Billboard : 11/09/1959

Ornette Coleman is one of the controversial new artists to spring from the modern jazz scene. By some he is considered an important new innovator and creator; by others too far out for serious consideration. He is heard here, with Donald Cherry on cornet, Charlie Haden on bass and Billy Higgins on drums, performing a group of selections written by himself. Coleman’s alto work is self-consciously original and won’t have mass appeal. But its uniqueness will interest many avant garde jazz buffs. Best sides are Peace, and Lonely Woman.

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Cashbox : 11/28/1959

Coleman’s “new” jazz is difficult to listen to at first, for he combines a harsh, almost aggravating alto tone with a complete breakaway from usual jazz forms. The quartet—with Donald Cherry, trumpet; Charlie Haden, bass; Billy Higgins, drums—plays six Coleman compositions which are unquestionably original, imaginative and intriguing to the listener, but public acceptance of Coleman will be a difficult thing to come by. However, he should be listened to for the complete freedom that he advocates.

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American Record Guide
Joe Goldberg : 01/1960

Coleman is, apparently, all things to all men. According to Martin Williams, who wrote the liner notes for this album, his playing “will effect the whole character of jazz music profoundly and pervasively”. An advertisement for a concert he is participating in refers to him as “the new alto saxophone sensation”. A jazz disc jockey calls him the “most talked-about musician in town”. And in the “Goings On About Town” section of The New Yorker, he is “Ornette Coleman and his perhaps mortally wounded alto saxophone”.

I will be more than happy to leave technical discussion of Coleman’s music to Williams’ liner notes, for he seems to have a much better grasp of the situation than I. What I hear from this group (Coleman, alto sax; Don Cherry, trumpet; Charlie Haden, bass; and Billy Higgins, drums) is almost completely different on fast and slow numbers. The uptempo selections are nerve-shattering unrealized fragments, departing, it would seem, from Charlie Parker at the time of KoKo. On slower numbers, Coleman, who sounds much like the late Ernie Henry, is capable of composing strange melody lines that stick naggingly in the mind for days, and, on his solos, playing isolated phrases that have an instantly affecting beauty.

The instrumentation of this group will suggest the Gerry Mulligan Quartet, but the only point of similarity is that Coleman’s musicians have taken harmonic advantage of the absence of a piano, while Mulligan’s thought in such a harmonically conventional way that the piano might as well have been there all along.

In reference to the various quotations above, it will be interesting to see what happens to the career of the first new prophet to appear since the publicity machinery of jazz has gotten itself in full swing. Coleman’s is an authentic attempt, and the initial praise for it came from musicians. Now, it seems, everyone else has climbed aboard for what may be a long, long ride.

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Delaware County Times (Chester, PA)
Bill Kagler : 02/19/1960

Coleman Music Seems Too Deep

The white plastic alto sax of Ornette Coleman continues to be the center of a jazz controversy which has swept across the country from West to East. The 29-year-old musician has been hailed as the most explorative and inventive artist since the late Charlie Parker. Others have assailed his work as atonal, without purpose, distasteful. Some have adopted a wait-and-see attitude.

Unfortunately, exposure to Coleman’s music has been limited. Atlantic Recording Co. has produced several LPs. The Monterey jazz festival programmed the Coleman group. And recently, the quartet held forth at the Five Spot in Greenwich Village. Still, little air time is given to Coleman music; hence, unless a jazz fan is mobile enough to see him. in person, there’s little to base a judgment upon.

Armed with the foregoing Qualification, this writer will attempt to assess the jazz validity of Coleman’s work. This assessment is based solely upon The Shape of Jazz to Come, his second Atlantic LP. The side features six Coleman compositions and only the titles match the music. The tunes are hung with tags such as Sanity, Peace and Congeniality.

