Ornette Coleman, 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 jazzimprovisation 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 suchmusic changed at the improvisers’ will, it became known as “free jazz.”
In the late 1950s Coleman formed a group with trumpeter Don Cherry, drummerBilly Higgins, and bassist Charlie Haden, with whom he recorded his first album,Something Else (1958). His classic recordings The Shape of Jazz to Come andChange 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 (1961), 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 suiteSkies 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 Rif musicians of Morocco in 1973, Coleman formed an electricband called Prime Time, whose music was a fusion of rock rhythms with harmonically free collective improvisations; this band remained his primaryperformance vehicle until the 1990s.
Coleman’s early style influenced not only fellow saxophonists but also players of all other instruments in jazz. In recognition of such accomplishment, he received the Japan Art Association’s Praemium Imperiale prize for music in 2001. In 2005, with a quartet made up of two acoustic double bass players (one bowing his instrument, the other plucking), a drummer, and Coleman himself (playing alto saxophone, trumpet, and violin), he recorded Sound Grammar during a live performance in Italy; the work, which was said to hearken back to his music of the 1960s, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for music in 2007.
_________________________________________________________________________________Randolph Denard Ornette Coleman (born March 9, 1930) is an American saxophonist, violinist, trumpeter and composer. He was one of the major innovators of thefree jazz movement of the 1960s, having also invented the term "free jazz" by naming his album so. Coleman's timbre is easily recognized: his keening, crying sound draws heavily on blues music. His album Sound Grammar received the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for music.
Contents
[hide]Biography[edit]
Early life[edit]
Coleman was born in 1930 in Fort Worth, Texas, where he was also raised.[1][2][3] He attended I.M. Terrell High School, where he participated in band until he was dismissed for improvising during "The Washington Post."[4] He began performing R&B and bebop initially on tenor saxophone, and started a band, the Jam Jivers, with some fellow students including Prince Lasha and Charles Moffett.[5] Seeking a way to work his way out of his home town, he took 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, he was assaulted and his saxophone was destroyed.[6]
He switched to alto, which has remained his primary instrument, first playing it in New Orleans after the Baton Rouge incident. He then joined the band of Pee Wee Crayton and travelled with them to Los Angeles. He worked at various jobs, including as an elevator operator, while still pursuing his musical career.
Even from the beginning of Coleman's career, his music and playing were in many ways unorthodox. His approach to harmony and chord progression was far less rigid than that of bebop performers; he was increasingly interested in playing what he heard rather than fitting it into predetermined chorus-structures and harmonies. His raw, highly vocalized sound and penchant for playing "in the cracks" of the scale led many Los Angeles jazz musicians to regard Coleman's playing as out-of-tune. He sometimes had difficulty finding like-minded musicians with whom to perform. Nevertheless, pianist Paul Bley was an early supporter and musical collaborator.
