Musicians - Ornette Coleman

Home > Listing Index > Musicians > Ornette Coleman

	Musicians - Ornette Coleman

Ornette Coleman (born March 19, 1930) is an American jazz saxophonist and composer. He was one of the major innovators of the free jazz movement of the 1960s, and one of the most notable figures in jazz history.

Coleman was born and raised in Fort Worth, Texas, where he began performing R&B and bebop initially on tenor saxophone. He later switched to alto, which has remained his primary instrument. Coleman's timbre is perhaps one of the most easily recognized in jazz: his keening, crying sound draws heavily on blues music. This unique tone comes from his plastic saxophone (Coleman claimed that it sounded drier, without the pinging sound of metal) and specialized mouthpiece, which gave him complete control of his sound.

Early career

Coleman moved to Los Angeles in the early 1950s. He worked at various jobs, including as an elevator operator, while pursuing his musical career.

Even from the beginning of Coleman's career, his music and playing were, in many ways rather unorthodox: Coleman was more concerned with relative pitch than with "proper" equal temperament; his sense of harmony and chord progression are not as rigid as most swing music or bebop performers', and were easily changed and often implied. Many Los Angeles jazz musicians regarded Coleman's playing as out-of-tune, and he sometimes had difficulty finding like-minded musicians with whom to perform. Pianist Paul Bley was an early supporter.

In 1958 Coleman led his first recording session for Something Else! The Music of Ornette Coleman. The session also featured trumpeter Don Cherry, drummer Billy Higgins, bassist Don Payne and Walter Norris on piano. Norris was sympathetic to Coleman's ideas, but has been criticised for not quite grasping them (though, in fairness, it must be noted that few grasped Coleman's ideas this early on), and further, a piano tied Coleman to equal temperament.

The Shape of Jazz to Come

1959 found Coleman very busy: He abandoned the piano entirely for Tomorrow Is The Question!, a quartet featuring Shelly Manne on drums. Coleman encountered double bassist Charlie Haden – perhaps his most important collaborator – and formed a regular group with him, Cherry, and Higgins. They were an unlikely-looking fellowship – Coleman with his plastic alto saxophone, Cherry playing the pint-sized pocket trumpet, Haden honing his technique via his Missouri family's hillbilly band. This quartet recorded The Shape of Jazz to Come in 1959, with Atlantic Records, who had signed Coleman to a multi-album contract.

The Shape of Jazz to Come was, according to critic Steve Huey, "a watershed event in the genesis of avant-garde jazz, profoundly steering its future course and throwing down a gauntlet that some still haven't come to grips with." While definitely – if somewhat loosely – blues-based and often quite melodic, the album's songs were harmonically unusual and unpredictable. Some musicians and critics saw Coleman as talentless hack; others regarded him as a genius.

Coleman's quartet received a lengthy – and sometimes controversial – engagement at New York City's famed Five Spot jazz club. Such notable figures as The Modern Jazz Quartet, Leonard Bernstein and Lionel Hampton were favorably impressed, and offered encouragement. (Hampton was so impressed he reportedly asked to perform with the quartet; Bernstein later helped Haden obtain a composition grant from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.) Opinion was, however, divided: trumpeter Miles Davis famously declared Coleman was "all screwed up inside," and Roy Eldridge stated he'd listened to Coleman drunk and sober, but couldn't understand or enjoy his music either way.

On his best-known early recordings for the Atlantic Records, Coleman led a piano-less quartet with Cherry on trumpet, usually Charlie Haden, but sometimes Scott LaFaro on double bass and either Billy Higgins or Ed Blackwell on drums. These recordings are collected in a box set, Beauty is a Rare Thing.

Free Jazz

In 1961, Coleman recorded Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation, which featured a "double quartet," including Cherry and Freddie Hubbard on trumpet, Eric Dolphy on bass clarinet, Haden and LaFaro on bass, and both Higgins and Blackwell on drums. The record was recorded in stereo, with a reed/brass/bass/drums quartet isolated in each stereo channel. Free Jazz was, at nearly 40 minutes, the lengthiest jazz recording to date, and was instantly one of Coleman's most controversial albums. The music features a regular but complex pulse, one drummer playing "straight" while the other played double-time; the thematic material is a series of brief, dissonant fanfares; as is conventional in jazz, there are a series of solos features for each member of the band, but the other soloists are free to chime in as they wish, producing some extraordinary passages of collective improvisation by the full octet.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for Ornette Coleman ]

This page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article Ornette Coleman; it is used under the GNU Free Documentation License. You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the GFDL.

Searches on eBay