To this writer, Coleman’s artIstry seems too deep an introspective process. Jazz has soul, to be sure, but Coleman’s study—in its penetrating probe—emphasizes the meaning of music, rather than music itself. Most jazz fans are musically untrained. Their interest in this art form is predicated on enjoyment. The music spurs an emotional experience which is pleasing.

But with Coleman, the pleasure seems to be overshadowed by intellectual value. The sound of his horn is strange, especially when combined with Don ‘Cherry’s cornet. His music abounds in discordance transmitted in odd tempos. It’s just too weird to enjoy.

Only on Congeniality, where Coleman swings lightly, does any Parkerism show through — and then it’s only Bird’s familiar tone, not his sense of timing and steaming technical execution.

Coleman has drawn high praise from the likes of John Lewis, Percy Heath and Gunther Schuller. These men, highly respected as musicians, do not represent the vast cross-section of jazz interest, however.

Maybe, with more exposure and more concentration, audiences will come to enjoy and appreciate Coleman. One thing is certain: He should be encouraged to continue his exploration, since such methodology adds new scope to jazz. For the present, however, we prefer to augment a statement on a Coleman LP liner: “His melodies are unusual…” Too much so.

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HiFi / Stereo Review
Ralph J. Gleason : February, 1960

A review of The Shape of Jazz to Come and Tomorrow is the Question

Jazz musicians, ever artists with experimental minds, have been struggling for years to escape the bondaries and restrictions of the basically folk music material with which they have built their music. During the early days of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, the struggle was to escape from the strictures of sounding four beats to a measure on the part of the rhythm section and too close a tie to the chord skeleton of the number on which they were improvising. Louis Armstrong, for instance, built his solos basically as paraphrases of the original tune and simple extensions of the basic chords. Parker, Gillespie and the modernists who followed them, broke the tune down to the chord structure and built an entirely new tune on that, extending the chords as far as the ear would allow and incorporating all the harmonic devices of contemporary music to aid them. This exploration of the harmonic depths normally hidden in a tune has produced some magnificent music. Jazz artists, however, are still restlessly trying to extend further the scope of their music. Men like Ornette Coleman have abandoned the ordinary song (32 bars) and the ordinary blues (12 bars) as well as the ordinary conception of phrasing so that they are now working toward a freer form of jazz improvisation in which the actual bar length may be whatever the improvisor desires, and in which the harmonies are not the structuring factor, but develop as the soloist states his line of improvisation. In this framework, the broadest possible range of sounds is sought to be utilized. The instruments now equate more fully with the flexibility of the human voice. Cecil Taylor, John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman are the leaders in this avant garde these two albums are examples of Coleman’s own highly individual explorations. He drives an unusual amount of personal emotion into his music and plays with startling abruptness and discontinuity. However, even though his themes are unfamiliar, they do on occasion give signs of being from the mainstream of jazz. They always indicate deep personal emotional commitment. Of the two albums, the Contemporary is easier to listen to at first because it sounds more nearly like a conventional jazz group. The Atlantic, however, is more truly a step in the direction of what Coleman is looking for in free-flowing improvisation with only the command of the instrument, the limitations of the musical imagination and the implicit time signature to govern what comes out. It is a fascinating experiment and presages even more fascinating music to follow.

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New Yorker
Whitney Balliett : 11/28/1959

(Reviewing Contemporary M3569 and Atlantic 1317)

