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Ornette Coleman

Ornette Coleman is an NEA Jazz Master

Early on in his career, alto saxophonist Ornette Coleman, recorded an album entitled, The Shape of Jazz To Come. It might have seemed like an expression of youthful arrogance - Coleman was 29 at the time - but actually, the title was prophetic. Coleman is the creator of a concept of music called "harmolodic," a musical form which is equally applicable as a life philosophy. The richness of harmolodics derives from the unique interaction between the players. Breaking out of the prison bars of rigid meters and conventional harmonic or structural expectations, harmolodic musicians improvise equally together in what Coleman calls compositional improvisation, while always keeping deeply in tune with the flow, direction and needs of their fellow players. In this process, harmony becomes melody becomes harmony. Ornette describes it as "Removing the caste system from sound." On a broader level, harmolodics equates with the freedom to be as you please, as long as you listen to others and work with them to develop your own individual harmony.

For his essential vision and innovation, Coleman has been rewarded by many accolades, including the MacArthur "Genius" Award, and an induction into the American Academy of Arts and Letter. an honorary doctorate degree from the University of Pennsylvania, the American Music Center Letter of Distinction, and the New York State Governor Arts Award.

But the path to his present universal acclaim has not always been smooth.

Born in a largely segregated Fort Worth, Texas on March 9, 1930, Coleman's father died when he was seven. His seamstress mother worked hard to buy Coleman his first saxophone when he was 14 years old. Teaching himself sight-reading from a how-to piano book, Coleman absorbed the instrument and began playing with local rhythm and blues bands.

In his search for a sound that expressed reality as he perceived it, Coleman knew he was not alone. The competitive cutting sessions that denoted 'bebop' were all about self-expression in the highest form. "I could play and sound like Charlie Parker note-for-note, but I was only playing it from method. So I tried to figure out where to go from there," Coleman said.

Los Angeles proved to be the laboratory for what came to be called free jazz. There began to gather around Ornette a core of players who would figure largely in his life: a lanky teenage trumpeter, Don Cherry and a cherubic double bass player with a pensive, muscular style named Charlie Haden, drummers Ed Blackwell and Billy Higgins also joined the intense exploratory rehearsals in which Coleman was honing his vocabulary on a plastic sax, despite the lack of live gigs.

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Album Review

Ornette Coleman Trio: At The Golden Circle Stockholm Revisited

Read "At The Golden Circle Stockholm Revisited" reviewed by John Eyles


As the ezz-thetics label has already released two of Ornette Coleman's Blue Note albums together on New York Is Now & Love Call Revisited, both recorded in April and May 1968, it was always in the cards that both volumes of At the Golden Circle Stockholm, recorded in December 1965, would not be far behind. Sure enough, here they are, both together on one disc with a running time of eighty minutes. That means this single disc includes all of ...

16
Multiple Reviews

Ornette Coleman: An Innovator of the First Order, But Certainly No Messiah

Read "Ornette Coleman: An Innovator of the First Order, But Certainly No Messiah" reviewed by Richard J Salvucci


At the remove of sixty years, there is a temptation to say, “Ornette Coleman, so what?" His early music does not sound particularly out there. And by contemporary standards, it is not. The initial shock of Ornette Coleman in the mid 1950s wore off decades ago. Some of his compositions have passed into the standard repertoire. Coleman may have been a founding member of the Free Jazz Movement, but Cecil Taylor and Albert Ayler among others, moved beyond abandoning Western ...

Album Review

Ornette Coleman: New York Is Now & Love Call Revisited

Read "New York Is Now & Love Call Revisited" reviewed by Stefano Merighi


Verso la fine degli anni Sessanta, il jazz deve combattere una battaglia impari contro il mondo del nuovo rock, sviluppatosi dopo l'anno del flower power e dell'influsso dei nuovi gruppi inglesi negli USA. Il pubblico è attratto dalle insorgenti fusioni stilistiche--che Miles Davis intercetta con genialità--ed evita con indifferenza il mainstream e ancor più la durezza dell'avanguardia legata al free jazz. Anche la figura cristallina di Ornette Coleman non se la passa troppo bene, tra difficoltà discografiche e ...

10
Album Review

Ornette Coleman: Ornette At 12, Crisis To Man On The Moon, Revisited

Read "Ornette At 12, Crisis To Man On The Moon, Revisited" reviewed by John Eyles


The re-release albums on Ezz-thetics, by jazz legends from the 1940s, '50s and '60s, have been widely praised, particularly for their sound quality which is invariably much improved compared to the originals or later rereleases. Another impressive aspect of these re-releases is the behind-the-scenes detective work which has tracked down rarities by some iconic musicians. One notable example of this is the three previously unreleased live recordings by the Albert Ayler Quintet, from their autumn 1966 European tour, which appeared ...

