Ornette Coleman - Biography
The soft-spoken demeanor of innovative composer, saxophonist and musical theoretician Ornette Coleman masks the steeled determination of a visionary that led him from the wrong side of the tracks in Jim Crow Texas to the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in Music. Coleman developed “harmolodics,” a word and a concept that combine harmony, melody, and movement just as his music integrates them in a radical assertion of freedom for each player in an ensemble. As Gunther Schuller commented, Coleman’s “musical inspiration operates in a world uncluttered by conventional bar lines, conventional chord changes, and conventional ways of blowing or fingering a saxophone...his playing has a deep inner logic.” The influence of his playing, composing, and band-leading on several generations of jazz musicians is incalculable.
Randolph Denard Ornette Coleman was born in Fort Worth, Texas. Various dates of birth have been published; Coleman’s website gives it as March 9, 1930. The family was very poor and his father passed away when Coleman was just seven. He was raised by a strict, church-going mother in a neighborhood filled with music. With three churches on one block, Coleman told biographer John Litweiler that “I remember all the time going from one church to the other listening to gospel music.” He listened to big band music by Glenn Miller, Lucky Millender, and Les Brown on the radio. When a local bandleader brought his group to play at a school assembly, Coleman was fascinated by the looks of the instruments. He discovered that the sound that had already attracted his interest on the radio was that of the alto saxophone.
Told by his mother that he could have a horn if he worked for it, Coleman took any odd job he could find, from busing tables to scraping paint. When he’d finally saved up enough money, he found a Conn sax under the couch. He started playing immediately, teaching himself to play along with songs on the radio. Paying for music lessons was out of the question anyway, so except for an hour or so with saxophonist and arranger Walter “Foots” Thomas during a trip to New York City when he was fifteen, Coleman is entirely self-taught on saxophone. As he told Litweiler , he learned very early that “if you take an instrument and you happen to feel it a way you can express yourself, it becomes its own law,” a principle Coleman would apply in the early Sixties to his study of trumpet and violin.
Fort Worth in those years was a segregated city. At the one black high school, Coleman met a cadre of like-minded aspiring musicians, including drummer-to-be Charles Moffett and reed players John Carter, Prince Lasha, and Dewey Redman. Besides playing in school, Coleman was also involved with a church band and caught as many local and touring musicians as he could. Soon he was working clubs and dances for pay, taking advantage of post-war opportunities usually unavailable to teenagers. Sometime in 1946 or 1947, Coleman switched to tenor saxophone for a couple of years. Through the influence of local saxophone hero Red Connors, he started to be influenced by bebop, although the style was frowned upon in Fort Worth. He was offered several scholarships at black colleges, but decided instead to keep playing, with an eye toward escaping the stifling racial and artistic atmosphere in Fort Worth. In 1949, Coleman got his chance, leaving on a tour with the Silas Green medicine show. From the very start, Coleman’s personal sound on the horn was controversial. He was fired in Natchez, Mississippi, when another musician reported that Coleman was trying to teach him bebop. After a show in Baton Rouge, backing blues singer Clarence Samuels, Coleman was assaulted and his saxophone demolished. His appearance at the time, with long hair and a beard, also attracted unwelcome attention from police everywhere he traveled.
Coleman spent the next few years trying to get out of Fort Worth, with periods of time spent in New Orleans and Amarillo. It was a band led by blues singer and guitarist Pee Wee Crayton that finally proved to be the vehicle. Crayton had a hit with “Blues After Hours,” and was preparing to hit the road for a series of one-nighters that would take the group all the way to Los Angeles. Coleman got the gig, but he was still playing things his own way. By the time the group made it to the West Coast, as Coleman tells it, Crayton was paying his saxophonist not to solo. Stranded in Los Angeles, Coleman tried to continue his musical development by playing at jam sessions. Opportunities were rare, and he was soon forced to wire his mother for money to return to Texas. He spent a couple of dispiriting years back in Fort Worth, but had seen the way out and in 1953, he went back to Los Angeles.