It is quite possible that the encomiums that appear in the liner notes for two new records by Ornette Coleman, an amazing twenty-nine-year-old alto saxophonist from Texas, and that include such Ciceronian periods as “I’m especially convinced that Ornette Coleman is making a unique and valuable contribution to ‘tomorrow’s’ music” and “I believe that what Ornette Coleman is playing will affect the whole character of jazz music profoundly and pervasively,” may, because of their authoritarian ring—let alone the singular difficulties offered by Coleman’s playing—repel as many listeners as they attract. Coleman, in the manner of such avant-garde colleagues as John Coltrane and Cecil Taylor, approaches jazz by first erecting a defensive wall—disagreeable tone, eccentric phrasing, and so forth—between himself and his audience, and then devoting his energy to shoring it up. Charlie Parker supplies the central heating for Coleman’s style, which, accordingly, is both heretical and traditional. As a radical, Coleman has moved abreast of Coltrane and Taylor, using a method of nearly free improvisation, in which the chord structure and melody of a tune are only nodded at in his effort to create unfettered rhythmic and harmonic excursions and wild sounds that Adolphe Sax never dreamed of. Thus, after a series of deceptively simple phrases, played in a kind of alter-rhythm to the established beat and discolored here and there with brief atonal sallies, he will suddenly shoot into a couple of ascending yelps—incredibly swift runs whose notes actually seem to be vibrated out of the instrument. This hog-calling device leads to the other side of Coleman’s style, which is almost archaic. For Coleman’s most adventurous tonal flights appear to be attempts to reproduce on his horn the more passionate inflections of the human voice, which, of course, provided the first model for instrumental jazz. These weird emulations come off best at slow tempos—in fast tempos they sometimes resemble the squeakings of a giant mouse—and they are a peculiar and wrenching experience.

The two records under consideration, Ornette Coleman: Tomorrow is the Question! (Contemporary M 3569) and Ornette Coleman: The Shape of Jazz to Come (Atlantic 1317), are highly uneven. Possibly because of a conventional rhythm team, made up of Percy Heath or Red Mitchell (bass) and Shelly Manne, Coleman is in comparatively restrained form on the first record. (Don Cherry, his exact counterpart on cornet, is also on hand.) The best of the nine numbers, all of them by Coleman, are Lorraine, a slow, chanting dirge, complete with a long, mercurial human-voice run by Coleman that raises the hair on one’s neck, and Turnaround, a comfortable medium-tempo blues. (Coleman’s and Cherry’s ensembles, which are not unlike Coleman’s solos, often make it difficult to decipher just what the melody is, if, indeed, it is a melody at all.) On the second record, a different drummer and bassist come closer to Coleman’s own tastes (Cherry is again present), and the results are even more otherworldly. The tempos tend to be faster and the rhythmic foundations are full of wobbly, steadily shifting twists and turns, with the drums and bass performing decorative-melodic rather than purely percussive roles. These deviations, together with Coleman’s bare-ganglion playing, give most of the six numbers, all of them again Coleman’s, the air of someone racing down a sidewalk littered with banana peels. However, listen to Coleman; he is unique.

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San Bernardino County Sun (San Bernardino, CA)
Jim Angelo : 11/21/1959

A review of The Shape of Jazz to Come and Tomorrow is the Question

Conceded by many critics to be the most revolutionary musician since Charlie Parker is altoist Ornette Coleman whose latest LPs are appropriately titled Tomorrow is the Question (Contemporary 3569) and The Shape of Jazz to Come (Atlantic 1317). He’s accompanied on the Contemporary album by his musical soulmate, trumpeter Don Cherry, and two rhythm-bassist Red Mitchell and drummer Shelly Manne. Programmed are 9 Coleman originals with such unique and graphic tags as Tears Inside, Compassion, Rejoicing, and Turnaround. The Atlantic disk finds Coleman and Cherry aided by bassist Charlie Haden and drummer Billy Higgins, Six more of Ornette’s originals are performed, among them Lonely Woman, Eventually, Peace, and Focus On Sanity. As pianist John Lewis puts it: “Ornette is doing the only really new things in jazz since the innovations in the mid-forties of Parker, Gillespie, and Monk.” Although the music cuts across the usual chordal patterns and compositional forms, it is intensely personal and starkly emotional. Rough edges and shallow concepts are apparent in places but there’s much of value here and repeated listening will greatly reward most modern devotees.

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San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco, CA)
Ralph J. Gleason : 12/17/1959

The Radical Jazz of Ornette Coleman

Alto saxophonist named Ornette Coleman, who is completely self-taught and whose knowledge of the mathematics of music is rudimentary insofar as its formal expression is concerned, is the most controversial jazz musician on the current scene.

