Background Information

Ornette Coleman was born on March 9, 1930, in Fort Worth, Texas and died on June 11, 2015, in New York, New York. He was an American composer and jazz saxophonist that was a large influence on the free jazz movement (The Editors of Encyclopædia Britannica).Coleman’s father, Randolph, was a cook and construction worker that died when Coleman was only seven years old. Coleman first began his musical career by learning to play the alto saxophone when he was 14. His mother, Rosa, gave it to him as a gift and without the money for a tutor, he taught himself how to play (Fordham). He learned to play tenor saxophone almost two years later due to how inspiring Charlie Parker was to him (Yanow). Coleman later taught himself how to play the violin and the trumpet He then began to join rhythm-and-blues groups as well as becoming a musician in dance bands. His beginning style of harmony, due to the fact that he wasn’t “classically” trained, was very unorthodox and proved to be too different for many established musicians to accept. He was rejected by their community during the 1950’s in Los Angeles where he lived and during this time he developed a “harmolodic theory”. He studied harmony while working as an elevator operator and thus created his “harmonic theory”. The typical improvisation used in jazz was completely changed and directed towards more expressive and melodic aspects. This new move that jazz had started became known as “free jazz’ due to the fact that it was up to the player’s will on what the music would be therefor it being “free” for the player to choose what to do (The Editors of Encyclopædia Britannica).

        After many failed attempts to sit with top musicians in Los Angeles, Coleman was featured as a part of Paul Bley’s quintet at the Hillcrest Club where he recorded two albums (Yanow). It was during 1951 where he met with Ed Blackwell, traditional jazz and R&B drummer, and Don-Cherry, trumpeter, that Coleman began to transform his ideas into fresh compositions It was in 1958 when Coleman and Cherry made Coleman’s debut album, Something Else!!!! The Music of Ornette Coleman, under the Los Angeles jazz label Contemporary Records (Fordham). Billy Higgins, drummer, and Charlie Haden, bassist, along with Coleman and Cherry formed a band with Bley that features recordings such as The Shape of Jazz to Come in 1959 and Change of the Century in 1960 (The Editors of Encyclopædia Britannica). This was in part due to John Lewis, pianist-leader of the Modern Jazz Quartet, that they were able to have such an opportunity. Later on, it was actually Lewis who enabled Coleman and Cherry to attend the Lenox School of Jazz (Fordham). Coleman then moved to New York City to which his obscure and “radical” thought of musical structure and vastly expressive improvisations caused a wide variety of controversy.  Free Jazz from 1960 and Beauty is a Rare Thing from 1961 were two recordings in which Coleman used two quartets improvising simultaneously to test his ideas of free meter and individuality. In 1962, he started to compose more regularly than performing. His most memorable composition is the suite Skies of America, which the London Symphony Orchestra recorded with Coleman in 1972.

They way and extent to which his style of jazz influenced players of jazz instruments other than the saxophone won him the Japan Art Association’s Premium Imperiale prize for music in 2001 and in 2007 Coleman won a Pulitzer Prize for his Sound Grammar, which he recorded a few years before and has been said to go back to his music of the 1960’s (The Editors of Encyclopædia Britannica).

Socioeconomic and Cultural Influences

Ornette Coleman changed the course of jazz away from harmony and rhythm as well as from American songbook repertoire. He was influenced heavily by Charlie Parker, an earlier jazz altoist who had changed the jazz game entirely. Parker initiated the be-bop revolution in the 1940s but Coleman’s ideas of freedom, derived from people like Cecil Taylor (a pianist and poet), countered the constricting conventions of bop. He set out to dismantle a song’s architecture and make it less reliant on chord changes. He also opened up with a rhythm section with mostly no piano, opening up the roles of the bassist and the drummer. John Lewis, the founder of the Modern Jazz Quartet, saw much of Charlie Parker in Ornette Coleman in the idea that they both brought their own innovations to jazz music and transformed music as a whole.

Coleman was not born an opulent person by any means. His father was a construction worker and a cook while his mother was a clerk in a funeral house. His father died when Coleman was 7, leaving even less for the family to get by with.

