Coleman, Ornette, 1930–, African-American saxophonist and composer, b. Fort Worth, Tex. Largely self-taught, he began playing the alto saxophone in rhythm-and-blues bands. He later developed an unorthodox and impassioned style of free jazz jazz, the most significant form of musical expression of African-American culture and arguably the most outstanding contribution the United States has made to the art of music.

Origins of Jazz

Jazz developed in the latter part of the 19th cent.
..... Click the link for more information. characterized by broken rhythms, atonal harmonies, and improvised melody, which made him an enduringly controversial figure in the jazz avant-garde. Coleman made his first real impact in the commercial jazz world after he moved from Los Angeles to New York City in 1959, and he has since played in a number of small groups with various musicians. In the mid-1970s he formed Prime Time, an electric band. Coleman has written several modernist concert pieces, notably the orchestral Skies of America (1972). In 2007 he was awarded the Pultizer Prize for his recording Sound Grammar (2006).

Bibliography

See biography by B. McRae (1988).

Coleman, (Randolph Denard) Ornette

(born March 9, 1930, Fort Worth, Texas, U.S.) U.S. saxophonist and composer, the principal initiator and leading exponent of free jazz. Coleman began playing the saxophone as a teenager and soon became a working musician in dance bands and rhythm-and-blues groups. He abandoned harmonic patterns in order to improvise more directly upon melodic and expressive elements; because the tonal centres of such music changed at the improviser's will, it became known as “free jazz.” His organized collective improvisation in such recordings as Free Jazz (1960) placed him firmly in the jazz avant-garde. In the 1970s he began composing orchestral music and also formed an electric band called Prime Time, with which he was active until the 1990s.

Coleman, Ornette (1930– ) jazz musician; born in Fort Worth, Texas. An iconoclastic saxophonist and composer, his experiments in free-form improvisation sharply divided the jazz establishment upon his emergence in 1959. Largely self-taught, he played in rhythm-and-blues bands before settling in Los Angeles in 1951, where he gradually formed a quartet of musicians who were receptive to his unorthodox ideas. He first recorded in 1958 and made his New York debut the following year. He made a series of important recordings in 1959–61 that shaped the direction of jazz for the next twenty years. A sporadic performing artist after the early 1960s, he occasionally led both a conventional jazz quartet and the rock band Prime Time, but turned increasingly to composition, producing several works for symphony orchestra in accordance with his "harmolodic theory."