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THE great Texas-born jazz musician, who died last week, worked in a number of genres — free jazz, symphonic music, funk — and it can be hard for newcomers to get a sense of him.
Here’s how I began my Salon piece on Coleman:
Miles Davis said he must be “all screwed up inside” to play that way he did. Max Roach punched him in the mouth after he saw him play. But Ornette Coleman, who died today off cardiac arrest at 85, lived longer than almost any jazz great, he made important and challenging music for decades.
How to get into Coleman’s music, which drove so many people crazy, influenced musicians in jazz, funk and dance music, and became known even among admirers (a group that included not just fellow jazzheads, but Jackson Pollock and James Baldwin) for being difficult and driven by an arcane theory?
RIP to a great, at times frustrating, always challenging artist.
Irrespective of how one may eventually appraise the instrumental sound, improvisations and compositions of Ornette Colemen, he remains an artist who creative musicians must come to terms with while seeking their own identity, representing one extreme. While working at the Patelson Music House, on the street behind Carnegie Hall, and also America’s largest seller of classical sheet music at the time, a colleague pointed out Coleman perusing the record bin just across from us in the narrow back room. I wished to speak with him, but paused to reflect upon my opening, and that delay cost me because he vanished in an instant. Of course, the finest improvisors do not think, they react, but only after a great deal of preparation to reach that level of spontaneity. I wish I had that opportunity to speak with Coleman back, this time with no pause! Likely, I might have begun something like: “Hi Ornette, I’m a friend of Lee Konitz, and its a pleasure to meet you.” Who knows where the conversation might have moved from there…