He attended I.M. Terrell High School, the first black high school in Fort Worth. I.M. Terrell was a school known for churning out revolutionary jazz musicians including but not limited to Coleman himself and three of his future bandmates, saxophonist Dewey Redman and the drummers Charles Moffett and Ronald Shannon Jackson. One of the graduates, Red Connor, was a bebop tenor saxophonist who, as Coleman said, influenced him by playing jazz as an “idea” instead of as a series of patterns.

After High School, he moved around in different bands. As he did so, he became entranced with the bebop movement and Charlie Parker’s imaginative phrasing. He was fired from one of the bands he was in when he tried to teach bebop to another saxophonist. He was then hired by Clarence Samuels. One of the times he played alongside Samuels’s band, he was beaten outside of the dance hall by another group of musicians and had his saxophone thrown down the street, or down the hill, or of a cliff (depending on how Coleman chose to tell the story that time around) all because he was “playing strangely.” In any case, it was destroyed and he had to buy a new one. He took the opportunity to buy himself the white plastic alto saxophone that he was known for and to move to Los Angeles. His first album Something Else!!!! The Music of Ornette Coleman, which he released in Los Angeles, was close to Parker’s style but refused to adhere to as strict a rhythmic grid as his predecessor.

John Lewis had a big influence on Coleman’s career as Lewis was the one behind Coleman being signed with Atlantic Records and thereby gaining much of his fame.

Coleman was one of the people behind the growth of SoHo in the late 60’s. He took a cue from a friend and collaborator Yoko Ono and basically started the Loft Era in Jazz by buying two stories of an industrial complex at 131 Prince Street which he dubbed the Artist’s House. The space became a “combination performance space, studio, clubhouse, and apartment.” This came during a time when artists found refuge in SoHo. Unfortunately, these artists were bought out of the neighborhood in the following years as a result of the gentrification of SoHo. Richer tenants moved into SoHo in order to seem cooler by proximity but they didn’t like that the place wasn’t up to their own standards so they spiffed it up and bought and sold to their collective heart’s content. As such, the real estate rates skyrocketed and the artists that had made SoHo what it was were kicked out of their creative spaces and their homes.

 

Seminar Themes

Morals and norms

Ornette Coleman went against the norm with his style of jazz. He used a very unorthodox approach to his music and this is in part due to the fact that he was never classically trained. He learned to play the saxophone, violin, and trumpet by himself. He coined the term “free jazz” in which the artist is free to create whatever they desire without the need to follow a typical structure that is associated with jazz. Turnaround, from his album, Sound Grammar, that won a Pulitzer Prize, showcases how melody and other aspects of his work do not need to be altered imitations of conventional jazz music structures, but that they can be completely free on their own. This is not only shown by the music itself, but by the fact that the music was recorded by two different quartets that were improvising simultaneously.

 

Bibliography

Fordham, John. “Ornette Coleman obituary.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 11 June 2015, www.theguardian.com/music/2015/jun/11/ornette-coleman.

The Editors of Encyclopædia Britannica. “Ornette Coleman.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, inc., 9 Mar. 2017, www.britannica.com/biography/Ornette-Coleman.

Yanow, Scott. “Ornette Coleman | Biography & History.” AllMusic, www.allmusic.com/artist/ornette-coleman-mn0000484396/biography.

Jarenwattananon, Patrick, and Lars Gotrich. “Ornette Coleman In 5 Songs.” NPR, NPR, 1 Mar. 2010, www.npr.org/2010/03/01/101618034/act-like-you-know-ornette-coleman.

Kelman, John. “The Dave Liebman Group: Turnaround: The Music of Ornette Coleman.” All About Jazz, 9 Apr. 2010, www.allaboutjazz.com/turnaround-the-music-of-ornette-coleman-dave-liebman-jazzwerkstatt-berlin-brandenburg-ev-review-by-john-kelman.php.

Ratliff, Ben. “Ornette Coleman, Saxophonist Who Rewrote the Language of Jazz, Dies at 85.” The New York Times, 11 June 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/12/arts/music/ornette-coleman-jazz-saxophonist-dies-at-85-obituary.html

Agovino, Michael J. “Ornette Coleman, the Saxophonist who transformed Jazz.” The New Republic, 17 June 2015.