Ornette Coleman
Where he had torn down the fence of chords, he played an alto that wept like a human voice.
At a glance 🔭💭
Some coordinates adapted from GeoNames (CC BY 4.0) · Pleiades (CC BY 3.0)
Fellow travelers ⏳🌊
- InfluenceCharlie Parker
In his Fort Worth years he learned solos by listening to his records, and these became his doorway into bebop.
- FamilyJayne Cortez
The poet he married in 1954 and the mother of his son Denardo; after they parted in 1964, each went on down their own artistic path.
- ColleagueDon Cherry
A trumpeter he met in Los Angeles, with whom he voiced the themes of “Lonely Woman” and “Free Jazz.”
- ColleagueCharlie Haden
A bassist he met in 1957 and a lifelong musical comrade who listened more deeply than anyone to his music, unbound by chords.
- PatronageNesuhi Ertegun
Signed him to Atlantic Records and produced “The Shape of Jazz to Come” and “Free Jazz.”
- FriendshipJohn Coltrane
Studied his music closely and recorded “The Avant-Garde” from his compositions; Ornette played at Coltrane's funeral in 1967.
I. The boy from Fort Worth · 1930–1949 (age 0–19)
(Fort Worth) He was born in March 1930 in Fort Worth, Texas. His birthday was the 9th. His father, Randolph, died when Ornette was about seven, and his mother, Rosa, raised the children alone, earning the family's living by herself. His older sister Truvenza would later work in Fort Worth as a blues singer and bandleader. The family lived across the railroad tracks in a poor Black neighborhood, and Southern segregation divided schools, theaters and buses alike. (Saxophone) Around the age of fourteen, he got an alto saxophone bought with money his mother had saved. He was almost entirely self-taught. Learning note names from a piano method book, he did not know that the saxophone sounds different pitches from those written on the page, and for a while, he recalled, he played with the note names all wrong. Considering that people would later speak of ‘wrong notes’ in his music, it was a beginning that trusted the ear before fixed rules. (High school) He is said to have been thrown out of the I.M. Terrell High School band for improvising new melodies while playing a march. At the same school and in the same neighborhood were the tenor saxophonist Dewey Redman, the drummer Charles Moffett and the alto player Prince Lasha, all of whom he would later record with. Through a local tenor player, Red Connors, he discovered bebop, and he learned Charlie Parker's solos by listening to his records. But the money came from picking up a tenor saxophone and blowing raw rhythm and blues in clubs and dance halls. In 1949, at nineteen, he joined a traveling show and left home.
II. On the road, in the elevator · 1949–1958 (age 19–28)
(Wandering) In 1949 he set out with Silas Green from New Orleans, a touring show that worked the South, but lost the job in Natchez, Mississippi. In Baton Rouge, Louisiana, he recalled, men dragged him outside after a performance, beat him and smashed his tenor saxophone. He then stayed on in New Orleans and befriended the drummer Ed Blackwell, a bond that would lead to his band 10 years later. (Los Angeles) In 1950 he went to Los Angeles with the band of the blues guitarist Pee Wee Crayton. The story goes that Crayton so disliked his playing that he paid him not to blow on the bandstand. After a brief return home, he settled in Los Angeles again in 1953. He ran an elevator at Bullock's department store, reading books on harmony in spare moments, and he recalled that when he stepped up at jam sessions, other musicians would walk off the stage. His long hair and beard were also an unfamiliar sight in the jazz world of the day. (Marriage) In 1954 he married the poet Jayne Cortez, and in 1956 their son Denardo was born. Around this time he met, one after another, the trumpeter Don Cherry, the drummer Billy Higgins and the bassist Charlie Haden, and rehearsed his tunes with them. In 1958, it is said, he went to sell his compositions to Lester Koenig of Contemporary Records and came away with a chance to record them himself. That same year he also played the Hillcrest Club with the pianist Paul Bley's band. One track on his first album he titled “Jayne,” after his wife.
The debut that first put on record the tunes he wrote while running an elevator. With “Jayne,” dedicated to his wife, it carries the texture of his Los Angeles days intact.