In 1958, Coleman led his first recording session for Contemporary, Something Else!!!!: The Music of Ornette Coleman. The session also featured trumpeter Don Cherry, drummer Billy Higgins, bassist Don Payne and Walter Norris on piano.[7]
The Shape of Jazz to Come[edit]
Coleman was very busy in 1959. His last release on Contemporary was Tomorrow Is the Question!, a quartet album, with Shelly Manne on drums, and excluding the piano, which he would not use again until the 1990s. Next Coleman brought double bassist Charlie Haden – one of a handful of his most important collaborators – into a regular group with Haden, Cherry, and Higgins. (All four had played with Paul Bley the previous year.) He signed a multi-album contract with Atlantic Records who released The Shape of Jazz to Come in 1959. It was, according to critic Steve Huey, "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."[8] While definitely – if somewhat loosely – blues-based and often quite melodic, the album's compositions were considered at that time harmonically unusual and unstructured. Some musicians and critics saw Coleman as an iconoclast; others, including conductor Leonard Bernstein and composer Virgil Thomson regarded him as a genius and an innovator.[9]
Coleman's quartet received a lengthy – and sometimes controversial – engagement at New York City's famed Five Spot jazz club. Such notable figures as the Modern Jazz Quartet, Leonard Bernstein and Lionel Hampton were favorably impressed, and offered encouragement. (Hampton was so impressed he reportedly asked to perform with the quartet; Bernstein later helped Haden obtain a composition grant from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.) Opinion was, however, divided. Trumpeter Miles Davis famously declared Coleman was "all screwed up inside" (although this comment was later recanted) and Roy Eldridge stated, "I'd listened to him all kinds of ways. I listened to him high and I listened to him cold sober. I even played with him. I think he's jiving baby."[10]
Coleman's unique early sound was due in part to his use of a plastic saxophone. He had first bought a plastic horn in Los Angeles in 1954 because he was unable to afford a metal saxophone, though he didn't like the sound of the plastic instrument at first.[11] Coleman later claimed that it sounded drier, without the pinging sound of metal. In more recent years, he has played a metal saxophone.[12]
On the Atlantic recordings, Coleman's sidemen in the quartet are Cherry on cornet or pocket trumpet, Haden, Scott LaFaro, and then Jimmy Garrison on bass, and Higgins or his replacement Ed Blackwell on drums. The complete released recordings for the label were collected on the box set Beauty Is a Rare Thing.[7]
Free Jazz[edit]
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 both Higgins and Blackwell on drums. The record was recorded in stereo, with a reed/brass/bass/drums quartet isolated in each stereo channel. Free Jazz was, at nearly 40 minutes, the lengthiest recorded continuous jazz performance to date, and was instantly one of Coleman's most controversial albums. The music features a regular but complex pulse, one drummer playing "straight" while the other played double-time; the thematic material is a series of brief, dissonant fanfares. As is conventional in jazz, there are a series of solo features for each member of the band, but the other soloists are free to chime in as they wish, producing some extraordinary passages of collective improvisation by the full octet.
Coleman originally intended "Free Jazz" as simply an album title, but his growing reputation placed him at the forefront of jazz innovation, and free jazz was soon considered a new genre, though Coleman has expressed discomfort with the term. Among the reasons Coleman may not have entirely approved of the term 'free jazz' is that his music contains a considerable amount of composition. His melodic material, although skeletal, strongly recalls the melodies that Charlie Parker wrote over standard harmonies, and in general the music is closer to the bebop that came before it than is sometimes popularly imagined. (Several early tunes of his, for instance, are clearly based on favorite bop chord changes like "Out of Nowhere" and "I Got Rhythm".) Coleman very rarely played standards, concentrating on his own compositions, of which there seemed to be an endless flow. There are exceptions, though, including a classic reading (virtually a recomposition) of "Embraceable You" for Atlantic, and an improvisation on Thelonious Monk's "Criss-Cross" recorded with Gunther Schuller.
1960s[edit]
After the Atlantic period and into the early part of the 1970s, Coleman's music became more angular and engaged fully with the jazz avant-garde which had developed in part around Coleman's innovations.[7]
His quartet dissolved, and Coleman formed a new trio with David Izenzon on bass, and Charles Moffett on drums. Coleman began to extend the sound-range of his music, introducing accompanying string players (though far from the territory of Charlie Parker with Strings) and playing trumpet and violin (which he played left-handed) himself. He initially had little conventional musical technique and used the instruments to make large, unrestrained gestures. His friendship with Albert Ayler influenced his development on trumpet and violin. Haden would later sometimes join this trio to form a two-bass quartet.
Between 1965 and 1967 Coleman signed with Blue Note Records and released a number of recordings starting with the influential recordings of the trio At the Golden Circle Stockholm.
In 1966, Coleman was criticized for recording The Empty Foxhole, a trio with Haden, and Coleman's son Denardo Coleman – who was ten years old. Some[who?] regarded this as perhaps an ill-advised piece of publicity on Coleman's part and judged the move a mistake. Others, however,[who?] noted that despite his youth, Denardo had studied drumming for several years. His technique – which, though unrefined, was respectable and enthusiastic – owed more to pulse-oriented free jazz drummers like Sunny Murraythan to bebop drumming. Denardo has matured into a respected musician, and has been his father's primary drummer since the late 1970s.