Ornette has had three LPs issued: Something Else! (Contemporary C 3551); The Shape of Jazz to Come (Atlantic SD 1317); and Tomorrow Is the Question (Contemporary M 3569). His recent appearance at Monterey drew a mixed reaction, as did his stay at the Lenox School of Jazz this summer. His appearance this month in New York drew a burst of critical hosannas and an equal number of solid dissents. Musicians themselves are divided into those who don’t dig him and those who think he’s the shape of things to come.

Ornette Coleman is another manifestation of the questing nature of the jazz musician. In company with many young contemporary jazzmen (chief among them being Cecil Taylor and John Coltrane) Ornette is working toward a freer form of jazz improvisation in which the actual bar number may be whatever the improviser desires; in which the harmonies develop as the soloist improvises and are not the structuring factor; and in which the broadest possible range of sounds is utilized. There is a great similarity to the human voice in the way in which Ornette plays with highly charged emotion, abruptness and discontinuity. He uses unfamiliar themes, the better to startle our ears perhaps, and the sound that he gets is not yet easy to listen to. It would seem only logical to suspend judgment on what he is doing to see where it goes. It is obvious that his work is only a beginning; we don’t know where the end is. From it we may reasonably deduce that the saxophone, for one, and possibly jazz itself may never be the same.

One can listen to Ornette Coleman’s records with interest and with some sense of discovery. This listener, however, does not derive any pleasure from Ornette’s music nor from that of Cecil Taylor, to be frank. John Coltrane on the other hand, far removed though he may be from the tenor sound of Lester Young, is pure pleasure.

Despite the lack of obvious logic to the music of Ornette it is just as obvious that there is a hidden logic to it. Otherwise Don Cherry, who has played with him for some time now, could not improvise so tightly with him. You and I may not know what Ornette is doing but Don Cherry does. Meanwhile, anything this young alto man does will be watched most closely by everyone. Nobody’s taking the chance of missing the boat, as they did with Bird.

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San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco, CA)
Ralph J. Gleason : 12/17/1959

Coleman is so ‘Far Out’ He Could be Parker’s Extension

Right now the most controversial musician in the whole of that controversial music, jazz, is a 30-year old former elevator operator at Bullock’s, Los Angeles department store.

His name is Ornette Coleman, he plays the alto saxophone and he has been variously tabbed an enemy of jazz and the most important musician since Charlie Parker.

Coleman, whose recorded output to date consists of only three LPs Something Else! (Contemporary C 3551); The Shape of Jazz to Come (Atlantic SD 1317) is already the talk of the music world. He was featured in Newsweek’s recent long story on jazz, was one of the stars of the Monterey Jazz Festival last fall and will be featured at several festivals this summer and his quartet is currently one of the top box office attractions in jazz with a fat history of successful engagements in night clubs and concerts.

What is it that Coleman does? John Lewis, pianist and musical director of the Modern Jazz Quartet, says: “I feel he’s an extension of Charlie Parker, but I mean a REAL extension…” And most of the other statements in his support have been equally nonspecific. The closest is Ornette’s own description: “You can always reach into the human sound of a voice on your horn if you’re actually hearing and trying to express the warmth of a human voice. There are some intervals that carry the human quality if you play them in the right pitch.” To this, Shelly Manne adds, “He sounds like a person crying or a person laughing when he plays.”

Other musicians’ comments cover the whole range of invective and praise. Some Los Angeles musicians who played with him in 1958 and 1959 when he was getting started there insist he plays more conventionally when the critical spotlight is not on him. Others simply maintain they cannot play with him at all. And still others regard him with the same enthusiasm that John Lewis does.

