Another Ornette Coleman review: Melody's the key clause

This review focuses on Coleman’s supposedly unconventional sounds.

Part of the legend of saxophonist Ornette Coleman, as with many other great innovators, has to do with early rejection and ridicule.

There’s the story of one of his first employers, rhythm ‘n’ blues bandleader Pee Wee Crayton, paying him to not take solos. Of the beboppers in Los Angeles in the early 1950s telling Coleman he didn’t know the chord changes, was out of tune, couldn’t play. Of audience members in his native Forth Worth seizing his saxophone and smashing it or, according to an alternate story, throwing it in a river.