Ornette Coleman Overview

There are two mutually exclusive opinions regarding jazz musician Ornette Coleman. By some he is considered a visionary genius, representing the "third spur" of the Modernist revolution -- "a shift in approach to melody and rhythm to match Coltrane's skyscraping harmonics... [more]

There are two mutually exclusive opinions regarding jazz musician Ornette Coleman. By some he is considered a visionary genius, representing the "third spur" of the Modernist revolution -- "a shift in approach to melody and rhythm to match Coltrane's skyscraping harmonics and Cecil Taylor's introduction of atonality." Others saw Coleman as a poseur, a fraud with a minimal grasp of musical theory. Even one of his band members, Jimmy Garrison, expressed this dismissive view, abandoning the stage in the middle of a performance because of his frustration with Coleman's use of off notes instead of chords. However one views Coleman's desire for experimentation, one can still turn to the music and let it speak for itself. With albums like "Tomorrow Is the Question" (1959), "Beauty Is a Rare Thing" (1961), "Town Hall, 1962," the rocky "Dancing in Your Head" (1975), and the stunning "In All Languages" (1987), Coleman consistently manages to evoke powerful feelings in his listeners as he experiments with different concepts of sound. Coleman's style is harsh, inchoate, atonal, cacophonic, and completely original. According to Coleman, the spasmodic phrases, swoops, smears, and runs that emanate aimlessly from his sax are all about a new freedom of improvisation that would convey a warmth and expressiveness akin to that of a human voice. "I'm beginning where Charlie Parker stopped. Parker's melodic lines were placed across ordinary chord progressions. My melodic approach is based on phrasing, and my phrasing is an extension of how I hear the interval and pitch of the tunes I play." [show less]