One of Ornette Coleman’s most impressive aspects is his originality. His entire output of three LPs contain only his own compositions. It has always been a mark of a major jazz musician to provide his own material and Coleman does this. Another is the obvious fact that regardless of how complicated, “far-out” or experimental his music may be and regardless of how hard or how easy it is to listen to it, Don Cherry, his trumpet playing partner, quite obviously understands fully what is being done. They improvise together in a way that is quite remarkable. “I can’t figure how they start together,” John Lewis says. “They play together like I’ve never heard anybody play together.”

Coleman was born in Fort Worth and played in a variety of circus and blues bands before starting his present career in Hollywood in the 1950s. When he was an elevator operator at Bullock’s he says he used his spare time to study harmony on the job. “I’d park on the 10th floor and read.”

Los Angeles musicians at first didn’t dig the way he played but gradually got used to him. Critics, who have praised him in recent months only did so after his approval by genuine major leaguers. All except John Tynan of Down Beat. However, Tynan voted for Ornette Coleman in the 1958 Critics Poll saying “he is showing more originality on his instrument than ANY of the newer group of altoists on either coast or points between.”

Coleman himself has a neat musical philosophy: “Music is for our feelings,” he says. “I think jazz should try to express more kinds of feeling than it has up to now.”

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San Francisco Examiner (San Francisco, CA)
C.H. Garrigues : 11/22/1959

The Controversial Sound of the ’60s

By far the most controversial musical figures at this year’s Monterey Jazz Festival were two young men from Los Angeles—Ornette Coleman, an alto saxophonist who plays on a plastic instrument because he likes the dry sound he gets, and Don Cherry, who plays a tiny, toy-sized trumpet because “it enables you to hear yourself back.”

Coleman and Cherry (or Coleman, rather; this is really his story) appeared on the Los Angeles musical scene with something that could be called a new kind of music six or eight years ago. Jazz musicians in general ignored them, putting them down as not knowing harmony or as playing out of tune. Jobs were out of the question; if they even tried to sit in at sessions the other musicians would lay out.

The first exception was the very perceptive bassist, Red Mitchell; he took Coleman to Lester Koenig, head of Contemporary Records, who commissioned his first album (Something Else: M3551).

But nothing much happened; there were a few favorable reviews (including one here), and Coleman went back to running an elevator to support his young family. Another record was cut for Contemporary in the spring but lay in the vaults unreleased. It looked as though the “new music” was destined to remain unheard.

Then John Lewis, musical director of the Modern Jazz Quartet and head of the School of Jazz at Lenox, Mass., heard Coleman on one of his trips to the coast. Lewis flipped. He immediately arranged for Coleman to attend the School of Jazz on a scholarship—less, he confessed, for what Coleman would learn there than for the chance it would give him to be heard by such faculty members as Max Roach, Milt Jackson, Bill Evans and Gunther Schuller.

While Coleman was in Lenox, Lewis called him to the attention of Nesuhi Ertegun, of Atlantic Records. “Ornette is doing the only really new thing in jazz since the innovations of the mid-Forties of Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk.” Lewis told Nesuhi.

Ertegun, after hearing him, agreed and signed Coleman to a new LP series. Lewis, who also was musical director of the Monterey Jazz Festival, signed him for his first big appearance, and Coleman, after years of struggling had received his first break.

With the close of the festival, Coleman’s new LPs—the one he made for Contemporary last spring and his first for Atlantic—are off the press and available for serious study. (They are Tomorrow Is the Question! Contemporary M 3569 and The Shape of Jazz of Come” Atlantic 1317. After extended playings, I am certain that they justify Lewis’ seemingly extravagant praise — and that of such men as Schuller and Shelly Manne, quoted on the liner notes).

The first thing of which the listener is aware the first time he listens to Coleman is that he — the listener — feels exactly as he did, back in the Forties, the first time he listened to Parker. This is not to say that Coleman is “another Parker” (in the way that Sonny Stitt was said to be another Parker) or that he is Parker’s successor in the way Cannonball Adderley was said to be Parker’s successor).

