Ornette Coleman
Randolph Denard Ornette Coleman (March 9, 1930 – June 11, 2015)[1] was an American jazz saxophonist, trumpeter, violinist, and composer. He is best known as a principal founder of the free jazz genre, a term derived from his 1960 album Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation. His pioneering works often abandoned the harmony-based composition, tonality, chord changes, and fixed rhythm found in earlier jazz idioms.[2] Instead, Coleman emphasized an experimental approach to improvisation, rooted in ensemble playing and blues phrasing.[3] AllMusic called him "one of the most beloved and polarizing figures in jazz history," noting that while "now celebrated as a fearless innovator and a genius, he was initially regarded by peers and critics as rebellious, disruptive, and even a fraud."[3]
Ornette Coleman
Randolph Denard Ornette Coleman
March 9, 1930
Fort Worth, Texas, U.S.
June 11, 2015 (aged 85)
New York City
- Musician
- composer
1940s–2015
Born and raised in Fort Worth, Texas, Coleman taught himself to play the saxophone when he was a teenager.[1] He began his musical career playing in local R&B and bebop groups, and eventually formed his own group in Los Angeles featuring members such as Ed Blackwell, Don Cherry, Charlie Haden, and Billy Higgins. In November 1959, his quartet began a controversial residency at the Five Spot jazz club in New York City and he released the influential album The Shape of Jazz to Come, his debut LP on Atlantic Records. Coleman's subsequent Atlantic releases in the early 1960s would profoundly influence the direction of jazz in that decade, and his compositions "Lonely Woman" and "Broadway Blues" became genre standards that are cited as important early works in free jazz.[4]
In the mid 1960s, Coleman left Atlantic for labels such as Blue Note and Columbia Records, and began performing with his young son Denardo Coleman on drums. He explored symphonic compositions with his 1972 album Skies of America, featuring the London Symphony Orchestra. In the mid-1970s, he formed the group Prime Time and explored electric jazz-funk and his concept of harmolodic music.[3] In 1995, Coleman and his son Denardo founded the Harmolodic record label. His 2006 album Sound Grammar received the Pulitzer Prize for Music, making Coleman the second jazz musician ever to receive the honor.[5]
Biography[edit]
Early life[edit]
Coleman was born on March 9, 1930, in Fort Worth, Texas,[6] where he was raised.[7][8][9]
He attended I.M. Terrell High School, where he participated in band until he was dismissed for improvising during "The Washington Post" march. He began performing R&B and bebop on tenor saxophone and started The Jam Jivers with Prince Lasha and Charles Moffett.[9]
Eager to leave town, he accepted a job in 1949 with a Silas Green from New Orleans traveling show and then with touring rhythm and blues shows. After a show in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, he was assaulted and his saxophone was destroyed.[10]
He switched to alto saxophone, which remained his primary instrument, first playing it in New Orleans after the Baton Rouge incident. He then joined the band of Pee Wee Crayton and traveled with them to Los Angeles. He worked at various jobs, including as an elevator operator, while pursuing his music career.[11]
In California he found like-minded musicians such as Ed Blackwell, Bobby Bradford, Don Cherry, Charlie Haden, Billy Higgins, and Charles Moffett.[3][12] He recorded his debut album, Something Else!!!! (1958), with Cherry, Higgins, Walter Norris, and Don Payne.[13] During the same year he briefly belonged to a quintet led by Paul Bley that performed at a club in New York City (that band is recorded on Live at the Hilcrest Club 1958).[3] By the time Tomorrow Is the Question! was recorded soon after with Cherry, bassists Percy Heath and Red Mitchell, and drummer Shelly Manne, the jazz world had been shaken up by Coleman's alien music. Some jazz musicians called him a fraud, while conductor Leonard Bernstein praised him.[12]
1959: The Shape of Jazz to Come[edit]
In 1959 Atlantic released The Shape of Jazz to Come. According to music critic Steve Huey, the album "was 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."[14] Jazzwise listed it No. 3 on their list of the 100 best jazz albums of all time.[15] When French philosopher Jacques Derrida interviewed him, Ornette said that "Lonely Woman" from the album resulted from seeing a rich woman who was in such solitude.[16]
