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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsRIP: Ornette Coleman, jazz great
Ornette Coleman, the alto saxophonist and composer who was one of the most powerful and contentious innovators in the history of jazz, died on Thursday morning in Manhattan. He was 85.
The cause was cardiac arrest, a representative of the family said.
Mr. Coleman widened the options in jazz and helped change its course. Partly through his example in the late 1950s and early 60s, jazz became less beholden to the rules of harmony and rhythm, and gained more distance from the American songbook repertoire. His own music, then and later, became a new form of highly informed folk song: deceptively simple melodies for small groups with an intuitive, collective language, and a strategy for playing without preconceived chord sequences. In 2007, he won the Pulitzer Prize for his album Sound Grammar.
His early work a kind of personal answer to his fellow alto saxophonist and innovator Charlie Parker lay right within the jazz tradition and generated a handful of standards among jazz musicians of the last half-century. But he later challenged assumptions about jazz from top to bottom, bringing in his own ideas about instrumentation, process and technical expertise.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/12/arts/music/ornette-coleman-jazz-saxophonist-dies-at-85-obituary.html?_r=1
Ornette and the Grateful dead in 1993: https://archive.org/details/gd93-02-23.sbd.hall.1611.sbeok.shnf
KamaAina
(78,249 posts)at WYBC in New Haven in the mid-'80s. (Pity there's no horn smilie, just guitar and drums.
R.I.P.
Ornette Coleman
eppur_se_muova
(36,262 posts)CBGLuthier
(12,723 posts)Even though I told my wife one way to describe him was if you really hate some kinds of Jazz you may have Ornette Coleman to thank. As for me, I loved his work, his philosophy, and his approach to everything. In a week of losses this may be the greatest.