Coleman, Ornette

in full Randolph Denard Ornette Coleman

(born March 9, 1930, Fort Worth, Texas, U.S.) American jazz saxophonist, composer, and bandleader who was the principal initiator and leading exponent of “free jazz” in the late 1950s.

Coleman began playing alto, then tenor saxophone as a teenager and soon became a working musician in dance bands and rhythm-and-blues groups. Early in his career, his approach to harmony was already unorthodox and led to his rejection by established musicians in Los Angeles, where he lived for most of the 1950s. While working as an elevator operator, he studied harmony and played an inexpensive plastic alto saxophone at obscure nightclubs. 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 the late 1950s Coleman formed a group with trumpeter Don Cherry, drummer Billy Higgins, and bassist Charlie Haden, with whom he recorded his first album, Something Else (1958). His classic recordings The Shape of Jazz to Come and Change of the Century in 1959 preceded his move that year 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,” in which he successfully experimented with free metres and tempos, also proved influential.

In the 1960s Coleman taught himself to play the violin and trumpet, using unorthodox techniques. 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 native musicians in the Rif Mountains 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.