Coleman formed another quartet. A number of bassists and drummers (including Haden, Garrison and Elvin Jones) appeared, and Dewey Redman joined the group, usually on tenor saxophone.
He also continued to explore his interest in string textures – from Town Hall, 1962, culminating in Skies of America in 1972. (Sometimes this had a practical value, as it facilitated his group's appearance in the UK in 1965, where jazz musicians were under a quota arrangement but classical performers were exempt.)
In 1969, Coleman was inducted into the Down Beat Jazz Hall of Fame.
Later career[edit]
See also: Of Human Feelings
Coleman, like Miles Davis before him, took to playing with electrified instruments. Albums like Virgin Beauty and Of Human Feelings used rock and funk rhythms, sometimes called free funk. On the face of it, this could seem to be an adoption of the jazz fusion mode fashionable at the time, but Ornette's first record with the group, which later became known as Prime Time (the 1976 Dancing in Your Head), was sufficiently different that it had considerable shock value. Electric guitars were prominent, but the music was, at heart, rather similar to his earlier work. These performances have the same angular melodies and simultaneous group improvisations – what Joe Zawinul referred to as "nobody solos, everybody solos" and what Coleman calls harmolodics – and although the nature of the pulse has altered, Coleman's own rhythmic approach has not.[citation needed]
Some critics[who?] have suggested Coleman's frequent use of the vaguely defined term harmolodics is a musical MacGuffin: a red herring of sorts designed to occupy critics overly focused on Coleman's sometimes unorthodox compositional style.
Jerry Garcia played guitar on three tracks from Coleman's Virgin Beauty (1988): "Three Wishes", "Singing In The Shower", and "Desert Players". Coleman joined the Grateful Dead on stage twice in 1993 playing the band's "The Other One", "Wharf Rat", "Stella Blue", and covering Bobby Bland's "Turn On Your Lovelight", among others.[13] Another unexpected association was with guitarist Pat Metheny, with whom Coleman recorded Song X (1985); though released under Metheny's name, Coleman was essentially co-leader (contributing all the compositions).
In 1990, the city of Reggio Emilia in Italy held a three-day "Portrait of the Artist" featuring a Coleman quartet with Cherry, Haden and Higgins. The festival also presented performances of his chamber music and the symphonic Skies of America.
In 1991, Coleman played on the soundtrack for David Cronenberg's Naked Lunch; the orchestra was conducted by Howard Shore. It is notable among other things for including a rare sighting of Coleman playing a jazz standard: Thelonious Monk's blues line "Misterioso". Two 1972 (pre-electric) Coleman recordings, "Happy House" and "Foreigner in a Free Land" were used in Gus Van Sant's 2000 Finding Forrester.
The mid-1990s saw a flurry of activity from Coleman: he released four records in 1995 and 1996, and for the first time in many years worked regularly with piano players (either Geri Allen or Joachim Kühn).
2000s[edit]
In 2004 Coleman was awarded The Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize, one of the richest prizes in the arts, given annually to "a man or woman who has made an outstanding contribution to the beauty of the world and to mankind's enjoyment and understanding of life."[14]
In September 2006 he released a live album titled Sound Grammar with his newest quartet (Denardo drumming and two bassists, Gregory Cohen and Tony Falanga). This is his first album of new material in ten years, and was recorded in Germany in 2005. It won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for music.
On February 11, 2007, Ornette Coleman was honored with a Grammy award for lifetime achievement, in recognition of this legacy.