- Unusually among his early records, it includes a piano (Walter Norris). The tension as the alto slips outside the chords the piano lays down hints at why he would later drop the piano.
- The form still follows bebop custom. The theme is played together, solos go around, and the theme returns (head-solo-head), so even a first-time listener never gets lost.
- Don Cherry's cornet and Ornette's alto sing the theme together note for note (unison), but the two sounds never lie perfectly on top of each other; they drift slightly apart, creating a rough grain.
- In short, songlike, sharply bending themes such as “Invisible” and “The Blessing,” one can already hear his distinctive melodic sense as a composer.
- Produced by Lester Koenig of Contemporary Records in Los Angeles in February and March 1958.
III. The shape of jazz to come · 1959–1961 (age 29–31)
(Atlantic) John Lewis, the pianist of the Modern Jazz Quartet, took notice of him and introduced him to Nesuhi Ertegun of Atlantic Records. In May 1959 in Hollywood he recorded “The Shape of Jazz to Come” with Don Cherry, Charlie Haden and Billy Higgins. It was music without piano, moving forward not by a predetermined chord progression but by melody and by each player's response to the others. That summer he spent time at the Lenox School of Jazz in Massachusetts alongside John Lewis, Gunther Schuller and others. (Five Spot) In November 1959 he made his debut at the Five Spot, a club on Cooper Square in New York. An engagement booked for two weeks ran on for more than two months. People like Leonard Bernstein were ecstatic, while Miles Davis panned him, saying he sounded like a man all messed up inside. John Coltrane sought him out to talk music, and in 1960 recorded “The Avant-Garde” on his compositions with Don Cherry, Haden and Blackwell. The white plastic alto he played, he recalled, had first been bought simply because it was cheap. (Free jazz) On December 21, 1960, he set two quartets in one studio and recorded “Free Jazz,” a collective improvisation running nearly 40 minutes. Eric Dolphy, Freddie Hubbard and Scott LaFaro took part, and the title soon became the name of an era. In 1961 he recorded “Ornette on Tenor” with the bassist Jimmy Garrison, who shortly afterward joined the Coltrane quartet. Amid the mix of acclaim and ridicule, his club fees never rose as far as he had hoped.
The opening track of “The Shape of Jazz to Come.” A tune he recalled conceiving from a painting of a wealthy woman he saw while working at the department store, it is the decisive recording made just before his New York debut.
- In the introduction Charlie Haden lays down a heavy low drone, plucking two strings at once, while Billy Higgins taps the cymbals fast and fine. The drums run at a fast tempo and the horns at a slow one, so that two times seem to overlap.
- Alto and pocket trumpet sing the minor-key theme together, in a style closer to leaning on each other, stretching and tightening as if sobbing, than to keeping precise time (rubato).
- Ornette's solo nudges pitches up and lets them sag by tiny degrees, producing a tone like a human cry. Listen less for dazzling speed than for the expression of a single note.
- With no piano, no chords are imposed, so the bass moves the harmonic floor freely, following the soloist (interplay).
- Produced by Nesuhi Ertegun at Radio Recorders in Hollywood in May 1959. It went on to become his most famous composition, recorded again by countless musicians.
Just a year after he shook New York, he assembled two quartets at once. It is the album whose title became the very name of a genre.
- On the left of the stereo image sit Ornette, Don Cherry, Scott LaFaro and Billy Higgins; on the right, Eric Dolphy (bass clarinet), Freddie Hubbard, Charlie Haden and Ed Blackwell. On headphones, the two bands' conversation comes through clearly.
- While one player solos, the other seven don't sit still; they cut in and talk back (collective improvisation). The essence is the blurring line between solo and accompaniment.
- Between solos, short ensemble passages written in advance burst in like fanfares, opening the next scene. It is not utter chaos; there is a loose design.
- The longest solo is Ornette's own: seizing a short motif, he twists and stretches it for nearly 10 minutes. Beneath him, the two basses and two drummers never stop moving.
- About 37 minutes were recorded in a single take and split across the two sides of the LP. The cover reproduced Jackson Pollock's painting “White Light.”
