Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Ornette Coleman was born March 9, 1930 hailing from Fort Worth, Texas where he began performing R&B and bebop on the tenor. He found his way out of Texas taking a job with traveling shows, first Silas Green and then rhythm and blues. After his tenor was destroyed in an attack, Ornette switched to alto that has remained his primary instrument.
From the beginning Coleman was ear was unorthodox, his approach to harmony and chord progression was less rigid than that of bebop musicians who considered him out-of-tune. However there were some who heard the same sound and by the 50s he was making music with Paul Bley, Don Cherry, Billy Higgins, Don Payne, Walter Norris, Shelly Manne and Charlie Haden.
Regarded by some as iconoclastic, others like conductor Leonard Bernstein and composer Virgil Thomson saw his genius and innovation. Ornette became one of the major influences in the free jazz movement and a major player in the genesis of avant-garde jazz. Throughout the sixties and seventies he played with Freddie Hubbard, Eric Dolphy, Scott LaFaro and Ed Blackwell and introduced brief thematic dissonant fanfares, regular but complex pulse and solos where band mates were able to chime in as they wish.
His friendship with Albert Ayler influenced his development of the trumpet and violin. His evolution continued and subsequent quartets included his son Denardo, Sunny Murray, Jimmy Garrison, Elvin Jones, and Dewey Redman. It also forwarded his sojourn into electrified instruments, adopting a jazz-fusion mode fashionable at the time and bringing in such artists as Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead. He has brought to his recordings Pat Metheny, Geri Allen, and Joachim Kuhn but seldom appeared as a sideman.
Ornette Coleman is a saxophonist, violinist, trumpeter, and composer whose timbre is easily recognized with his keen, crying sound drawing upon the blues. In 2007 he won a Pulitzer for his album Sound Grammar and honored with a Grammy for lifetime achievement He continued to push the envelope with younger musicians from radically different cultures until his passing on June 11, 2015 in Manhattan, New York.
