

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. On at least one occasion fistfights broke out between Coleman's admirers and detractors. The publicity fueled sales of Coleman's albums on the Atlantic label, 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 40 minutes of free group improvisation. The album intensified the controversy for a while, but 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, as well as 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. A 1967 Guggenheim fellowship 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 in All Music Guide, "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 the 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.

The 1990s and 2000s saw the former jazz revolutionary turning into something of an elder statesman as he achieved senior citizen status. He was widely honored, winning, among many other laurels, a 1994 "genius" grant from the MacArthur Foundation, 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." More important to him were the new and varied musical activities and experiments he had begun to undertake.

Coleman 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, performed live accompaniment to a film version of the William Burroughs novel Naked Lunch, collaborated with various musicians from around the world, and continued to give interviews in which he delivered mystical paradoxes that challenged interviewers and readers to think about music in new ways. "People always talk about how much I've done," Coleman told Down Beat. "I always hope I can do so much more."

Awards

Selected: Guggenheim fellowship, 1967; MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant, 1994; inducted as officer in French Order of Arts and Letters; Jazz Artist of the Year, 46th Annual Down Beat International Critics Poll; Jazz Artist of the Century award, Texas Monthly magazine.

Works

Selected discography

• Something Else!, Contemporary, 1958.
• 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, Vols. 1 and 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.
• Three Women, Harmolodic, 1996.
• The Complete Science Fiction Sessions, Columbia, 2000.

Further Reading

Books

• Contemporary Musicians, Vol. 5, Gale, 1991.
• Gridley, Mark, Jazz Styles, 5th ed., Prentice-Hall, 1994.

Periodicals

• Down Beat, February 1994, p. 44; February 1996, p. 22; August 1998, p. 46; October 2000, p. 69.
• Jet, July 4, 1994, p. 36.
• Nation, July 10, 2000, p. 41.
• New York Post, March 17, 2001, p. 8.
• People, October 13, 1986, p. 108.
• Times (London, England), March 17, 2001, Features section.

On-line

• "Ornette Coleman," All Music Guide, www.allmusic.com (March 14, 2003).
• "Ornette Coleman," Europe Jazz Network, www.ejn.it/mus/coleman.htm.

— James M. Manheim

For more information on Randolph Denard Ornette Coleman, visit Britannica.com.

• Born: March 09, 1930, Fort Worth, TX
• Active: '50s, '60s, '70s, '80s, '90s, 2000s
• Genres: Jazz
• Instrument: Sax (Alto), Leader, Composer
• Representative Albums: "The Shape of Jazz to Come," "Free Jazz (A Collective Improvisation)," "Change of the Century"
• Representative Songs: "Lonely Woman," "Chronology," "Eventually"

Biography

One of the most important (and controversial) innovators of the jazz avant-garde, Ornette Coleman gained both loyal followers and lifelong detractors when he seemed to burst on the scene in 1959 fully formed. Although he, and Don Cherry in his original quartet, played opening and closing melodies together, their solos dispensed altogether with chordal improvisation and harmony, instead playing quite freely off of the mood of the theme. Coleman's tone (which purposely wavered in pitch) rattled some listeners, and his solos were emotional and followed their own logic. In time, his approach would be quite influential, and the quartet's early records still sound advanced many decades later.

Unfortunately, Coleman's early development was not documented. Originally inspired by Charlie Parker, he started playing alto at 14 and tenor two years later. His early experiences were in R&B bands in Texas, including those of Red Connors and Pee Wee Crayton, but his attempts to play in an original style were consistently met with hostility both by audiences and fellow musicians. Coleman moved to Los Angeles in the early '50s, where he worked as an elevator operator while studying music books. He met kindred spirits along the way in Don Cherry, Charlie Haden, Ed Blackwell, Bobby Bradford, Charles Moffett, and Billy Higgins, but it was not until 1958 (after many unsuccessful attempts to sit in with top L.A. musicians) that Coleman had a nucleus of musicians who could play his music. He appeared as part of Paul Bley's quintet for a short time at the Hillcrest Club (which is documented on live records), and recorded two very interesting albums for Contemporary. With the assistance of John Lewis, Coleman and Cherry attended the Lenox School of Jazz in 1959, and had an extended stay at the Five Spot in New York. This engagement alerted the jazz world toward the radical new music, and each night the audience was filled with curious musicians who alternately labeled Coleman a genius or a fraud.

During 1959-1961, Coleman recorded a series of classic and somewhat startling quartet albums for Atlantic (all of which have been reissued on CD). With Don Cherry, Charlie Haden, Scott LaFaro, or Jimmy Garrison on bass, and Billy Higgins or Ed Blackwell on drums, Coleman created music that would greatly affect most of the other advanced improvisers of the 1960s, including John Coltrane, Eric Dolphy, and the free jazz players of the mid-'60s. One set, a nearly 40-minute jam called Free Jazz (which other than a few brief themes was basically a pulse-driven group free improvisation) had Coleman, Cherry, Haden, LaFaro, Higgins, Blackwell, Dolphy, and Freddie Hubbard forming a double quartet.

In 1962, Coleman, feeling that he was worth much more money than the clubs and his label were paying him, surprised the jazz world by retiring for a period. He took up trumpet and violin (playing the latter as if it were a drum), and in 1965, he recorded a few brilliant sets on all his instruments with a particularly strong trio featuring bassist David Izenzon and drummer Charles Moffett. Later in the decade, Coleman had a quartet with the very complementary tenor Dewey Redman, Haden, and either Blackwell or his young son Denardo Coleman on drums. In addition, Coleman wrote some atonal and wholly composed classical works for chamber groups, and had a few reunions with Don Cherry.

In the early '70s, Coleman entered the second half of his career. He formed a "double quartet" comprised of two guitars, two electric bassists, two drummers, and his own alto. The group, called "Prime Time," 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. He now called his music harmolodics (symbolizing the equal importance of harmony, melody, and rhythm), although free funk (combining together loose funk rhythms and free improvising) probably fits better; among his sidemen in Prime Time were drummer Ronald Shannon Jackson and bassist Jamaaladeen Tacuma, in addition to his son Denardo. Prime Time was a major (if somewhat unacknowledged) influence on the M-Base music of Steve Coleman and Greg Osby. Pat Metheny (a lifelong Ornette admirer) collaborated with Coleman on the intense Song X, Jerry Garcia played third guitar on one recording, and Coleman had irregular reunions with his original quartet members in the 1980s.

Coleman, who recorded for Verve in the '90s, has remained true to his highly original vision throughout his career and, although not technically a virtuoso and still considered controversial, is an obvious giant of jazz. He recorded sparingly as the 21st century began, appearing on Joe Henry's Scar in 2000 and on single tracks on Lou Reed's Raven and Eddy Grant's Hearts & Diamonds, both released in 2002. ~ Scott Yanow, All Music Guide

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