Ornette Coleman Profiled

Source: Chron.

There’s a moment in “Eventually,” the frenetic second song on Ornette Coleman’s blazing (and trailblazing) 1959 album The Shape of Jazz to Come, when Coleman’s alto sax seems to whinny like an excited horse. It doesn’t sound gimmicky, just wild and untrammeled, galloping—free. Coleman, born in 1930 and raised amid the Western culture of Fort Worth, was always seeking new musical frontiers, conventional taste and wisdom be damned. The Shape of Jazz to Come, his first album for Atlantic Records and probably the best of his long, winding career, encapsulates his compulsion to shatter standards and expectations of jazz form, while also foreshadowing the groundbreaking work he’d further create. And yet, somehow, it is also, almost, soothing.