Ornette Coleman, father of 'free jazz', dies at 85
Ornette Coleman, alto saxophonist and composer, one of the most important innovators in the history of jazz, father of 'free jazz', died on Thursday in Manhattan at the age of 85. According to his family the cause of death was cardiac arrest. Coleman widened the options in jazz and helped change its course. Partly through his work in the late 1950s and early 1960s, jazz became less beholden to the rules of harmony and rhythm while gaining more distance from the American songbook repertoire.
Randolph Denard Ornette Coleman was born in Fort Worth, Texas, on March 9, 1930, and lived in a house near railroad tracks. He attended I.M. Terrell High School, a veritable seedbed of modern American jazz. Three of his future bandmates - the saxophonist Dewey Redman and the drummers Charles Moffett and Ronald Shannon Jackson - were graduates, as were the saxophonists King Curtis, Prince Lasha and Julius Hemphill; the clarinetist John Carter; and Red Connor, a bebop tenor saxophonist who, Coleman said, influenced him by playing jazz as “an idea” rather than as a series of patterns.
Learning by ear, he played alto and then tenor saxophone in rhythm-and-blues and society bands around Texas, backing up vocalists and practicing the gutbucket style that made stars out of Illinois Jacquet and Arnett Cobb. But he had already become entranced by the new kind of jazz known as bebop, and especially by Charlie Parker. In 1949 he joined Silas Green From New Orleans, a popular traveling minstrel-show troupe on its last legs. He was later fired in Natchez, Miss., for trying to teach bebop to one of the other saxophonists. In Natchez he joined the band of the blind blues singer Clarence Samuels. While on tour with the group he was reportedly beaten by a gang of musicians outside a dance hall in Baton Rouge, La., for playing strangely!
In 1953 he moved to Los Angeles to play with the R&B bandleader Pee Wee Crayton. In 1954 he married the poet Jayne Cortez, with whom he had a son, Denardo. They divorced in 1964. Denardo later played drums on his father's recordings.
Also in 1954, he bought a white plastic alto saxophone, which became an emblem of his early years. Staying in Los Angeles for six years he created a core group of musicians who were not only interested in playing his music but who also helped define it. They included the trumpeters Don Cherry and Bobby Bradford, the drummers Ed Blackwell and Billy Higgins, and the bassist Charlie Haden. These musicians were the exceptions; during his Los Angeles period, many wanted nothing to do with Ornette Coleman, a longhaired Jehovah's Witness dressed in clothes made by his wife.
His first album Something Else!!!! The Music of Ornette Coleman was released in 1958 by Contemporary Records, a recording that holds close to his model Charlie Parker. Still he adhered less to a strict rhythmic grid than Parker did, operating on his own sense of time.
Ornette Coleman made one more record for Contemporary, Tomorrow Is the Question!, with Percy Heath and Red Mitchell on bass, Shelly Manne on drums and, significantly, nobody on piano. The lack of a pianist to root the music in chords would characterize the sound of Coleman's music for a long time. The Ornette Coleman Quartet - with Don Cherry, Charlie Haden and Billy Higgins - then recorded six numbers for Atlantic in May 1959. (John Lewis, the pianist for the Modern Jazz Quartet, had glowingly recommended Coleman to Nesuhi Ertegun of Atlantic Records.) This session was released as The Shape of Jazz to Come. The record's swing and harmonic freedom, its intuitive communication between Coleman and Cherry, and its ease with nonstandard ways of playing jazz made it a classic.
In under two years the same group made enough music for nine records with Atlantic, including Free Jazz, using a "double quartet" of four musicians in each audio channel. It was not quite 'free jazz' though. Despite the great harmonic mobility among the musicians, Coleman relied on written melodies to cut the piece into episodes; rhythmically, Ed Blackwell and Billy Higgins swung hard and not in free rhythm.
Ornette Coleman's music had such force that even John Coltrane said in 1961 that the 12 minutes he had spent on stage with him amounted to "the most intense moment of (his) life".
In 1962 Coleman rented the Town Hall, the New York performance space, to play with a new trio, featuring David Izenzon on bass and Charles Moffett on drums, and on one piece with a string quartet. It was the beginning of Coleman's public career in classical music, though a more dissonant and self-consciously European-modernist body of work. He retreated from performance and separated himself from New York’s emerging free-jazz scene. When he reappeared, in 1965, at the Village Vanguard jazz club, he was playing trumpet and violin as well as alto saxophone. He wrote music for jazz quartet and orchestra on a well-paid commission for Chappaqua, a movie about drug addiction. The music was rejected by the producers of the film, but was eventually released by Columbia Records. In 1966 Coleman made the album The Empty Foxhole, with Charlie Haden on bass and his 10-years-old son, Denardo, on drums. In the late 60s he bought an industrial building in SoHo, on Prince Street, that he called 'Artists House' and started producing concerts; he formed a new band that included Dewey Redman on tenor saxophone, and recorded albums for Blue Note and Columbia like New York Is Now! and Science Fiction. He then composed a concerto grosso called Skies of America, which he recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra in 1972. It was the purest demonstration of his harmolodic principle, with parallel lines for orchestra members to play as written, rather than transposing to fit their instruments' home keys.
In 1973 he traveled to the Rif mountains of Morocco to collaborate with the famed musicians of Jajouka. A short recording of these encounters, displaying the Jajouka reed players' untempered approach, appeared on his album Dancing in Your Head, released in 1977. The collaboration confirmed his belief that the "concert key" system of Western tonality was misguided.
Dancing in Your Head (A&M 1977) marked the beginning of Prime Time, Coleman's first electric band with two guitarists. Their music took few cues from rock, but it nonetheless had an influence on what would be called post-punk. They recorded several albums for his own Artists House label and A&M. In 1985 Coleman collaborated with the guitarist Pat Metheny on the album Song X. In 1987 he released In All Languages, a double album, with Prime Time on one disc and his original acoustic quartet on the other. And in 1988 he released Virgin Beauty, a Prime Time album with Jerry Garcia of The Grateful Dead as a third guitarist. In 1991 he played on Howard Shore's soundtrack to the film Naked Lunch, based on the novel by William S. Burroughs.
Lincoln Center became his stage in the summer of 1997, when he played four nights presenting his 1970s concerto grosso, Skies of America, conducted by Kurt Masur, as well as his old quartet music and a strange show called Tone Dialing (after his 1995 album of the same name), with dancers, video, circus performers walking on nails and broken glass, and Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson. By this time Ornette Coleman had become part of the avant-garde establishment. He was awarded a National Endowment of the Arts Jazz Master fellowship in 1984 and made a MacArthur Foundation fellow in 1994.
He formed a new quartet in 2004, with two bassists and son Denardo on drums, and started the Sound Grammar record label. In 2007 he won the Pulitzer Prize, received a Lifetime Achievement Grammy Award and performed at the Bonnaroo festival in Tennessee. To the alarm of the audience, he passed out from heat stroke and was taken to a hospital.
His final public performance was at Prospect Park in Brooklyn in June 2014, as part of a tribute to him organized by his son.
One of the true giants of music in our time has passed away. RIP.
[source: The New York Times]