IV. Withdrawal and a rebuilt trio · 1962–1971 (age 32–41)
(Fees) In December 1962 he put on a self-financed concert at New York's Town Hall. Alongside his trio with the bassist David Izenzon and the drummer Charles Moffett, he also brought in a string quartet and a rhythm and blues band, but he is said to have lost heavily. He felt the price paid for his music was absurd next to the share taken by clubs and record companies, and when he began quoting far higher fees and the work dried up, he withdrew from the stage. In the meantime, Sonny Rollins called on Don Cherry and Billy Higgins to form a new band. (Hiatus) During his time away he taught himself trumpet and violin. His violin, which ignored conventional technique, baffled many listeners. In 1964 he and Jayne Cortez separated; he never remarried. In January 1965 he returned at the Village Vanguard, and that year he recorded a score for the film “Chappaqua,” which the director did not use. That December, on a European tour, he played the Golden Circle in Stockholm, and the performances came out on Blue Note as two albums. (Comeback) In 1966 he put his ten-year-old son Denardo behind the drums and recorded “The Empty Foxhole” with Haden. In July 1967 he played at John Coltrane's funeral, and that same year he is reported to have become the first jazz composer to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 1968 he brought in Elvin Jones and Jimmy Garrison of the Coltrane quartet, along with his hometown friend Dewey Redman, to record “New York Is Now!” He bought a building on Prince Street in SoHo and turned it into Artists House, a space for both performing and working, and in 1971 released “Science Fiction” on Columbia.
The peak of the trio he rebuilt with Izenzon and Moffett after his retreat from the stage. This live recording was also where the violin and trumpet he had learned during his hiatus first became widely known.
- With neither piano nor trumpet in the trio, the alto's sound stands fully exposed. On “Faces and Places” he sustains a long solo over a fast tempo, endlessly transforming short motifs.
- David Izenzon bows the bass (arco) up into its high register, moving less like an accompanist than like a second melodic line.
- Charles Moffett's drums bounce bright and springy, shifting rhythms as if answering the alto's speech rather than holding a steady beat.
- On the second volume, in "Snowflakes and Sunshine," he plays violin and trumpet. The rough sound of an untrained hand becomes, if anything, a source of color.
- Recorded live in December 1965 at the Golden Circle club in Stockholm, it was released by Blue Note in two volumes.
V. Skies and Joujouka · 1972–1989 (age 42–59)
(Harmolodics) In 1972, at Abbey Road Studios in London, he recorded Skies of America with the London Symphony Orchestra. British Musicians' Union rules kept him from bringing his own quartet, so he played with the orchestra alone. From around this time he began calling his idea of treating melody, harmony and rhythm as equals, without hierarchy, harmolodics, and he spent the rest of his life trying to explain it. His explanations were always as elusive as poetry, but one conviction never wavered: no sound should be bound to serve as accompaniment to another. (Joujouka) In 1973 he traveled to Joujouka, a mountain village in Morocco, and played with its musicians. In their ritual music, handed down for generations and circling endlessly around a single note, he said he saw something akin to his own thinking. After his return he formed Prime Time, a band of two electric guitars, electric bass and drums. Guitarists Bern Nix and Charles Ellerbee, bassist Jamaaladeen Tacuma, and drummers Ronald Shannon Jackson and Denardo all passed through its ranks. It was a sound in which everyone spun out melody at once over rhythms you could dance to. (Homecoming) When the Caravan of Dreams performing arts center opened in Fort Worth in September 1983, he took the stage on opening night and performed Skies of America with the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra. His hometown declared that day Ornette Coleman Day. Director Shirley Clarke's documentary Ornette: Made in America captured the homecoming. In 1985 he released Song X with guitarist Pat Metheny, and in 1987 In All Languages, which set the old quartet and Prime Time side by side on a single record.
His first major work to carry harmolodics into the orchestra. Because he could not bring his quartet, Ornette's alto alone moves among the ranks of the London Symphony Orchestra.