On July 9, 2009, Ornette Coleman received the Miles Davis Award, a recognition given by the Festival International de Jazz de Montréal to musicians who have contributed to continuing the tradition of jazz.[15][16]
On May 1, 2010, Ornette was awarded an honorary doctorate in Music from the University of Michigan for his musical contributions.[17]
Jazz pianist Joanne Brackeen (who had only briefly studied music as a child) stated in an interview with Marian McPartland that Coleman has been mentoring her and giving her semi-formal music lessons in recent years.[18]
Coleman continues to push himself into unusual playing situations, often with much younger musicians or musicians from radically different musical cultures, and still performs regularly. An increasing number of his compositions, while not ubiquitous, have become minor jazz standards, including "Lonely Woman", "Peace", "Turnaround", "When Will the Blues Leave?", "The Blessing", "Law Years", "What Reason Could I Give" and "I've Waited All My Life". He has influenced virtually every saxophonist of a modern disposition, and nearly every such jazz musician, of the generation that followed him. His songs have proven endlessly malleable: pianists such as Paul Bley and Paul Plimley have managed to turn them to their purposes; John Zorn recorded Spy vs Spy (1989), an album of extremely loud, fast, and abrupt versions of Coleman songs. Finnish jazz singer Carola covered Coleman's "Lonely Woman" and there have even been progressive bluegrass versions of Coleman tunes (by Richard Greene).
Personal life[edit]
Coleman married poet Jayne Cortez in 1954. The couple divorced in 1964. They had one son, Denardo, born in 1956.[19]
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Ornette Coleman (Randolph Denard Ornette Coleman) (b. March 9, 1930, Fort Worth, Texas), was an American jazz saxophonist, composer, and bandleader who was the principal initiatior 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 the, 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 centers 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, drummery 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 (1961), in which he successfully experimented with free meters 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 compse. 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 Rif musicians 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. In recognition of such accomplishment, Coleman received the Japan Art Association's Praemium Imperiale prize for music in 2001. In 2005, with a quartet made up of two acoustic double bass players (one bowing his instrumennt, the other plucking), a drummer, and Coleman himself (playing alto saxophone, trumpet, and violin), he recorded Sound Grammar during a live performance in Italy; the work, which was said to hearken back to his music of the 1960s, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for music in 2007.
Ornette Coleman (Randolph Denard Ornette Coleman) (b. March 9, 1930, Fort Worth, Texas), was an American jazz saxophonist, composer, and bandleader who was the principal initiatior 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 the, 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 centers 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, drummery 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 (1961), in which he successfully experimented with free meters 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 compse. 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 Rif musicians 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. In recognition of such accomplishment, Coleman received the Japan Art Association's Praemium Imperiale prize for music in 2001. In 2005, with a quartet made up of two acoustic double bass players (one bowing his instrumennt, the other plucking), a drummer, and Coleman himself (playing alto saxophone, trumpet, and violin), he recorded Sound Grammar during a live performance in Italy; the work, which was said to hearken back to his music of the 1960s, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for music in 2007.
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Ornette Coleman began playing alto saxophone at the age of 14, and developed a style predominantly influenced by Charlie Parker. His early professional work with a variety of southwestern rhythm-and-blues and carnival bands, however, seems to have been in a more traditional idiom. In 1948 he moved to New Orleans and worked mostly at nonmusical jobs. By 1950 he had returned to Fort Worth, after which he went to Los Angeles with Pee Wee Crayton's rhythm-and-blues band. Wherever he tried to introduce some of his more personal and innovative ideas he was met with hostility, both from audiences and musicians. While working as an elevator operator in Los Angeles he studied (on his own) harmony and theory textbooks, and gradually evolved a radically new concept and style, seemingly from a combination of musical intuition born of southwestern country blues and folk forms, and his misreadings — or highly personal interpretations — of the theoretical texts.
