Saxophonist Ornette Coleman....

Born:
March 9th, 1930 in Fort Worth, Texas
Instruments:
Saxophone / Trumpet / Violin
by Jacob Teichroew,
Saxophonist Ornette Coleman sparked controversy in jazz almost as soon as he began playing. Although highly influenced by blues, R&B, and bebop, in the 1950s he began playing with such an unorthodox approach to improvisation that to this day jazz musicians and scholars aren’t sure what to make of him. One thing is sure, however: that Coleman changed the way people thought about jazz improvisation, and as a result opened new avenues of creativity for later musicians.

Unrestricted, Unashamed:
Coleman’s first professional work with rhythm-and-blues bands brought him to Los Angeles, California, in the mid 1950s. His largely self-taught style agitated audiences and musicians alike. While working odd jobs, he studied music theory in his spare time, and began to experiment with loose interpretations of melody, harmony, and rhythm. His experiments contrasted sharply with the disciplined approach of bebop musicians, who focused on fitting their improvised melodic lines into the tempo and chord changes of a given song.
Despite his unconventional style, Coleman managed to meet likeminded musicians, including bassist Charlie Haden, drummer Ed Blackwell, and trumpeter Don Cherry who later collaborated with him. Pianist John Lewis, best known for his playing with the Modern Jazz Quartet, helped secure Coleman the opportunity to record with Atlantic Records. In 1959 he recorded the seminal album The Shape of Jazz to Come with Haden, Blackwell, and Cherry.

Breaking From Tradition:
Rather conventional by contemporary standards, The Shape of Jazz to Come broke barriers. Coleman and his quartet improvise freely over drones and shifting pulses, like on the song “Lonely Woman,” and sometimes even over familiar harmonies, like on “Blues Connotation.”
At times Coleman allows the saxophone’s tone to squeak or break, resembling a straining human voice. On this recording, the influence of blues and Charlie Parker is present, but at the forefront are the moods created by the band’s stream of consciousness approach.

The Five Spot:
In 1959, the quartet landed a regular gig at New York’s Five Spot café, where they exposed their controversial sound to many top musicians, including Leonard Bernstein, Lionel Hampton, Benny Goodman, and Roy Eldridge. Bernstein and Hampton were thrilled, and Goodman and Eldridge were disgusted. This divergence in opinion was reflected throughout the jazz world.

Free Jazz:
With The Shape of Jazz to Come, and Coleman’s next album, Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation (1960), was an avant-garde movement in jazz that favored the free jazz and harmolodic aesthetic, and which had the fewest restrictions for musicians.
The freedom with which Coleman played inspired others to search for even greater freedom. On recordings by saxophonist and clarinetist Eric Dolphy, saxophonist Albert Ayler, and saxophonist John Coltrane, conventional melodies are abandoned in favor of raucous and raw sounds, which are used to attain moments of intensity unreachable by music bound by laws of harmony and melody.

Legendary Iconoclast:
Throughout the following decades, Ornette Coleman has continued to search for new balances of liberated improvisation and composition. In 1962, he took three years off from performing so that he could teach himself the violin and trumpet, both of which he later performed in addition to the saxophone.He has since composed and performed works for orchestra, string quartet, and various jazz ensembles. In 1994 he received the MacArthur Foundation’s “genius” grant. An iconoclast who has earned mainstream recognition in his decades of musical adventurism, Ornette Coleman, in rejecting standard jazz practices, has become one of the most well known figures in jazz history.
http://jazz.about.com/od/classicjazzartists/p/OrnetteColeman.htm