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"Best known for a series of highly experimental albums and performances in the late 1950s and early 1960s, saxophonist and composer Ornette Coleman has been recognized as one of modern jazz's great innovators, a man who has pushed his music to extremes where even other highly progressive musicians refused to follow. Coleman's pioneering work in what would later be called Free Jazz polarized the musical community, between those who thought his work represented Jazz's future and those who considered him a musical con man who didn't know his chords and couldn't stay in tune. Despite considerable resistance from the jazz establishment, Coleman has carved out a durable career through sheer persistence and belief in his own unique artistic vision, one that now affords him the accolades reserved for jazz's most revered elder statesmen.
Taught Himself to Play the Saxophone
Coleman told Howard Reich in the Chicago Tribune that it took him "three or four years" saving money from shining shoes to get his first saxophone. Because his family did not have money for lessons, he taught himself to play along with the songs he heard on the radio. This self-education process may have been the key to Coleman's experimental view of jazz. "I could play and sound like Charlie Parker note-for-note, but I was only playing it from method," he told Robert Tynan Down Beat in 1960. "So I tried to figure out where to go from there."
Was an Outsider in the World of Jazz
Coleman signed on with a traveling carnival show band (he was later fired for trying to push the group's music in a more modern direction), kept playing rhythm and blues, and finally made his way to Los Angeles, where he was so poor that he reached the brink of starvation. His mother kept him going by sending him loaves of bread in the mail.
Finally Coleman landed a job as an elevator operator and began reading music theory texts during slack moments. In the evenings, plastic saxophone in hand, he began to experiment with a radical new brand of jazz that rejected the traditional idea of improvising on a tune, in favor of free responses to what the musician felt was the tune's mood or essence. In the process, such jazz basics as harmony and chord progressions might be partially or completely disregarded. Coleman antagonized even cutting-edge musicians like saxophonist Sonny Rollins and drummer Max Roach, who walked off the stage when Coleman began playing during a jam session they were leading.
Fistfights Occurred at Performances
The results were controversial, even by the contentious standards of modern jazz culture. Coleman was alternately hailed as a genius (by New York Philharmonic conductor Leonard Bernstein, among others) and denounced as a fraud. Coleman seemed to shred tunes—when they were recognizable at all—with unpredictable melodic leaps, dissonant harmonies, squawks and growls. Coleman's rhythm section did not provide a beat in the conventional sense, but operated with as much freedom as the rest of the band. In a sense, Coleman had returned African-American music to its earliest roots, redefining jazz as an ensemble music where individuals had their own distinct voices within a larger whole, rather than as a vehicle for virtuoso display. To some ears, the result sounded like atonal chaos, but many critics noted that no matter how advanced the musical idiom Coleman adopted, his playing retained a raw quality evocative of the honky-tonk blues that he performed at the beginning of his career.
On a few occasions fistfights broke out between Coleman's admirers and detractors. Roach was alleged to have punched Coleman in the mouth after one performance in New York City, and an angry crowd in Baton Rouge stormed the stage and destroyed his sax after one of Coleman's solos brought activity on the dance floor to a screeching halt. The controversy his music generated fueled sales of his albums the first of which,Something Else!, was released in 1958. That album, and others such as 1959's The Shape of Jazz to Come,are considered classics today.
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