This time, he settled in Watts, in a house shared with drummer Edward Blackwell, who he had met in New Orleans around 1949. They practiced daily, but there were rarely any actual gigs. While he was still shunned by most established jazz musicians, with both his playing and his white plastic saxophone derided on bandstands around town, Coleman slowly began to attract a few like-minded musicians. Cornetist Bobby Bradford, another acquaintance from Fort Worth, was one. Teenaged musicians Don Cherry on trumpet and Billy Higgins on drums came into the fold in August 1956, introduced to Coleman by his wife at the time, Jayne Cortez. Their son Ornette Denardo Coleman was born that year as well, and Coleman worked at a department store to support his family (Cortez went on to become a visionary performing poet whose band the Firespitters usually includes Denardo Coleman on drums.)
Coleman continued to write music and play at rehearsals and private sessions. Sometime around the end of 1957, bop bassist Red Mitchell was at fellow bassist Don Payne’s house where he heard Coleman playing. Mitchell was closely associated with Contemporary Records, and while he didn’t much like Coleman’s alto sound, he thought that the label might be interested in acquiring some of his songs for other musicians to perform. When Coleman and Cherry showed up for their first encounter, Les Koenig, owner of the label, asked Coleman to play one of his tunes at the piano. Coleman couldn’t play piano, so he and Cherry played the songs on their horns instead. An impressed Koenig ended up buying the publishing rights to seven tunes, and offered Coleman a recording contract as well. Something Else! The Music of Ornette Coleman (1958 Contemporary), painstakingly recorded in three sessions in February and March 1958, featured a quintet of Coleman, Cherry, Payne, Higgins, and pianist Walter Norris (Coleman wouldn’t record again with a pianist in his group until 1972). The program of originals dating from the 1950-1953 period includes “The Blessing” and “When Will the Blues Leave?.”
The album didn’t help much in getting paying work. Coleman’s only 1958 performances were in a short-lived Paul Bley band at the Hillside Club. Bassist Charlie Haden was a member of the Bley group, soon to become a mainstay of Coleman’s bands. Some music from that engagement appeared later on The Fabulous Paul Bley Quintet (1975 America) and Coleman Classics (1977 IAI). A second Contemporary album, Tomorrow Is the Question (1959 Contemporary) had Mitchell or Percy Heath on bass with Shelly Manne on drums. The provocative compositions included the title track, “Tears Inside,” and “Turnaround,” a blues number that’s become a jazz standard .
Coleman received his first national exposure in 1958 when John Tynan and Nat Hentoff praised a test pressing of the first album. When pianist John Lewis of the Modern Jazz Quartet heard the followup, he enthusiastically recommended the group to his producer, Nesuhi Ertegun of Atlantic Records. Ertegun was a former employee of Koenig’s, and since a prescient Koenig knew that there was really no future in Los Angeles for Coleman’s progressive outlook, a deal was quickly struck for Coleman to move to Atlantic. The classic quartet with Cherry, Haden, and Higgins recorded its first Atlantic session in Hollywood in May, 1959. The prophetically titled The Shape Of Jazz To Come (1959 Atlantic) introduced “Lonely Woman,” still one of Coleman’s best-known compositions. Toward the end of the summer, Cherry and Coleman spent several weeks at the Lenox School of Music in Massachusetts, courtesy of Atlantic Records.
In the fall of 1959, the quartet was booked into Manhattan’s Five Spot Café, where they created a sensation that spilled over rapidly into the larger culture. Suddenly, it was necessary for artists, writers, painters, and, of course, other musicians, to go to the club to experience the latest sound in jazz . Haden has reported that John Coltrane, who was there every night, “would grab Ornette by the arm” and “go off into the night talking about music.” Coleman entered into a period of intense work over the next couple of years, recording with both the quartet and Gunther Schuller’s orchestra. The Schuller date, Jazz Abstractions (1961 Atlantic), was recorded just one day before Coleman’s historic and immediately controversial Free Jazz album (1961 Atlantic), which featured his double quartet with Eric Dolphy and Freddie Hubbard joining regular associates Cherry, Haden, Higgins, Blackwell, and bassist Scott LaFaro. (The Atlantic recordings were collected in 1993 in the 6-CD box Beauty Is a Rare Thing [Rhino].)
