MARCH 9, 1930

Born in Fort Worth, Texas, on a date that remains in dispute, jazz saxophonist and composer Ornette Coleman's early musical influences included gospel, rhythm and blues, and bebop. Coleman, whose father was a singer, began playing saxophone at age sixteen and had little formal music instruction. His earliest performances were in local churches, and he was expelled from his high school band for improvising during a performance of John Philip Sousa's "Washington Post March." Coleman at first played tenor saxophone in a honking rhythm-and-blues style influenced by Illinois Jacquet and Big Jay McNeely. His first professional work came in 1949 with the Silas Green Minstrels, a tent show that toured the South and Midwest. Coleman also traveled with blues singer Clarence Samuels and blues singer and guitarist "Pee Wee" Crayton. By this time he had been inspired by bebop to start playing with a coarse, crying tone and a frantic, unrestrained sense of rhythm and harmony. The reception in the jazz community to his controversial style kept him from working for a decade.

In 1950 Coleman moved to Los Angeles and began to recruit a circle of associates, including drummers Edward Blackwell and Billy Higgins, trumpeters Don Cherry and Bobby Bradford, bassist Charlie Haden, and pianist Paul Bley. He married poet Jayne Cortez in 1954; unable to support himself as a musician, he took a job as a stock boy and elevator operator at a Los Angeles department store. Despite his reputation as an eccentric who had unusually long hair, wore overcoats in the summer, and played a white saxophone, in 1958 he was invited to make his first recording, Something Else!, which included his compositions "Chippie" and "When Will the Blues Leave." Pianist John Lewis brought Coleman and Cherry to the Lenox (Massachusetts) School of Jazz in 1959, which led to a famous series of quartet performances at New York's Five Spot nightclub.

The albums Coleman made over the next two years, including Tomorrow Is the Question, The Shape of Jazz to Come, This Is Our Music, and Free Jazz, were vilified by traditionalists, who heard the long, loosely structured, collective improvisations and adventurous harmonies as worthless cacophony. However, among his admirers, those performances, which included his compositions "Focus on Sanity," "Peace," "Lonely Woman," and "Beauty Is a Rare Thing," were also recognized as the first significant development in jazz since bebop. Although modeled on the wit and irreverence of bebop, Coleman's pianoless quartets broke out of traditional harmonies, as well as rigid theme-and-improvisation structures. He began to call this style "harmolodics," referring to a musical system, since developed in a vast, unpublished manuscript, in which improvised melodies need not obey fixed harmonies.

In the 1950s Coleman was shunned by the jazz world, but in the 1960s he found himself hailed as one of the greatest and most influential figures in jazz. Yet Coleman, who was divorced from Cortez in 1964, scaled back his activities in order to study trumpet and violin. In the mid-1960s he most frequently appeared in trio settings (At the Golden Circle, 1965–1966), often including bassist DavidPage 498  |  Top of Article Izenzon and drummer Charles Moffett. In 1967 Coleman became the first jazz musician to win a Guggenheim fellowship. During the late 1960s and early 1970s he often played with the members of his old quartet, plus tenor saxophonist Dewey Redman, with whom he had first become acquainted in Fort Worth (Science Fiction, 1971).

Coleman, who had been composing classical music since the early 1950s, also saw performances in the 1960s of his string quartet Dedication to Poets and Writers (1961), his woodwind quintet Forms and Sounds (1967), and Saints and Soldiers (1967), a chamber piece. Coleman's Skies of America symphony was recorded in 1972 with the London Symphony Orchestra. In 1973 he traveled to Morocco to record with folk musicians from the town of Joujouka.

Coleman's next breakthrough came in 1975, when he began to play a style of electric dance music that recalled his early career in rhythm-and-blues dance bands. Using Prime Time, a new core group of musicians that often included his son, Denardo, a drummer, born in 1956, Coleman recorded Dancing in Your Head, an album-length elaboration of a theme from Skies of America, in 1975, and Of Human Feelings in 1979. During this time he also founded Artists House, a collective that helped introduce guitarists James "Blood" Ulmer and bassist Jamaaladeen Tacuma.

The mid-1980s brought a revival of interest in Coleman. His hometown, Fort Worth, honored him with a series of tributes and performances, including the chamber piece Prime Design/Time Design (1983). A documentary by Shirley Clarke, Ornette: Made in America, was released in 1984, and he collaborated with jazz-rock guitarist Pat Metheny (Song X, 1985), and rock guitarist Jerry Garcia (Virgin Beauty, 1987). On In All Languages (1987) he reunited with his 1959 quartet, and in 1991 Coleman, who had composed and performed on the film soundtracks for Chappaqua (1965) and Box Office (1981), recorded the score for Naked Lunch. Coleman, who has lived in Manhattan since the early 1960s, continues to compose regularly, though performing and recording only sporadically with Prime Time. In 1997, the same year he received the French award of Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters, he wrote a jazz concerto grosso, "Skies of America."

In the early 2000s Coleman was touring as part of the Ornette Coleman Quartet, and the group released a CD, titled Ornette!, in 2004.