While working sporadically in some of the more obscure clubs in Los Angeles, Coleman eventually came to the attention of Red Mitchell and later Percy Heath of the Modern Jazz Quartet. Coleman's first studio recording (for Contemporary in 1958) reveals that his style and sound were, in essence, fully formed at that time. At the instigation of John Lewis, Coleman (and his trumpet-playing partner Don Cherry) attended the Lenox School of Jazz in Massachusetts in 1959. There followed engagements at the Five Spot nightclub in New York, and a series of recordings for Atlantic entitled The Shape of Jazz to Come (which included his compositions Lonely Woman andCongeniality) and Change of the Century (with Ramblin' and Free). These recordings, which occasioned worldwide controversy, revealed Coleman performing in a style freed from most of the conventions of modern jazz. His recording Free Jazz (made on 21 December 1960) for double jazz quartet, a 37-minute sustained collective improvisation, was undoubtedly the single most important influence on avant-garde jazz in the ensuing decade. On another recording, Jazz Abstractions (made earlier the same week), Coleman is heard in a variety of more structured pieces, including Gunther Schuller's serial work Abstraction for alto saxophone, string quartet, two double basses, guitar, and percussion.
In 1962 Coleman retired temporarily from performing in public, primarily to teach himself trumpet and violin. His unorthodox treatment of these instruments on his return to public life in 1965 provoked even more controversy and led to numerous denunciations of his work by a number of influential American jazz musicians, including Miles Davis and Charles Mingus. However, Coleman was well received in Europe during his first tour there in 1965, giving a major impetus to the burgeoning European avant-garde jazz movement. In the mid- and late- 1960s he also became interested in extended, through-composed works for larger ensembles, and produced among other pieces Forms and Sounds for Wind Quintet (1965, recorded in England by the Virtuoso Ensemble, 1965) and Skies of America, a 21-movement suite for symphony orchestra (1972).
By the early 1970s Coleman's influence had waned considerably, while John Coltrane's dominance of saxophone styles had correspondingly spread. As Coleman turned increasingly to more abstract and mechanical compositional techniques (as in Skies of America), his playing lost some of its earlier emotional intensity and rhythmic vitality. But a visit to Morocco in 1972 and the gradual influence (especially rhythmic) of certain popular rock, funk, and fusion styles seemed to have revitalized his ensemble performances, a direction clearly discernible in Coleman's powerful electric band Prime Time, founded in 1975. This group first recorded in France in the same year as a quintet, including two electric guitarists, an electric bass guitarist, and a drummer, but thereafter it usually worked as a sextet, with a second drummer; the double bass player Charlie Hadean joined it for its performance at the Newport Jazz Festival New York in 1978, but not for its European tour later that year.
In the 1980s the group has performed and recorded as a septet with two guitarists, two bass guitarists, and two drummers, all amplified. Prime Time's repertory draws on the various musical styles that have influenced Coleman (including Moroccan music, jazz-rock, and free-jazz improvisation). Coleman's own playing, however, a fascinating and basically inimitable amalgam of blues and modal, atonal, and microtonal music, remains unchanged.
In the 1980s the group has performed and recorded as a septet with two guitarists, two bass guitarists, and two drummers, all amplified. Prime Time's repertory draws on the various musical styles that have influenced Coleman (including Moroccan music, jazz-rock, and free-jazz improvisation). Coleman's own playing, however, a fascinating and basically inimitable amalgam of blues and modal, atonal, and microtonal music, remains unchanged.
From the 1960s Coleman was often joined by his son, the drummer Denardo Coleman (1956-), in concerts and recordings. Although in the 1980s he performs in public only intermittently, the recording Song X (1985) and a tour (1986), both made with Pat Metheny, brought him and his music a degree of attention he had not enjoyed for some years. A film, Ornette: Made in America, directed by Shirley Clarke and compiled from footage made in the 1960s and the early 1980s, was released in 1984, and two concerts entitledOrnette Coleman Celebration took place at the Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall in 1987; the works performed were Notes Talking, for solo mandolin (1986), The Sacred Mind of Johnny Dolphin, for chamber ensemble (1984),Time Design, for amplified string quartet and electric drum set (1983),Trinity, for solo violin (1986), and In Honor of NASA and Planetary Soloist, for oboe, English horn, mukhavina, and string quartet (1986).
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