RIP Ornette Coleman

I haven't been blogging lately, but that I'm hoping to change very soon. And I haven't talked about avant-garde jazz in a while. With the death of one the style's originators, it's time to talk about it a bit.

Ornette Coleman died today (June 11) at the age of 85, from cardiac arrest. Coleman played the alto sax, which has become one of the more iconic instruments associated with avant-garde jazz, due to it's range and noisy wail, and no one could wail noisily like Coleman.

Coleman took up the alto sax at age 14. Interestingly, he played a more straight ahead style in his early career in the early 50s, but showed a drive to create his own, often radically different, music was usually met with derision from audiences. Once he began study in jazz at The Lenox School of Jazz in 1959, he met Don Cherry (not the hockey guy...) and they began a long collaborative friendship, often playing in each other's bands and opening for each other on tour.

1959 saw Coleman release The Shape of Jazz to Come, a landmark in experimental and free jazz. His albums were polarizing, some claiming they were genius, others calling him a fake. Nonetheless, the album set the jazz world on it's ear, and other improv and free-jazz players became to emerge, like Charlie Haden and John Coltrane.

The 70s saw Coleman form his Prime Time band, described as a "double quartet", featuring 2 guitarist, drummers and bassists. It also saw the landmark album, Song X, with Pat Metheny as collaborator.

Into the 90s and 2000s saw more released, and Coleman branching out into rock collaborations, playing with Joe Henry and Lou Reed. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 2007 for his album, Sound Grammar.

Coleman was a forward thinker, and an obtuse one too, seeing jazz as something more about personal and free expression. To many, his work was difficult, even impossible, to access, But his approach was the thing that drew me to his work, and to avant-garde jazz in general. Let's turn things sideways, take away the things we take as habit and see where things go. That's the essence of experimentation.