Ornette Coleman, one of jazz’s most groundbreaking artists who brushed aside convention with his prophetically titled 1959 album “The Shape of Jazz to Come,” died today. He was 85.
His death was confirmed to AFP by his publicist, Ken Weinstein. Coleman was born and raised in Texas but died in New York, where he had become both dapper fixture on the social circuit and an opinionated voice of the direction of music.
Coleman, along with John Coltrane, was one of the original forces behind so-called “free jazz” that broke down traditional structures of harmony and allowed a more free-flowing form of expression.
Best known as an alto saxophonist, Coleman cast away traditional notions that a musician needed to stay within chord progressions and instead pursued solos that detractors considered chaotic but gradually became commonplace in jazz and rock.
Coleman said that jazz needed to “express more feelings than it has up to now,” saying that chord structures were confining and unnatural.
Instead, the self-taught musician said that jazz should be a form of human communication.
“The idea is that two or three people can have a conversation with sounds, without trying to dominate it or lead it,” Coleman said in a 1997 interview with the French philosopher Jacques Derrida.
“What I mean is that you have to be — intelligent,” he said.
“I think the musicians are trying to reassemble an emotional or intellectual puzzle, in any case a puzzle in which the instruments give the tone,” he said.
“The Shape of Jazz to Come” stunned the jazz world, with leading artists including Miles Davis among the critics.
Not only did Coleman defy concepts of harmony with his saxophone playing, but the album lacked any piano or guitar, so often used to keep the songs together through chords.
The album featured the intense song “Lonely Woman,” written by Coleman about a high-society shopper he spotted when he was working at a Los Angeles department store, which went on to become a standard among jazz musicians.
Coleman followed up the next year with the album “The Change of the Century,” also recorded in young-spirited California rather than one of the more established jazz capitals.