On the contrary, Coleman sounds very little like Parker: he lacks the furious, flaring technique which enabled Bud to force his music down the throats of his fellow musicians long before they were able to grasp it for its ideas.

Further, where Parker was an extrovert, wailing at a furious pace which carried the listener along in spite of himself, Coleman’s sound is small, tight; his phrasing is short, tense, almost lachrymose in a bitter sort of way.

So Coleman sounds nothing like Parker—still less like the imitators of Parker who came after. He only makes you feel like Parker did … the first time you heard Parker. You knew, somehow, that this was it.

Any reservations? Somehow, the music of the ’60s (which this is) seems not quite for us of the ’40s. You can, after years of Adderley and Stitt and Quill and Woods, go back and play a Parker track and say, always with the same note of wonder, “Nobody ever played like Bird!” I doubt if you will ever say that about Coleman. There is the tenseness, the tightness.

Yet the reservations, perhaps, do not apply. This is the music of the ’60s; this is new; this is it. Even if it remains so far out that Coleman has to keep running his elevator the rest of his life.

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Down Beat : 12/10/1959
John S. Wilson : 4 stars

Coleman can come as something of a shock to the normally attuned ear because his arrival has not been prepared in gradual stages (as, for instance, the arrivals of Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane were) Coleman appears to have gone directly back to the basic foundation set up by Charlie Parker, to have shucked off the surface derivations which have been accumulating on it for 15 years, and to have taken off from this bare-bone launching pad in his own direction. His trumpet-playing partner, Donald Cherry, seems to stand in an equivalent relationship to Dizzy Gillespie and there are many times on this disc when they project a sensation that is very reminiscent of the early Parker-Gillespie groups—a sensation that is somewhat dimly based on sound and style, but much more clearly on creative intensity.

That is the element that pours out of this disc—creativity in strong, concentrated waves. Four of the half dozen Coleman originals in this collection grow out of bop roots, but Coleman hears other things, too. Peace, the most easily assimilated selection in the set, is in a relaxed blues vein, and Coleman, who often produces an extremely harsh, shrill tone on his plastic alto, plays with an ease and warmth here that is direct and communicative. Lonely Woman, on which Coleman makes formidable use of his interest in paralleling his instrument with the human voice, achieves a lamenting wail that is strikingly similar to the New Orleans dirges as they have been recorded by the Eureka Brass band and others.

This is not easy music for the listener, but even at its most difficult it remains compelling. Coleman still has a great deal of refining to do if his ideas are to lead anywhere. But he has solid musical ground under his feet here, and this disc is a more reassuring and provocative signpost than his first LP, Something Else, Contemporary 3551.

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Liner Notes by Martin Williams

I believe that what Ornette Coleman is playing will affect the whole character of jazz music profoundly and pervasively, but l am not unique or original in believing that what he is doing is new and authentic. For two examples, Percy Heath, bassist with The Modern Jazz Quartet, has been praising him for over two years, often to deaf ears. “When I first heard Ornette and Don Cherry, I asked, ‘What are they doing?’, but almost immediately it hit me. It was like hearing Charlie Parker the first time: it’s exciting and different, and then you realize it’s a really new approach and it makes a really valid music.” And John Lewis, pianist and musical director of the Quartet said last winter after hearing him, “Ornette Coleman is doing the only really new thing in jazz since the innovations in the mid-forties of Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, and those of Thelonious Monk.”

What Ornette Coleman plays can be very beautiful and it can have that rare quality of reaching out and touching each member of an audience individually. His melodies are unusual, but they have none of the harshness of self-conscious “experimental” borrowings. When we hear him he creates for our ears, hearts, and minds a new sensibility.