- He had several instruments carry the same melody, each at its own pitch. The harmonies thus stack up in staggered layers, producing a thick resonance unlike that of the familiar symphony.
- A suite of some twenty short movements played without pause. Rather than listening one movement at a time, follow the whole current and you will hear its themes return.
- The alto solos appear only in certain passages, but his tone, cutting through the orchestra, anchors the piece.
- One of the themes heard here would be reborn a few years later as a piece for electric band on Dancing in Your Head.
- Recorded in 1972 at Abbey Road Studios in London, conducted by David Measham.
The first fruit of the sense of circularity he found in Joujouka meeting the electric sound of Prime Time. It was released in 1977.
- "Theme from a Symphony" repeats a theme as short and simple as a nursery rhyme across two variations lasting more than twenty-five minutes. Each time, the same theme is twisted from a slightly different angle.
- Two electric guitars tangle in different rhythms, while bass and drums lay down finely chopped rhythms that set the body moving (a funk groove). Dance music and improvisation share the same space.
- This is the record on which the harmolodic idea—everyone voicing melody at once, with no accompaniment—is easiest to hear. No instrument steps back.
- The final track, "Midnight Sunrise," was recorded in the village of Joujouka in 1973; amid the pipes and drums of the local musicians, critic Robert Palmer's clarinet and Ornette's alto weave together.
VI. The grammar of sound · 1990–2015 (age 60–85)
(Recognition) In 1991 he worked with composer Howard Shore on the score for David Cronenberg's film Naked Lunch. In 1994 he received a MacArthur Fellowship and founded the Harmolodic label, releasing Tone Dialing and Sound Museum. This was also the period when he, who had long gone without piano, sat down opposite pianists such as Geri Allen and Joachim Kühn. Colleagues recalled that he spoke in a quiet voice, favored tailored suits, and would talk music at length with any young player who came to see him. (Pulitzer) In 2007 he won the Pulitzer Prize for Music for Sound Grammar, a live recording of an October 2005 concert in Ludwigshafen, Germany. That same year he also received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. His band of this period, built on two basses and his son Denardo's drums, revived pieces from 1959 without ever sounding dated. In 2009 he served as curator of the Meltdown festival at London's Southbank. (Farewell) In his final years he lived in Manhattan and kept practicing as far as his strength allowed. In June 2014 he briefly took the stage at a tribute concert in Brooklyn's Prospect Park to play alto; it was, in effect, his last public appearance. He died of cardiac arrest in Manhattan, New York, on June 11, 2015. He was eighty-five. His funeral at Riverside Church on June 27 unfolded like a concert nearly three hours long, and his contemporary and fellow innovator Cecil Taylor, saxophonist Pharoah Sanders and others played for him.
A live recording he left on a German stage at seventy-five. With this album he won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Music.
- There are two basses. One player plucks with the fingers, the other draws a bow, so that rhythm and melody flow together in the low register.
- His son Denardo's drumming does not insist on a steady beat; it pushes and pulls the whole band, shaping its flow.
- Old pieces such as 1959's "Turnaround" are played anew with a new lineup. It is worth listening side by side to hear how the same melody has changed across nearly half a century.
- Besides the alto, violin and trumpet also make brief appearances. The alto of his old age sounds rounder and more unhurried than in his youth.
- Recorded live at an October 2005 concert in Ludwigshafen, Germany, with the audience's reactions captured just as they were.
Lesser-known stories
(Croydon) In August 1965 he gave a trio concert in Croydon, on the outskirts of London. At the time the British Musicians' Union strictly restricted performances by American jazz musicians, but classical concerts were exempt. So he put his own composition for wind quintet, "Sounds and Forms for Wind Quintet," on the program and framed the evening as a classical recital. The recording came out as An Evening with Ornette Coleman, but the fact that such administrative circumstances were tangled up in his motives for presenting himself as a classical composer is rarely mentioned outside the liner notes. (Plastic) The white alto he played in the 1950s and '60s was an acrylic saxophone made by the British firm Grafton. He recalled that he first bought it because it was cheap. Charlie Parker, too, borrowed one of the company's instruments for his 1953 concert at Massey Hall in Toronto. The white horn in the photographs has endured as a kind of emblem, but the fact that it was a product of poverty tends to be hidden by the myth. (Derrida) In the summer of 1997 in Paris he held a long conversation with the philosopher Jacques Derrida, which was published in the French magazine Les Inrockuptibles. Derrida went onstage at one of his concerts to read a text and, it is said, was booed by the audience. It was a rare moment of jazz and contemporary thought meeting face to face, yet English-language biographies treat it as little more than a footnote.
