It is very difficult to put labels on saxophonist Ornette Coleman&’s kinds of jazz. However, it is easy to find in his life story the sort of controversy that has divided fans and fellow musicians into those who love him and those who don&’t.
Coleman was born on March 9, 1930, in Fort Worth, Texas. Blessed with a good ear, he basically taught himself to play on an alto saxophone that his mother had bought him. Although still a teenager, he started playing rhythm and blues in the kind of roughhouse nightspots that would hire an under-age musician. Coleman later took up the tenor sax and received some instruction with the high school band.
By the late 1940s, the excitement of bebop had reached Fort Worth and began to stimulate young Coleman&’s active imagination, but as he moved on from jobs in African-American clubs to better-paying gigs in white venues, his idiosyncratic solos seemed to incite the club owners&’ and patrons&’ musical conservatism and racism. In Baton Rouge, Louisiana, during one of his first jobs outside Fort Worth, Coleman was beaten up in a racist attack and his tenor saxophone smashed.
In New Orleans, after recovering from the assault, Coleman returned to alto and in 1949 signed on with a former Fort Worth employer, bandleader Pee Wee Crayton. Crayton&’s rhythm and blues (R&B) group travelled to Los Angeles the following year and Coleman left it there, living in the city until 1959- In Los Angeles, Coleman took a series of odd jobs during the day while studying music theory and harmony at night. His own music continued to encounter resistance: his compositions and solos seemed to have little to do with the standard harmonies on which swing jazz and bebop had been structured, and his rhythms paid less attention to the accepted rules of time-keeping than to the free flow of conversation and thought. Heard through sympathetic ears, though, his music revealed its R&B roots, bebop influence, and an eccentric appeal.
From the mid-1950s, Coleman performed with his own quartet, which included Don Cherry on trumpet, Charlie Haden on bass, and Billy Higgins on drums. Finally, in 1959, Coleman&’s music began reaching wider audiences when the prominent Atlantic label released The Shape of Jazz to Come, featuring six Coleman originals, including the haunting favourite &“Lonely Woman.&” Based on the success of the album, the quartet played a controversial but popular engagement at The Five Spot in New York.
Coleman distinguished his style from those more restricted by harmonic and rhythmic restrictions by calling it &“free jazz&”&—a term that was more a philosophical statement than a description. Some, such as Dizzy GILLESPIE, found it baffling. &“I don&’t know what he&’s playing,&” argued the legendary bebop trumpeter, &“but it&’s not jazz.&” However, the famous bassist Charlie MINGUS said, &“It gets to you emotionally &… like organised disorganisation, or playing wrong right.&”
Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Coleman continued to write mind-bending material for ensembles, and longer symphonic pieces, codifying what he referred to as &“harmolodic theory.&” &“I show that just because you play a note, it doesn&’t mean you're stuck in one key,&” he explained. &“It&’s how you feel, and how you hear what that note is indicating. You have more choices.&”
In the mid-1970s, Coleman fostered more controversy by abandoning his acoustic groups to form his funk and rock-flavoured Prime Time band, which at times comprised two electric guitars, two electric basses, and the dynamic drummer Ronald Shannon Jackson. Many former fans were turned off by the dense amplified sound, and were relieved when their idol returned in the 1990s to acoustic ensembles.
Jeff Kaliss
SEE ALSO:
FREE JAZZ; AZZ; JAZZ ROCK; MODERN JAZZ QUARTET.
FURTHER READING
Litweiler, J. Ornette Coleman, the Harmolodic Life (London: Quartet, 1992);
Wild, D., and M. Cuscuna. Ornette Coleman 1958–79: A Discography (Ann Arbor, MI: Wildmusic, 1980).
SUGGESTED LISTENING
Beauty Is a Rare Thing; Change of the Century; The Shape of Jazz to Come.