Ornette Coleman

If ever an artist came to be defined by their album titles it was the Texan musician whose trials and tribulations, above all physical abuse meted out by other players in the early stage of his career, have been documented to the point of cliché. What is much more important than the umpteenth re-versioning of such indignities is the fact that the grandiloquent claim of The Shape Of Jazz To Come actually proved to be a lot more than hyperbole of the highest order.

When Ornette Coleman started to attract attention in the late ‘50s he split opinion, pilloried as a charlatan and praised as a messiah in more or less equal measure. However, in the greater scheme of things the controversy over his perceived inability to uphold the jazz tradition is overshadowed by the way he extended it, or brilliantly played with perceptions of classicism and futurism.

His music sounded of times past and times ahead. Of old and new dreams. That was achieved by greater conceptual and structural freedom than the bebop he listened to in his youth [he was an avowed Charlie Parker fan]: a marked elasticity in rhythm, harmony and tempo, as indicated by the agitated flurries into double time that had a playful, sometimes comic theatricality; a sense of independence among band members that nonetheless did not preclude interdependence or a sense of deep underlying entente between them: themes and counterpoint that ran the emotional gamut from ashen solitude – ‘Lonely Woman’ – to unbridled joy – ‘Feet Music’.

As for Coleman’s alto saxophone playing it had great originality, the tone pushing the tradition of ‘the cry’ towards a kind of dawn-of-time character whereby some notes conspired to pierce and graze the air due to careful articulation. With cornet player Don Cherry, double bassist Charlie Haden and drummer Ed Blackwell [or Billy Higgins] in his quartet for his classic early ‘60s Atlantic period Coleman made music that opened up new areas of spontaneity in what was called jazz. Crucially, he retained the deeply communicative energy of the blues, reminding the world that it too had been a much more metrically pliable form before it settled into formulae such as the 12 bar template.

Throughout the ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s Coleman would embrace anything from electric funk and rock, by way of the much-loved Prime Time band to African, Asian and Middle Eastern music and European orchestral music, but that all-consuming intensity of the blues, sometimes reducible to a truth conveyed in one languorous note, never really went away.

When I interviewed him in 2009, just as he had been appointed curator of the Meltdown festival at London’s South Bank Centre, the only jazz artist to date to have such an honour, Coleman was keen to tell me about the importance of Robert Johnson as much as he was the beauty of flatted fifths.

Coleman’s edition of Meltdown also gave the world a chance to take stock of the enormous influence he had exerted beyond the world of jazz as the likes of Yoko Ono [with whose Plastic Ono band he recorded], Patti Smith and Flea from Red Hot Chilli Peppers as well as hip-hop pioneers The Roots all took part and paid heartfelt tribute to him.

At the time Coleman was 79 years old and had just six years to live but the uplifting nature of the event underlined the fact that for all the innovation for which he was responsible Coleman’s enduring credo was the ideal of equality and community amid individuality, or as another album title puts it, This Is Our Music.