Ornette Coleman (March 9, 1930 – June 11, 2015)was an American jazz saxophonist, composer, bandleader and principal initiator and leading exponent of free jazz in the late 1950s.
Randolph Denard Ornette Coleman was born on March 9, 1930, in Fort Worth, Texas, where he was raised. 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. 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. He then joined the band of Pee Wee Crayton and traveled with them to Los Angeles, where he lived for most of the 1950s and while working as an elevator operator, he studied harmony.
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. Until then, all jazz improvisation had been based on fixed harmonic patterns. In the “harmolodic theory” that Coleman developed in the 1950s, however, improvisers abandoned harmonic patterns (“chord changes”) in order to improvise more extensively and directly upon melodic and expressive elements. Because the tonal centres of such music changed at the improvisers’ will, it became known as “free jazz.”
In 1958 Coleman recorded his first album, Something Else! which notably featured trumpeter Don Cherry and drummer Billy Higgins.
The three musicians, along with bassist Charlie Haden, later formed a band, and the quartet’s classic recordings included The Shape of Jazz to Come (1959) and Change of the Century (1960). Coleman moved to New York City, where his radical conception of structure and the urgent emotionality of his improvisations aroused widespread controversy. His recordings Free Jazz (1960), which used two simultaneously improvising jazz quartets, and Beauty Is a Rare Thing (1961), in which he successfully experimented with free metres and tempos, also proved influential.
Here’s
what Charlie Haden had to say on meeting Ornette Coleman.
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. In the 1960s Coleman taught himself to play the violin and trumpet, using unorthodox techniques.
Coleman signed with Blue Note and recorded At the Golden Circle Stockholm. In 1966, he recorded The Empty Foxhole with his son, Denardo Coleman, who was ten years old. His technique was unrefined but enthusiastic, owing more to pulse-oriented free jazz drummers like Sunny Murray than to bebop drummers. He became his father's primary drummer in the late 1970s.On February 29, 1968, in a group with Haden, Ed Blackwell, and David Izenzon Coleman performed live with Yoko Ono at the Royal Albert Hall.
By the 1970s he was performing only irregularly, preferring instead to compose. His most notable extended composition is the suite Skies of America, which was recorded in 1972 by the London Symphony Orchestra joined by Coleman on alto saxophone. Influenced by his experience of improvising with Rif musicians of Morocco in 1973, Coleman formed an electric band called Prime Time, whose music was a fusion of rock rhythms with harmonically free collective improvisations; this band remained his primary performance vehicle until the 1990s.
Coleman’s early style influenced not only fellow saxophonists but also players of all other instruments in jazz. In recognition of such accomplishment, he received the Japan Art Association’s Praemium Imperiale prize for music in 2001. In 2005, with a quartet made up of two acoustic double bass players (one bowing his instrument, the other plucking), a drummer, and Coleman himself (playing alto saxophone, trumpet, and violin), he recorded Sound Grammar during a live performance in Italy; the work, which was said to hearken back to his music of the 1960s, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for music in 2007.
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| Ornette Coleman on his birthday March, 9, 2015 |
Though Coleman continued to work with other musicians, he issued no further recordings. He died of a cardiac arrest at the age of 85 in New York City on June 11, 2015. His funeral was a three-hour event with performances and speeches by several of his collaborators and contemporaries. (Edited from Britannica & Wikipedia)