Ornette Coleman

Musician and composer Born: March 9, 1930; Died: June 11, 2015.

ORNETTE COLEMAN, who has died at the age of 85, was one of jazz’s greatest innovators. By freeing the musicians in his bands from “the deadline of any particular chord”, as another important jazz theorist and practitioner, George Russell, put it, Coleman encouraged an intuitive form of expression that was not immediately welcomed by the jazz establishment but went on to influence subsequent generations.

Some of the melodies that featured on his ground-breaking early albums, songs such as Lonely Woman and Una Muy Bonita, which were often treated with contempt at the time, have become jazz standards, played around the world by eager young students and long-time disciples alike.

Randolph Denard Ornette Coleman was born in Fort Worth, Texas. His father died when the youngster was seven and his mother, despite lack of resources, somehow managed to buy Ornette his first saxophone when he was 14. He had no money for lessons, so he taught himself by ear and within a short time was playing in local society and rhythm ‘n’ blues bands while still at Terrell High School.

Also at the same school were R&B saxophone legend King Curtis, future World Saxophone Quartet founder Julius Hemphill and three musicians who would become Coleman band members, saxophonist Dewey Redman and drummers Charles Moffett and Ronald Shannon Jackson. It was yet another Terrell student, tenor saxophonist Red Connor who fostered Coleman’s early interest in bebop and whose linear style has been credited with helping to point Coleman towards improvising on the melody rather than the chord changes.

In 1949, and by now a firm disciple of bebop pioneer Charlie Parker, Coleman joined a travelling minstrel show. His enthusiasm for bebop apparently got him fired when he tried to teach one of his fellow saxophonists some bebop licks and, stuck in Natchez, Mississippi, he got a job with blind blues singer Clarence Samuels. That gig ended badly too, with Coleman claiming to have had his saxophone trashed by a group of irate musicians due to his unconventional approach.

His next move took him to Los Angeles where, while playing in R&B singer-guitarist Pee Wee Crayton’s band, Coleman bought the white plastic alto that became synonymous with his early work under his own name. In Los Angeles he found musicians who were sympathetic to the theories and practices he had been working on as a reaction to what he saw as bebop’s formulaic style and in 1958 he led his first recording session for Contemporary Records, Something Else!!!

Its successor, Tomorrow Is The Question, where his group played without a piano, was the harbinger of his first album for Atlantic Records, The Shape Of Jazz To Come, which some regarded as unmusical but others, including Elmer Bernstein, recognised as a work of genius.

The quartet on this album, Coleman, trumpeter Don Cherry, bassist Charlie Haden and drummer Billy Higgins all became life-long standard bearers for creative jazz, backing up its title’s boast. Indeed, the opening track, Lonely Woman, will now assuredly outlive Coleman, who was the last surviving member of the group, and as the imminent visitor to Glasgow Jazz Festival, bassist Charnett Moffett, himself a former Coleman band member, said last week, Coleman’s ideas encouraged all musicians to find their own way of expressing themselves.

Coleman went on to express himself on trumpet and violin, as well as saxophone, although his left-handed violin playing was not universally admired. He led trios including one featuring his then 10-year-old son, Denardo, created orchestral compositions such as Skies Of America, recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra, and formed his electric band Prime Time, which on a visit to Edinburgh during the 1990s proved conclusively it was possible to create aurally challenging music that people could dance to.

Although seen as his own man, Coleman was not above collaborating with musicians from more popular musical spheres. Having invited Grateful Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia to play on his Virgin Beauty album in 1988, Coleman then joined Garcia’s band onstage for a set that included Bobby Bland’s Turn on Your Lovelight, a song that must have taken Coleman back to his R&B roots, and in 1985, with popular guitarist Pat Metheny, a long-time fan, he recorded Song-X, an album of Coleman compositions that introduced Coleman to a new audience.

His many awards included a MacAr- thur Fellowship in 1994, a World Culture Prize from the imperial family of Japan in 2001, the Dorothy & Lillian Gish Prize, one of the richest awards in the arts, and a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2007, the same year as his Sound Grammar album won him a Pulitzer Prize for music.

He is survived by his son, Denardo.