Ornette Coleman
For a time, when Ornette Coleman took the stage to play, fellow musicians would walk out. That is how polarizing his explorations of jazz were during the 1960s and 70s; to some they still are. Saxophonist and composer Ornette Coleman was born in Fort Worth, Texas in 1930 and began teaching himself to play at the age of 14. Coleman played R&B and bebop at clubs in Texas, and then in a carnival show band before moving to Los Angeles in the early 1950s. By day Coleman was an elevator operator, and by night he took up his plastic saxophone and proceeded to break all the conventional structures of tune, harmony, and even improvisation. Even more than the dissonant sounds, it was the relationship amongst the musicians that proved most radical; each player had equal footing and responded to one another with music that seemed a radical departure from any core composition. In Los Angeles, Coleman found like-minded musicians such as trumpeter Don Cherry and bassist Charlie Haden who together recorded their first album Something Else! in 1958. After a summer concert series at the Lenox School of Jazz, Coleman moved to New York City where the band was booked at the Five Spot Cafe. It was at these performances that Coleman’s fans and critics were said to sometimes come to blows. He released the seminal albums The Shape of Jazz to Come (1959) and Free Jazz (1960) and spent the mid-1960s touring in Europe and writing classical compositions such as Skies of America, a symphony for jazz band and orchestra. Free Jazz was more than an album: it became the name for a movement that has engaged other performers in experiments akin to those embraced by Coleman. During the 1980s and 1990s Coleman continued to record and release on his own label and distribute through Verve. In 1994 he received a genius grant from the MacArthur Foundation, and his album Sound Grammar received the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for music.
