Ornette Coleman

• Born: March 19, 1930
• Birthplace: Fort Worth, Texas
• Died: June 11, 2015

Jazz musician

Coleman is credited with helping bring free jazz to mainstream notice. His musical experiments expanded artists’ ideas about instruments, format, and individual freedom within a unit.

Early Life

Randolph Denard Ornette Coleman (deh-NAHRD ohr-NEHT KOHL-muhn) was born on March 19, 1930, in Forth Worth, Texas. He recalled seeing his father in a baseball uniform, but Coleman could remember little else. His father died when Coleman was seven, and his mother worked as a seamstress. He began to play hooky from school after he had been spanked by a teacher upon telling her she was wrong. When he stayed out of school for six weeks, his mother beat him severely.

Coleman began playing saxophone at fourteen, teaching himself to play along with the songs on the radio. In 1945, he visited his New York aunt and her husband, trumpeter Doc Cheatham, who secured the boy lessons with saxophonist Walter “Foots” Thomas. Coleman was also a talented “scatback” in high school football. Playing with bands in Fort Worth bars, he was put off by the fights among rowdy patrons. The teenager then signed on with the Silas Green road show, but Coleman was fired for pushing the musical envelope. He was influenced by local alto player “Red” Connor. He also admired “Pee Wee” Crayton, and later in life Coleman cited Dallas-native saxman David “Fathead” Newman, a Ray Charles sideman, as an influence. Coleman attended Wiley College, but he left after one semester.

Life’s Work

Coleman made his way to Los Angeles, where he was so poor that he nearly starved. His mother sent him loaves of bread in the mail. He took a job as an elevator operator and began reading about music theory. Playing a plastic saxophone, he experimented with his style while performing in dance bands and rhythm-and-blues groups. As he developed a signature sound, Coleman abandoned harmonic patterns to improvise on melodic and expressive elements. This became known as free jazz; because the tonal centers changed at the player’s whim. In 1954, he married poet Jayne Cortez. In 1958, Coleman released his debut album as a leader, Something Else!!!!

Coleman’s influential early sponsor was pianist John Lewis of the Modern Jazz Quartet. Lewis insisted that Atlantic Records pay Coleman and Don Cherry to participate in the new School of Jazz, a summer program, in Lenox, Massachusetts. Lewis also brought Coleman’s quartet (Cherry on trumpet, Charlie Haden on bass, and Billy Higgins on drums) to the Monterey Jazz Festival in October 1959, introducing Coleman to the media. The Lenox exposure generated good publicity and provided contact with such performers as drummer Max Roach, clarinetist Jimmy Giuffre, pianist Bill Evans, pianist George Russell, trumpeter Kenny Dorham, and horn player Gunther Schuller. Lenox’s closing concert on August 28, 1959, so impressed Martin Williams, coeditor of The Jazz Review, that he wrote in his “Letter from Lenox, Massachusetts” that the revolutionary sound would affect “the whole character of jazz music profoundly and pervasively.” Williams called Coleman a “driving force,” described Coleman and Cherry as “almost like twins,” and dubbed Coleman an “extension of Charlie Parker,” which was akin to bestowing royal status.

In early November 1959, Coleman’s quartet opened at Manhattan’s popular Five Spot Café. His innovative sound was met with skepticism—someone deemed him “a nobody from Los Angeles.” Roy Eldridge, Coleman Hawkins, and Red Garland reacted with hostility toward the newcomer. At the time Lou Donaldson, Cannonball Adderley, and Jackie McLean were the reigning alto saxophone players. Leonard Bernstein, John Hammond, Symphony Sid Torin, and Schuller were on hand opening night. Every prominent alto player was present. Dallas-born alto man John Handy said the club was packed. Donaldson strode in after the first set, circumnavigated the club, and walked out (famously stating “nothing’s happening”), trailed by an exodus of alto stars. Bassist Jimmy Garrison also voiced disapproval of what music journalists began to call “The New Thing,” while bassist Haden visited Coleman’s at home and came away amazed by the spontaneity Coleman drew out of Haden. The controversy transformed Coleman into a major figure overnight and filled the Five Spot every night. Coleman opened at the Five Spot earning four hundred dollars a week; by 1961 he was commanding twelve hundred dollars a week.

Jazz critic Nat Henthoff and playwright LeRoi Jones (later Amiri Baraka) became Coleman fans. Bassist Charles Mingus and tenor player John Coltrane championed Coleman. Influential critic Leonard Feather was not moved by “The New Thing.” Landmark albums, such as The Shape of Jazz to Come (1959) and Free Jazz (1960), established Coleman in the avant-garde genre. Free Jazz consisted of performances by eight musicians playing forty minutes of free improvisation. Coleman called his approach “harmolodics,” which he defined as “the use of the physical and the mental of one’s own logic made into an expression of sound to bring about the musical sensation of unison executed by a single person or with a group.” His modal approach was free of traditional harmonic sequences and melodic variations.

Coleman was noted for maintaining rhythm-and-blues roots within his sound. For thirty-five years, he performed primarily without the accompaniment of a pianist. In 1966, however, he came under criticism for recording The Empty Foxhole with Haden on bass and Coleman’s ten-year-old son, Denardo, on drums. In 1967, Coleman earned a Guggenheim Fellowship.

During the 1970s, Coleman began composing orchestral music. Around 1980, his career faltered, and he lived in unheated apartments and cheap hotels. He was robbed twice inside an abandoned Manhattan school he had tried to convert into an arts center. In 1981, he formed an electric band called Prime Time, with which he played until the 1990s. In 1985, the Real Art Ways festival in Hartford, Connecticut, featured a week-long retrospective on Coleman’s career. In 1987, he reunited his original quartet for an album called In All Languages. His son Denardo was his producer. In 2007, he won the Pulitzer Prize for music for his 2006 album, Sound Grammar, and in 2009 his lifetime contributions to jazz were recognized with the Miles Davis Award. In June 2014, as part of a tribute organized by his son, Coleman performed on stage for the final time. He passed away in Manhattan on June 11, 2015, at the age of eighty-five after suffering a heart attack approximately one year later.

Significance

Coleman was a key figure in the development of free jazz and a center of controversy in music circles. His theory of “harmolodics” gave shape to a school of musical thought in which harmony, movement of sound, and melody had equal value. Coleman’s experimentation in the avant-garde realm, including leading a musical combo without a keyboard player, expanded musical boundaries, inspiring other composers and players to break from prevailing norms.

Bibliography

Jost, Ekkehard. Free Jazz. New York: Da Capo, 1981. Print.

Litweiler, John. Ornette Coleman: A Harmolodic Life. New York: Da Capo, 1994. Print.

Mandel, Howard. Miles, Ornette, Cecil: Jazz Beyond Jazz. New York: Routledge, 2008. Print.

Pareles, Jon. “Shedding the Weight of Theory.” New York Times 3 Nov. 1996. Print.

Ratliff, Ben. "Ornette Coleman, Saxophonist Who Rewrote the Language of Jazz, Dies at 85." New York Times. New York Times, 11 June 2015. Web. 26 Dec. 2015.

Spellman, A. B. Four Lives in the Bebop Business. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2004. Print.

Watrous, Peter. “The Return of Jazz’s Greatest Eccentric.” New York Times 3 Nov. 1996. Print.

Wilson, Peter N. Ornette Coleman: His Life and His Music. Albany: Berkeley Hills, 1999. Print.