Coleman's quartet received a long – and sometimes controversial – engagement at Five Spot jazz club in New York City. Leonard Bernstein, Lionel Hampton, and the Modern Jazz Quartet were impressed and offered encouragement. Hampton asked to perform with the quartet; Bernstein helped Haden obtain a composition grant from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. But trumpeter Miles Davis said Coleman was "all screwed up inside",[17][18] although he later became a proponent of Coleman's innovations.[19]
Coleman's early sound was due in part to his use of a plastic saxophone. He bought a plastic horn in Los Angeles in 1954 because he was unable to afford a metal saxophone, though he didn't like the sound of the plastic instrument at first.[9]
On the Atlantic recordings, Coleman's sidemen in the quartet are Cherry on cornet or pocket trumpet; Charlie Haden, Scott LaFaro, and then Jimmy Garrison on bass; and Higgins or his replacement Ed Blackwell on drums. The complete recordings for the label were collected on the box set Beauty Is a Rare Thing.[20]
1960s: Free Jazz and Blue Note[edit]
In 1960, Coleman recorded Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation, which featured a double quartet, including Don Cherry and Freddie Hubbard on trumpet, Eric Dolphy on bass clarinet, Haden and LaFaro on bass, and both Higgins and Blackwell on drums.[21] The album was recorded in stereo with a reed/brass/bass/drums quartet isolated in each stereo channel. Free Jazz was, at 37 minutes, the longest recorded continuous jazz performance to date[22] and was 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. A series of solo features for each member of the band, but the other soloists are free to chime in as they wish.[23] In the January 18, 1962, issue of Down Beat magazine, in a review titled "Double View of a Double Quartet", Pete Welding gave the album five stars while John A. Tynan rated it zero stars.[24] Time has been kinder to the album, though, with AllMusic listing it as one of "20 Essential Free Jazz albums".[21]
Coleman intended "free jazz" as simply an album title. But his growing reputation placed him at the forefront of jazz innovation, and free jazz was soon considered a new genre, though Coleman has expressed discomfort with the term. Among the reasons he may have disapproved of the term is that his music contains composition. His melodic material, although skeletal, recalls melodies that Charlie Parker wrote over standard harmonies. The music is closer to the bebop that came before it than is sometimes popularly imagined.[25]
After the Atlantic period and into the early part of the 1960s, Coleman's music became more angular and engaged with the avant-garde jazz which had developed in part around his innovations.[20] After his quartet disbanded, he formed a trio with David Izenzon on bass and Charles Moffett on drums. He extended the sound of his music, introducing string players and started playing trumpet and violin, which he spent three years teaching himself to play, in addition to alto saxophone. He had little conventional musical technique and used the instruments to make large, unrestrained gestures. His friendship with Albert Ayler influenced his development on trumpet and violin. Charlie Haden sometimes joined this trio to form a two-bass quartet.
Coleman signed with Blue Note and recorded At the Golden Circle Stockholm.[26] In 1966, he recorded The Empty Foxhole with his son, Denardo Coleman, who was ten years old.[27] Freddie Hubbard and Shelly Manne regarded this as an ill-advised piece of publicity on Coleman's part.[28][29] Despite his youth, Denardo Coleman had studied drumming for several years. His technique was unrefined but enthusiastic, owing more to pulse-oriented free jazz drummers like Sunny Murray than to bebop drummers.[26] He became his father's primary drummer in the late 1970s.
Coleman formed another quartet. Haden, Garrison, and Elvin Jones appeared, and Dewey Redman joined the group, usually on tenor saxophone. On February 29, 1968, in a group with Haden, Ed Blackwell, and David Izenzon Coleman performed live with Yoko Ono at Albert Hall. One song was included on the album Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band (1970).[30]
He continued to explore his interest in string textures – from Town Hall, 1962, culminating with the Skies of America album in 1972. (Sometimes this had a practical value, as it facilitated his group's appearance in the UK in 1965, where jazz musicians were under a quota arrangement but classical performers were exempt.)
In popular culture[edit]
McClintic Sphere, a fictional character in Thomas Pynchon's debut novel V. (1963), is an innovative saxophonist modeled on Ornette Coleman.[49][50][51]