Coleman, Ornette (EN)

Coleman Ornette, *19 March 1930 Fort Worth, Texas, †11 June 2015 New York, an American jazz alto saxophonist and jazz composer. He also played the tenor saxophone, violin, and trumpet. A self-taught musician, he studied at the Lenox School of Jazz in Massachusetts for one semester in 1959. Initially, he played with various rhythm and blues bands. In 1957, he formed his own band featuring trumpeter Don Cherry; in 1958, he recorded his first album (Something Else). He performed in Europe on numerous occasions, including in Poland at the “Jazz Jamboree 1971.” Coleman, the initiator of free jazz, was one of the most outstanding innovators in jazz music and a leader of the jazz avant-garde of the mid-1960s. He ushered in a new phase of jazz, free from traditional tonal and formal constraints and sonic formulaic patterns. He held the view that musical order in jazz improvisation should stem not from “external,” pre-imposed rules, but from the “internal” properties of the instrument itself. Coleman’s music, now considered a classic of modern jazz, sparked a wave of protests and conflicting opinions within the jazz community in the early 1960s.

In the late 1960s, he performed with his former collaborators: Charlie Haden, Don Cherry, Bill Higgins, and Eddie Blackwell (including the albums: The Unprecedented Music of O. Coleman 1968, Crisis 1969, Broken Shadows 1969). During this time, Coleman also composed and recorded chamber music (Forms and Sounds, Saints and Soldiers, Space Flight) and orchestral works (the suite Skies of America, 1972). In 1975, he founded the band Prime Time, which realized his new musical concept called “harmolodics” (the albums Dancing in Your Head and Body Meta, 1976). In the 1980s, Coleman recorded the albums: Opening the Caravan Dreams (1985), Song X (1986) (with Pat Metheny), In All Languages (1987), and Virgin Beauty (1988) (with the Grateful Dead); in 1985, he appeared in the documentary film Ornette. Made in America (dir. S. Clark). In 1990, he composed the ballet music Architecture of Motion; in 1991, he released an album featuring the soundtrack to the film Naked Lunch (dir. D. Cronenberg), and in 1995, the album Tone Dialing. He performed in Poland during the Jazz Jamboree festival in 1971, 1984, 1997. He won numerous polls in various jazz magazines; he has received several honorary degrees from, among others: the University of Pennsylvania (1989), the California Institute of the Arts (1990), the Boston Conservatory of Music (1993), and the New School of Social Research (1994).

Coleman is widely regarded as a pioneer of the jazz avant-garde of the 1960s, characterized by the abandonment of the periodic symmetry of themes and choruses, and of the major-minor system. Coleman moved toward collective improvisation, a variable pulse (so-called “glide”), and improvisation over shifting tonal centers. The culmination of his sonic explorations was the album Free Jazz. Double Quartet (Atlantic, 1960). In Poland, the free jazz style had a major influence as early as 1963–64 on T. Stańko, and later on W. Nahorny, A. Kurylewicz, J. Milian, and J. Wróblewski. The imprecise 1970s term “harmolodism,” when translated into musical language, turned out to be essentially a synthesis of funk, free jazz, black rhythm and blues, dance music, and ethnic music – that is, elements previously present in jazz but structured somewhat differently. However, with its tonal and rhythmic freedom, and especially its modern electronic sound, Coleman’s approach offered an attractive alternative to classical jazz. Coleman’s concepts influenced a large group of musicians at the turn of the 1970s and 1980s, including guitarist James “Blood” Ulmer and drummer Ronald Shannon Jackson, and in Poland, the bands Tie Brek and Young Power. Coleman’s ideas from the 1970s, however, always sparked controversy among some audiences and critics. Jazz historians, on the other hand, unanimously agree that Coleman played his greatest role primarily as a co-founder of free jazz in the early 1960s.