After a Town Hall concert at the end of 1962, Coleman took a couple of years off to write extended compositions and study trumpet and violin. (He still performs on both instruments, albeit sparingly.) He re-emerged a few years later with the soundtrack for Chappaqua Suite (1965 CBS), which featured his new trio with David Izenzon on bass and Charles Moffett on drums, plus guest artist Pharaoh Sanders on tenor sax. Coleman and the group spent the latter half of 1965 and the early part of 1966 touring Europe, with recordings in Stockholm issued on Blue Note as At The Golden Circle, Volumes 1 & 2. Among his large-scale compositions in this period are “Forms and Sounds for Wind Quintet” (on An Evening With Ornette, 1965 Polydor) and Skies of America (1972 Columbia), composed under a Guggenheim Foundation grant. By the end of the Sixties, Coleman had established a studio and performance space in lower Manhattan that he called Artists House.
In 1973, Coleman journeyed to Morocco with journalist Robert Palmer to experience and play with the Master Musicians of Joujouka. There was a 1974 concert tour of Europe in a quartet with Higgins, guitarist James “Blood” Ulmer, and bassist Sirone. By 1975, he had put together the first version of his electric ensemble, Prime Time, a quintet with guitarists Bern Nix and Charlie Ellerbee, bassist Jamaaladeen Tacuma, and drummer Ronald Shannon Jackson, which recorded Dancing In Your Head (1976 A&M) and Body Meta (1976 Artists House) at the end of the year. Prime Time eventually became a septet with two guitars, two basses, and two drummers, a line-up reminiscent of the Double Quartet that recorded Free Jazz. Drummer Denardo Coleman, who made his recording debut at the age of 10 on The Empty Foxhole (1966 Blue Note), rejoined his father for Of Human Feelings (1979 Antilles). He continues to be a mainstay of various Coleman ensembles, as well as his father’s business manager.
A commission from the Fort Worth Symphony funded a new version of “Skies of America” and a chamber piece, premiered in September, 1983. Two albums from those events (Opening The Caravan of Dreams and Prime Time/Prime Design) were released in 1984 on the Caravan of Dreams label. Shirley Clarke’s documentary film Ornette: Made In America, centered around his return to Fort Worth, was released in 1986. Other notable recordings of the period include Coleman’s collaboration with guitarist Pat Metheny (Song X, 1986 Geffen), and Virgin Beauty (1987 Portrait), a Prime Time album featuring Grateful Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia. To celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of his first quartet, Coleman released the double album In All Languages (1987 Caravan of Dreams). Prime Time played on half the album, with the classic quartet of Cherry, Haden, and Higgins interpreting many of the same compositions on the other half.
In 1991, Coleman collaborated with composer Howard Shore on the soundtrack to Naked Lunch, heralding a return to more visible activity. He formed the Harmolodic label, and subsequently issued Tone Dialing (1995 Harmolodic/Verve) with Prime Time, Three Women and Hidden Man (both 1996 Harmolodic/Verve) with a quartet featuring pianist Geri Allen, and Colors (1996 Harmolodic/Verve), a duet with pianist Joachim Kuhn.
Coleman was awarded a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant in 1994, followed by induction into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1997. That year, Lincoln Center provided the backdrop for Civilization 1997, a four day series of concerts that examined various facets of Coleman’s music, as part of which the classic quintet played in NewYork for the first time in two decades.
After another period out of the public eye, Coleman re-emerged in the first decade of the 21st century with his latest group, a quartet of acoustic bassists Tony Falanga and Greg Cohen, and Denardo Coleman on drums. This is the line-up on Sound Grammar (2006 Sound Grammar), for which Coleman received the 2007 Pulitzer Prize “for distinguished musical composition by an American.” Other awards have included a Grammy for Lifetime Achievement, the Texas Medal of Arts, and a Living Legend Jazz Award from the Kennedy Center. Although the 77-year old Coleman collapsed on stage during a performance at the 2007 Bonnaroo festival, he has since returned to touring. Performances in Croatia, Spain, Hong Kong, New Zealand and other countries preceded his much-anticipated return to New York for a Town Hall concert in the spring of 2008.
In the liner notes to his very first album back in 1958, Coleman correctly predicted that in the future, “music will be a lot freer.” Much of that freedom comes as the result of his own efforts and continued vitality over the decades. Sadly, Ornette Coleman passed away on June 11, 2015. He was 85.
