Ornette Coleman threw out jazz rulebook
Whatever rules in jazz hadn’t been shattered by Charlie Parker and other bebop artists, Ornette Coleman finished off for good.
Coleman, who died Thursday at age 85, brought to jazz the kind of openended, nonnarrative approach that Jackson Pollock used in painting and James Joyce in books. In the late 1950s, he originated “free jazz,” abandoning the conventional song form and liberating musicians to freely improvise off of the melody rather than the underlying chord changes.
Though largely self-taught, Coleman would create his own “harmolodic” concept of music, which also became a life philosophy. It derived from free interaction between the musicians, without being tethered to rigid metric or harmonic structure.
Once so revolutionary he drove some listeners to physical abuse, he was only the second jazz performer to win a Pulitzer Prize, cited for his 2006 album Sound Grammar, and was voted into the elite American Academy of Arts and Letters. He also received a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master award and a Grammy lifetime achievement award, even though none of his recordings won a competitive Grammy.
Early in his career, Coleman’s unconventional playing led to rejection by the public and his fellow musicians, who would walk off the stage when he showed up at jam sessions.
Tired of rejection, Coleman moved to Los Angeles in1952 and got a job as a department store elevator operator, studying music theory on his breaks.
Coleman soon found a like-minded group of musicians, including bassist Charlie Haden, Don Cherry, who played a tiny pocket trumpet, and drummer Billy Higgins.
Coleman recorded his first album, Something Else, in 1958. The new sound caught the attention of the Modern Jazz Quartet’s pianist John Lewis, who called Coleman “the only really new thing in jazz since Charlie Parker in the mid-’40s.”