Ornette Coleman walked into a New York club in 1959 with a plastic alto saxophone and a band with no piano, and proceeded to divide the jazz world for years. Some musicians thought he was a charlatan who couldn’t play. Others heard the future. The album title said it plainly: The Shape of Jazz to Come.
What Coleman did was throw out the chord changes. Instead of improvising over a fixed harmonic structure, his band followed the melody and the feeling wherever they led, free to shift key and direction on instinct. He called the underlying idea “harmolodics,” a theory people still argue about, but the sound was clear enough: raw, vocal, bluesy, and unbound.
It was less random than it seemed. Coleman’s playing was full of strong melodies and a deep Texas blues feeling – he’d come up playing rhythm and blues in dance halls – and there was real logic and emotion under the apparent chaos. He was a composer of memorable themes as much as a free improviser.
He spent his life following his own path, indifferent to fashion, and lived to see himself vindicated as one of the most important innovators jazz produced. Free jazz, and much of what came after, starts with the door he kicked open. He even won a Pulitzer near the end, the establishment finally catching up.
Start here
The Shape of Jazz to Come (1959) is the breakthrough – confronting and thrilling.
The Change of the Century (1960) deepens the free-jazz vision with the classic quartet.
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