7
Book Excerpts

A Life In Music

Read "A Life In Music" reviewed by Wulf Muller


The following is an excerpt from the Chapter “1996," from Wulf Müllers illustrated chronicle A Life In Music (Amazon Direct Publishing, 2022) Dee Dee Bridgewater performed three sold out nights at the glamorous and legendary Paris venue L'Olympia, with new signing to Verve France, singer Jeffery Smith, opening for her. Dee Dee's show was spectacular and really established her as a star in France. She had young trumpet player Roy Hargrove and saxophonist David Sanchez as guests ...

4
Liner Notes

Ornette Coleman: Ornette At 12 / Crisis

Read "Ornette Coleman: Ornette At 12 / Crisis" reviewed by Howard Mandel


Ornette Coleman, the musical savant who freed jazz and every other art form that cared to dispense with stifling conventions and stultifying pretense, recorded Ornette at 12 and Crisis at the height of the 1960s' countercultural creative promise and world-wide unrest. It was an era of citizens claiming hard-won freedoms as civil rights, of youthful energies fueling fast changes and expressive artistic innovations--but also of backlash, assassinations, inequalities, riots and war. The music Coleman and his band of ...

6
Album Review

Ornette Coleman: Genesis of Genius: The Contemporary Albums

Read "Genesis of Genius: The Contemporary Albums" reviewed by Jeff Kaliss


For many an Ornette Coleman devotee, devotion was pledged with the singular saxophonist's The Shape of Jazz to Come (Atlantic). It was recorded in May and released in November of 1959, and it's a matter of when in our life we caught up with it. For some of us, that's when we first felt liberated by jazz. That album, produced by Nesuhi Ertegun, remains a hard act to follow, even for Coleman himself. Or to precede. But “Hollywood ...

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Birthday

Jazz Musician of the Day: Ornette Coleman

Jazz Musician of the Day: Ornette Coleman

Source: Michael Ricci

All About Jazz is celebrating Ornette Coleman's birthday today!

Early on in his career, alto saxophonist Ornette Coleman, recorded an album entitled, The Shape of Jazz To Come. It might have seemed like an expression of youthful arrogance- Coleman was 29 at the time- but actually, the title was prophetic. Coleman is the creator of a concept of music called “harmolodic," a musical form which is equally applicable as a life philosophy. The richness of harmolodics derives from the unique ...

Birthday

Jazz Musician of the Day: Ornette Coleman

Jazz Musician of the Day: Ornette Coleman

Source: Michael Ricci

All About Jazz is celebrating Ornette Coleman's birthday today!

Early on in his career, alto saxophonist Ornette Coleman, recorded an album entitled, The Shape of Jazz To Come. It might have seemed like an expression of youthful arrogance- Coleman was 29 at the time- but actually, the title was prophetic. Coleman is the creator of a concept of music called “harmolodic," a musical form which is equally applicable as a life philosophy. The richness of harmolodics derives from the unique ...

Birthday

Jazz Musician of the Day: Ornette Coleman

Jazz Musician of the Day: Ornette Coleman

Source: Michael Ricci

All About Jazz is celebrating Ornette Coleman's birthday today!

Early on in his career, alto saxophonist Ornette Coleman, recorded an album entitled, The Shape of Jazz To Come. It might have seemed like an expression of youthful arrogance- Coleman was 29 at the time- but actually, the title was prophetic. Coleman is the creator of a concept of music called “harmolodic," a musical form which is equally applicable as a life philosophy. The richness of harmolodics derives from the unique ...

Birthday

Jazz Musician of the Day: Ornette Coleman

Jazz Musician of the Day: Ornette Coleman

Source: Michael Ricci

All About Jazz is celebrating Ornette Coleman's birthday today!

Early on in his career, alto saxophonist Ornette Coleman, recorded an album entitled, The Shape of Jazz To Come. It might have seemed like an expression of youthful arrogance- Coleman was 29 at the time- but actually, the title was prophetic. Coleman is the creator of a concept of music called “harmolodic," a musical form which is equally applicable as a life philosophy. The richness of harmolodics derives from the unique ...

Birthday

Jazz Musician of the Day: Ornette Coleman

Jazz Musician of the Day: Ornette Coleman

Source: Michael Ricci

All About Jazz is celebrating Ornette Coleman's birthday today!

