The most radical artistic innovations often seem deceptively simple in retrospect—more a recognition of a universal truth than the discovery of something new. To paint shape and color rather than image. To give as much weight to a word’s sound as to its meaning. To recognize the music inherent in silence.
Ornette Coleman posited that the infinite improvisational possibilities of a melody could thrive outside of a predetermined structure, that musical ideas could flow and expand in the moment as naturally as breath or speech or thought. A simple idea that shook the world of twentieth-century music—a revolutionary idea that sounded like a folk song, lilting with the loving congeniality of a parent singing to a child.
Coleman was always an outsider. While others fixated on the fluid virtuosity and harmonic sophistication of Charlie Parker, Coleman heard the bluesy cry in Parker’s tone and the rhythmic unrest just beneath the surface. He spent his early twenties touring with carnival shows and rhythm-and-blues bands, suffering ridicule (even physical abuse—he was once actually attacked and beaten after a gig) for his unconventional approach. He eventually found his way to Los Angeles, where he worked part-time as an elevator operator and began to find new allies amidst the disdain. With long hair and a beard, long before that look was in fashion, and wearing a heavy overcoat in ninety-degree weather, Coleman scared the trumpeter Don Cherry at their first meeting. But the music drew Cherry in, and soon their symbiotic telepathy recalled Parker and Dizzy Gillespie’s. In addition to Cherry, such burgeoning master improvisers as the bassist Charlie Haden and the drummers Billy Higgins and Ed Blackwell heard the magic in Coleman’s concept and dedicated themselves to its ensemble realization.
In a jazz industry often obsessed with young lions, Coleman didn’t make his recording début until a month before his twenty-eighth birthday (“Something Else!!!!” on Contemporary Records in 1958). From the beginning of the album, you can recognize his mature conception, even while you hear Coleman and Cherry chafing at the more conventional forms imposed by the pianist and bassist that the label brought in. By the following year, now accompanied by like-minded collaborators of his own choosing, Coleman moved to New York City and began a series of classic recordings for Atlantic Records—including “The Shape of Jazz to Come,” “Change of the Century,” and “This is Our Music”—which lived up to their propitious titles. He also began an extended residency at the Five Spot, in New York City, that solidified his role as the figurehead of the “new music.”