June 17, 2015
Page 13
Arts &
ENTERTAINMENT
Jazz Great Remembered as a Visionary
Ornette Coleman
challenged the
establishment
(AP) - Whatever rules in jazz
hadn’t been shattered by Charlie
Parker and other bebop artists,
Ornette Coleman finished off for
good.
Coleman, who died June 11 at
age 85, brought to jazz the kind
of open-ended, non-narrative ap-
proach that Jackson Pollock used
in painting and James Joyce in
books. In the late 1950s, he orig-
inated “free jazz,” challenging the
bebop establishment by abandon-
ing the conventional song form
and liberating musicians to freely
improvise off of the melody rather
than the underlying chord chang-
es. Coleman also broke down the
barrier between leader and side-
men, giving his band members
freedom to solo, interact and de-
velop their ideas.
Though largely self-taught, Cole-
man would create his own “harmo-
lodic” concept of music, which
also became a life philosophy. The
music derived from a uniquely free
interaction between the musicians,
without being tethered to rigid met-
ric or harmonic structure.
“I want everyone to have an
equal relationship to the results,”
Coleman told The Associated
Press in a 2007 interview. “I don’t
tell them what or how to play. ...
Sometimes the drum is leading,
sometimes the bass is leading. ... I
don’t think I’m the leader, I’m just
paying the bills.”
He was only the second jazz
performer to win a Pulitzer Prize,
cited for his 2006 album “Sound
Grammar,” and was the rare
jazzman voted into the elite Amer-
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Ornette Coleman, the visionary saxophonist who pioneered a ‘free
jazz’ sound that challenged the ‘bebop’ establishment, died June
11 at the age of 85. (AP photo)
ican Academy of Arts and Letters.
He also received a National En-
dowment for the Arts Jazz Master
award, and a Grammy lifetime
achievement award, even though
none of his recordings won a com-
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