It is probably impossible for Ornette Coleman to discuss music without sooner or later using the word love and he has said, with the innate modesty with which he seems to say everything, “Music is for our feelings. I think jazz should try to express more kinds of feeling than it has up to now.” He knows well, then, the source and reason for his music. He also knows that he does not “own” it himself, nor “invent” it, but is responsible to something given to him. As is so necessary with an innovator in the beginning, he is not afraid to play whatever his Muse tells him to play: “I don’t know how it’s going to sound before I play it any more than anybody else does, so how can we talk about it before I play it.”

What he has done is, like all valid innovations, basically simple, authentic, and inevitable — but we see that only once someone of a sublime stubbornness like Coleman’s does it. The basis of it is this: if you put a conventional chord under my note, you limit the number of choices I have for my next note; if you do not, my melody may move freely in a far greater choice of directions. As he says of his improvising. “For me, if I am just going to use the changes themselves, I might as well write out what I am going to play.” This does not mean that his music is “a-harmonic” as is the music of a “country” blues singer, a Sonny Terry or a Big Bill Broonzy; nor that he invites disorder. He can work through and beyond the furthest intervals of the chords, and he has said, “From realizing that I can make mistakes, I have come to realize there is an order to what I do” — which, among other things, is as good a definition of maturity as I have ever heard.

As several developments in jazz in the last few years have shown, no one really needs to state all those chords that nearly everyone uses, and as some events have shown, if someone does state them or if a soloist implies them, he may end up with a harassed running up and down scales at those “advanced” intervals like a rat in a harmonic maze. Someone had to break through the walls that those harmonies have built and restore melody — but, again, we realize this only after an Ornette Coleman has begun to do it.

Since the world of jazz has been thickly populated with false prophets for the past ten years, Coleman may need his credentials and it seems to me that among them are these; like the important innovators in jazz, he maintains an innate balance among rhythm and harmony and melodic line. In jazz, these three are really an identity, and any change in one of them without intrinsic reshuffling in the others invariably risks failure. Further, he works in terms of developing the specific, implicit resources of jazz, not by wholesale importations from concert music. Like most of the great ones, Coleman has a deep and personal feeling for the blues which is unmistakable. Peace seems to me a lovely example of that, and of how his playing adds to the emotional range of jazz. These things, and the fact that he breaks through the usual thirty-two, sixteen, and twelve bar forms both in his compositions and in his improvising, all spring from an inner musical necessity, not from an outer academic contrivance. I think that compositionally Congeniality is an excellent introduction to many of these things, to the authenticity of his work and the way he is extending the whole idea of instrumental composition in jazz. Finally, to say (as some have) that the solos on such a piece do not have a relationship to his melodies is quite wrong. As a matter of fact, most jazz solos are not related to their theme-melodies, but to the chords with which the themes are harmonized. Coleman and Cherry may relate to the emotion, the pitch, the rhythm, the melody of a theme, without relating to “chords” or bar divisions. To a listener such relationships can have even more meaning than the usual harmonic ones.

Ornette Coleman started to play alto in 1944, when he was fourteen, in Fort Worth, Texas. He remains largely self-taught on his instrument, but inspired by a cousin, James Jordan, who was a music teacher in Austin, he studied books on harmony and theory quite early and thoroughly. One of his earliest influences was Red Connor who had played with Charlie Parker and who, according to Coleman, played then the way Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane do now. Coleman has also heard and admired altoist Buster Smith, who now works in Dallas, and Smith was, as Parker said, “the guy I really dug.”

Early jobs included carnival and rhythm and blues bands from which he was usually discharged for playing something the leader didn’t like. Once in New Orleans a crowd smashed his instrument, apparently because they didn’t like his playing. 1952 found him stranded in Los Angeles, where musicians at sessions would tell him he didn’t know harmony and was out of tune. After a return to Fort Worth, he went back to Los Angeles in 1954; that was the crucial year for him, when he really broke through to the freedom that has characterized his work since. Still disapproved of, he supported himself and his wife Jayne, and soon a son, with day jobs while he stuck to his convictions about music.

In 1956, he met trumpeter Donald Cherry, who grasped what Coleman was doing, and began musically to