Term notes 📚🔎
Free jazz
(In jazz) Jazz in which the players, unbound by set chord progressions, fixed numbers of bars or a steady meter, make music by responding to one another's sounds. The name comes from Free Jazz, the album Ornette Coleman released in 1960. It is like a game friends play with no fixed rules, making up the rules as they go. But it is not playing any which way: everyone has to listen closely to one another, or the game falls apart. (Elsewhere) In everyday speech "free" can also mean costing nothing, but the "free" in free jazz means free in the sense of liberty, with nothing to do with money.
Harmolodics
(Word meaning) A word Ornette Coleman coined himself; he explained it as a blend of harmony, movement and melody. (In jazz) His musical principle that none of melody, harmony or rhythm ranks above the others, and that every instrument should play not as an accompanist but as an equal voice. He spent his whole life trying to explain it, but his words were as elusive as poetry, and even scholars disagree on how to interpret them. It is like a group presentation in which, instead of one person doing all the talking while the rest just nod, everyone contributes their ideas equally to complete a single presentation.
Chord progression
(In jazz) A chord is a harmony of several notes sounded at once, and a chord progression is the order in which those harmonies change as a piece unfolds. Traditional jazz improvisation uses this order as a map, choosing notes that fit over it. It is like a karaoke backing track that runs in a fixed order while you lay your singing on top. Ornette Coleman tried not to fix this map in advance, letting the harmony follow wherever the melody wanted to go. (Elsewhere) Chord is easily confused with code, the instructions used to write computer programs, but the two differ in both spelling and meaning.
Bebop
(Word meaning) The name is said to come from vocal imitations of fast, clipped melodic lines. (In jazz) Jazz created in the 1940s by Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and others, marked by very fast tempos, complex harmonies and dazzling improvised solos. It turned jazz from music for dancing into an art for attentive listening. Ornette Coleman learned bebop as a teenager and, after understanding its rules deeply, sought to go beyond them. It is like an athlete who fully masters the fundamentals and only then invents techniques of their own.
Collective improvisation
(Word meaning) The term jipdan jeukheung ('group improvisation') means a performance that a group (集團) invents together on the spot (卽), in the moment (興). (In jazz) Instead of one person soloing while the rest accompany, several players improvise melodies at the same time and trade them back and forth. It existed in early New Orleans jazz, but Free Jazz pushed it to the extreme with eight players. Picture a relay story written by a group of friends—not one at a time in turn, but all of them writing on the same page at once.
Rhythm and blues
(In jazz) Popular music that swept Black communities in America in the 1940s and 1950s, marked by a strong beat, bluesy melodies and a groove made for dancing. Saxophone solos that wailed loud and raw were a favorite, and Ornette Coleman, too, made his living playing this music as a young man. Like the upbeat song everyone jumps along to at a school festival, it is music that moves the listener's body first. (Elsewhere) The music we now call R&B for short inherited this name, but its sound has shifted toward a much smoother pop.
Third stream
(Meaning) English for 'the third stream.' The name was coined by the composer Gunther Schuller to describe two streams, jazz and classical music, meeting to form a third. (In jazz) A movement of the 1950s and '60s that sought to join the improvisation and rhythms of jazz with the compositional techniques and orchestral forces of classical music. Ornette Coleman met Schuller at the Lenox School of Jazz, and he later carried the idea forward in his own way, writing orchestral works such as “Skies of America.” Like fusion cuisine that blends kimchi and cheese into a new dish, it is an attempt to mix two traditions and draw out a flavor neither had on its own.