Jazz legend Ornette Coleman dies at 81

Jazz legend Ornette Coleman has died. He was 85.

Coleman was both a saxophonist and a composer and, over the course of his life, became one of the more controversial innovators in his field. In the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, Coleman helped the jazz scene break from its previously rigid musical rules, expanding the genre’s borders and re-inventing the American songbook. Coleman’s own work, which had previously adhered to jazz standards and practices set by his forefathers, became more experimental, using simple melodies set against a lack of existing chord sequences. Alongside contemporaries like John Coltrane, Coleman became an advocate for the avant garde, as well as for new American individualism.

Born Randolph Denard Ornette Coleman in Fort Worth, Texas, Coleman started playing saxophone when he was about 14 after earning enough money shining shoes to buy the instrument. An early mix-up regarding the difference between a piano’s “concert key” and a saxophone’s greatly contributed to his later experimentation with both notation and harmony. As The New York Times explains, “In essence, Mr. Coleman believed that everybody has his own tonal center, and that “unison”—a word he often used, though not always in its normal musical-theory sense—was a group of people playing together harmoniously, even if in different keys.”

risingsun wrote:Sad, didn't like his music that much as I was more into trad jazz, but he influenced a lot of people and changed jazz quite a lot.