Randolph Denard Ornette Coleman (March 9, 1930 – June 11, 2015) was an American jazz saxophonist, trumpeter, violinist, and composer. He is best known as a principal founder of the free jazz genre, a term derived from his 1960 album Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation. His pioneering works often abandoned the harmony-based composition, tonality, chord changes, and fixed rhythm found in earlier jazz idioms; instead, Coleman emphasized an experimental approach to improvisation rooted in ensemble playing and blues phrasing. Thom Jurek of AllMusic called him "one of the most beloved and polarizing figures in jazz history", noting that while "now celebrated as a fearless innovator and a genius, he was initially regarded by peers and critics as rebellious, disruptive, and even a fraud."
Born and raised in Fort Worth, Texas, Coleman taught himself to play the saxophone when he was a teenager. He began his musical career playing in local R&B and bebop groups and eventually formed his own jazz group in Los Angeles, featuring members such as Ed Blackwell, Don Cherry, Charlie Haden, and Billy Higgins. In November 1959, his quartet began a controversial residency at the Five Spot Café in New York City and he released the influential album The Shape of Jazz to Come on Atlantic Records. Coleman's subsequent Atlantic releases in the early 1960s would profoundly impact the direction of jazz in that decade, and his compositions "Lonely Woman" and "Broadway Blues" became standards cited as important early works in free jazz.
In the mid 1960s, Coleman left Atlantic for other labels, including Blue Note and Columbia, and began performing with his young son Denardo Coleman on drums. He explored symphonic composition with his 1972 album Skies of America, featuring the London Symphony Orchestra. In the mid-1970s, he formed the group Prime Time, which performed electric jazz-funk and elaborated on his theory of harmolodics. In 1995, he and Denardo founded the Harmolodic record label. Coleman's 2006 album Sound Grammar received the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Music, making him the second jazz musician ever to receive the honor.
Coleman was born Randolph Denard Ornette Coleman on March 9, 1930, in Fort Worth, Texas, where he was raised. He attended I.M. Terrell High School in Fort Worth, where he participated in the band program until he was dismissed for improvising during John Philip Sousa's march "The Washington Post". He began performing R&B and bebop on tenor saxophone, and formed The Jam Jivers with Prince Lasha and Charles Moffett.Eager to leave town, he accepted a job in 1949 with a Silas Green from New Orleans traveling show and then with touring rhythm and blues shows. After a show in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, he was assaulted and his saxophone was destroyed.
Coleman subsequently switched to alto saxophone, first playing it in New Orleans after the Baton Rouge incident; the alto would remain his primary instrument for the rest of his life. He then joined the band of Pee Wee Crayton and traveled with them to Los Angeles. He worked at various jobs in Los Angeles, including as an elevator operator, while pursuing his music career.
Coleman found like-minded musicians in Los Angeles, such as Ed Blackwell, Bobby Bradford, Don Cherry, Charlie Haden, Billy Higgins, and Charles Moffett. Thanks to the intercession of friends and a successful audition, Ornette signed his first recording contract with Los Angeles-based Contemporary Records, which allowed him to sell the tracks from his debut album, Something Else!!!! (1958), with Cherry, Higgins, Walter Norris, and Don Payne. During the same year, he briefly belonged to a quintet led by Paul Bley that performed at a club in Los Angeles. (That band is recorded on Live at the Hilcrest Club 1958.) By the time Tomorrow Is the Question! was recorded soon after with Cherry, bassists Percy Heath and Red Mitchell, and drummer Shelly Manne, the jazz world had been shaken up by Coleman's music. Some jazz musicians called him a fraud, while conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein praised him.
1959: The Shape of Jazz to Come
In 1959, Atlantic Records released Coleman's third studio album, The Shape of Jazz to Come. According to music critic Steve Huey, the album "was a watershed event in the genesis of avant-garde jazz, profoundly steering its future course and throwing down a gauntlet that some still haven't come to grips with". Jazzwise magazine listed it at number three on their list of the 100 best jazz albums of all time in 2017.
Coleman's quartet received a long and sometimes controversial engagement at the Five Spot Café in Manhattan, New York City. Leonard Bernstein, Lionel Hampton, and the Modern Jazz Quartet were impressed and offered encouragement. Hampton asked to perform with the quartet, while Bernstein helped Haden obtain a Guggenheim Fellowship grant. A young Lou Reed followed Coleman's quartet around New York City. Among detractors, Miles Davis said that Coleman was "all screwed up inside", although he later became a proponent of Coleman's innovations; Dizzy Gillespie remarked of Coleman that "I don't know what he's playing, but it's not jazz."
Coleman's early sound was due in part to his use of a plastic Grafton saxophone, which he had purchased in Los Angeles in 1954 because he was unable to afford a metal saxophone at the time.
On his Atlantic recordings, Coleman's sidemen were Cherry on cornet or pocket trumpet; Charlie Haden, Scott LaFaro, and then Jimmy Garrison on bass; and Higgins or Ed Blackwell on drums. Coleman's complete recordings for the label were collected on the box set Beauty Is a Rare Thing in 1993.
1960s: Free Jazz and Blue Note
In 1960, Coleman recorded Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation, which featured a "double quartet" including Cherry and Freddie Hubbard on trumpet, Eric Dolphy on bass clarinet, Haden and LaFaro on bass, and Higgins and Blackwell on drums. The album was recorded in stereo, with one woodwind/trumpet/bass/drums quartet in each channel. Free Jazz was, at 37 minutes, the longest recorded continuous jazz performance at the time and was one of Coleman's most controversial albums. The January 18, 1962, issue of DownBeat magazine presented an article entitled "Double View of a Double Quartet" in which Pete Welding gave the album five stars while John A. Tynan rated it zero stars.
While Coleman had intended "free jazz" as simply an album title, free jazz was soon considered a new genre; Coleman expressed discomfort with the term.
After he left Atlantic, Coleman's music became more angular and engaged with the avant-garde jazz which had developed in part around his innovations. He formed a trio with bassist David Izenzon and drummer Charles Moffett and began playing trumpet and violin in addition to the saxophone. His friendship with free jazz saxophonist Albert Ayler influenced his unorthodox self-taught style on the trumpet and violin. Charlie Haden sometimes joined this trio to form a two-bass quartet. In 1966, Coleman signed with Blue Note Records and released the two-volume live album At the "Golden Circle" Stockholm featuring Izenzon and Moffett, recorded in Sweden the previous December. Later that year, he recorded The Empty Foxhole with Haden on bass and his ten year-old son Denardo Coleman on drums; Freddie Hubbard and Shelly Manne regarded Denardo's appearance on the album as an ill-advised publicity stunt. Denardo later became his father's primary drummer in the late 1970s.
Coleman formed another quartet with Haden, Garrison, and Elvin Jones, and Dewey Redman joined the group, usually on tenor saxophone. On February 29, 1968, Coleman's quartet (with Haden, Izenzon, and Ed Blackwell) performed live with Yoko Ono at the Royal Albert Hall, and a recording from their rehearsal was subsequently included on Ono's 1970 album Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band as the track "AOS".
He explored his interest in string textures on Town Hall, 1962, culminating in the 1972 album Skies of America with the London Symphony Orchestra.