Early on in his career, alto saxophonist Ornette Coleman, recorded an album entitled, The Shape of Jazz To Come. It might have seemed like an expression of youthful arrogance- Coleman was 29 at the time- but actually, the title was prophetic. Coleman is the creator of a concept of music called “harmolodic," a musical form which is equally applicable as a life philosophy... Read more.

Place our Musician of the Day ...

Birthday

Jazz Musician of the Day: Ornette Coleman

Jazz Musician of the Day: Ornette Coleman

Source: Michael Ricci

All About Jazz is celebrating Ornette Coleman's birthday today!

Early on in his career, alto saxophonist Ornette Coleman, recorded an album entitled, The Shape of Jazz To Come. It might have seemed like an expression of youthful arrogance- Coleman was 29 at the time- but actually, the title was prophetic. Coleman is the creator of a concept of music called “harmolodic," a musical form which is equally applicable as a life philosophy... Read more.

Place our Musician of the Day ...

Video / DVD

The Free Soul of Ornette

The Free Soul of Ornette

Source: JazzWax by Marc Myers

Abstraction came late to jazz. New York's abstract expressionism art movement emerged in the late 1940s and flourished throughout the 1950s. By contrast, free jazz didn't coalesce until the late 1950s, though there were inklings of the style in the music of Lee Konitz in the late 1940s and early '50s. Not until alto saxophonist Ornette Coleman and his sidemen did free jazz begin to become a jazz genre in 1959. While the music can be difficult for listeners accustomed ...

5

Recording

Anansi Trio Releases "On The Path" - Cover Music By John Coltrane, Bud Powell, Ornette Coleman, and Arthur Blythe

Anansi Trio Releases "On The Path" - Cover Music By John Coltrane, Bud Powell, Ornette Coleman, and Arthur Blythe

Source: Mark Merella

The Anansi Trio is a group of like-minded musicians drawing from a wide range of musical influences. Using the language of jazz as their starting point they also fuse elements of Afro-Cuban and Indian music as well as other global traditions. Using percussion, saxophones and acoustic bass they create a music that’s unique and experimental yet remains accessible. With a diverse rhythmic approach and a focus on improvisation, The Anansi Trio hopes to put their own stamp on the American ...

2

Birthday

Jazz Musician of the Day: Ornette Coleman

Jazz Musician of the Day: Ornette Coleman

Source: Michael Ricci

All About Jazz is celebrating Ornette Coleman's birthday today!

Early on in his career, alto saxophonist Ornette Coleman, recorded an album entitled, The Shape of Jazz To Come. It might have seemed like an expression of youthful arrogance- Coleman was 29 at the time- but actually, the title was prophetic. Coleman is the creator of a concept of music called “harmolodic," a musical form which is equally applicable as a life philosophy... Read more.

Place our Musician of the Day ...

2

Birthday

Jazz Musician of the Day: Ornette Coleman

Jazz Musician of the Day: Ornette Coleman

Source: Michael Ricci

All About Jazz is celebrating Ornette Coleman's birthday today!

Early on in his career, alto saxophonist Ornette Coleman, recorded an album entitled, The Shape of Jazz To Come. It might have seemed like an expression of youthful arrogance- Coleman was 29 at the time- but actually, the title was prophetic. Coleman is the creator of a concept of music called “harmolodic," a musical form which is equally applicable as a life philosophy... Read more.

Place our Musician of the Day ...

Nathan Hanson
saxophone
David Bond
saxophone
Samo Salamon
guitar, electric
Richard Oppenheim
saxophone, alto
Aaron Bennett
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Jorge Sylvester
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Orhan Demir
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Ian Dogole
percussion
Joe McPhee
woodwinds
Pat Metheny
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Gary Peacock
bass, acoustic
Bruno Raberg
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Avi Granite
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Miguel Zenon
saxophone, alto
Blaise Siwula
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Fredrik Lundin
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Richard Andersson
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Louie Belogenis
saxophone
Mark Hanslip
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Tony Passarell
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Philip Yaeger
trombone
John Pietaro
percussion
Matthias Broede
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Dorian Wallace
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Piero Bittolo Bon
saxophone, alto
George Starks
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Maria Dybbroe
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John Purcell
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band / ensemble / orchestra
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Andrew Dixon
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Matthew Ottignon
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Tumi Árnason
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guitar, electric
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saxophone
Adam Simmons
woodwinds
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saxophone, tenor
Yiannis Papanastasiou
saxophone, alto
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saxophone, tenor
Benjy Sandler
saxophone, alto
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saxophone, alto
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guitar and vocals
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saxophone, soprano
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electronics
Andrew Ginzel
guitar, electric
Hill Collective
band / ensemble / orchestra

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