Photo courtesy Texas Music Museum (1930----) Birthplace: Fort Worth Genre: Jazz Influenced: Almost single-handedly created the Free Jazz movement. Other Sites:

At the end of the fifties the most controversial of jazz figures emerged from obscurity on the New York jazz scene. He was Ornette Coleman, a largely self-taught alto sax player from Fort Worth. He began playing in New York City clubs and releasing recordings that critics and musicians either praised extravagantly or just as adamantly condemned. He called his new music "free jazz," and it relied on group improvisation of an intensity and complexity not heard before. To some influential critics, such as Gunther Schuller, Coleman's music was the shape of things to come in jazz; to others it was cacophony. But whatever critics say, Coleman's approach spawned a generation of free jazz improvisers that formed the avant-garde of jazz in the U.S. and in Europe for decades.

Coleman's musical odyssey began in Fort Worth, where he took up the saxophone at the age of fourteen, playing in the I.M. Terrell High School band. Among the members of the Terrell High band were serveral musicians who would gain reputations in jazz, including Charles Moffett, Prince Lasha, and John Carter. About 1947, according to his friend and fellow band memeber Dewey Redman, he was kicked out of the band for introducing a bebop improvisation into a performance of The Washington Post March by Sousa.

This event proved prophetic as Coleman moved into his professional life after high school, rejected time and again for expressing his vision too freely. According to critic and biographer John Litweiler, Coleman made a spontaneous discovery while playing a standard tune with the Red Connors band in 1948: "...how to improvise without following the patterns of chord changes." That discovery cost him his job. On a gig in Baton Rouge with the Clarence Samuels band, members of the audience were so incensed with his solos that they took him outside and beat him unconscious.

After a stint in New Orleans, where Coleman began to develop his theory of "harmolodics," (his unique technique of melodic improvisation), he returned to Fort Worth and formed his first short-lived band with high school classmate Charels Moffett. When that effort folded, Coleman joined the R&B band of Pee Wee Crayton, which stranded him in Los Angeles.

Although attempts to fit into the LA jazz scene largely failed on this first encounter, Coleman made contacts that eventually paid off. He also used the extra time he had as an elevator operator to study books on harmonic theory.

Coleman's first album, Something Else!!!! released on Contemporary, brought immediate recognition that a strange new talent had arrived, but it was not a commercial success. A second album Tomorrow is the Question! attempted to correct that problem, but is considered by most critics less successful artistically than the the next few albums, beginning with The Shape of Jazz to Come from Atlantic. The Atlantic albums excited the jazz world like nothing since.

Ornette Coleman's prolific outpouring continued through the seventies, eighties, and nineties. He has continued to experiment with new formats, new sidemen, and has ventured into collaborations with classical musicians. In the eighties he made major contributions to his discography, including Song X, with Pat Metheny, and In All Languages, with his group Prime Time, while working with Fort Worth's Caravan of Dreams jazz club. All Languages, with his group Prime Time, while working with Fort Worth's Caravan of Dreams jazz club.