He played tenor in his high school band (alongside saxophonist King Curtis, drummer Charles Moffett and flautist Prince Lasha) and in various jazz and R&B outfits around the toughest local nightclubs. Ornette (somehow it never seems right to refer to him as Coleman, or Mr Coleman, which fails to capture either the respect or affection he merits) was born in 1930 in Fort Worth, Texas. If one believes that Ornette devised his style of playing as a way of concealing his mistake about pitch, and that he couldn’t cut it as a member of an R&B band, we get a picture of Ornette as a recalcitrant instrumental incompetent who nonetheless became one of the greatest and most influential musicians of the twentieth century. He told Ornette forcefully to either play what he was paid to play or keep quiet. Crayton is on record as saying that he was impressed with Ornette’s abilities and hired him to play the blues. In fact, he has always been capable of playing blues he just chose to play something different. The group’s repertoire was heavily based on blues progressions, and the story goes that Ornette played the blues so badly that he was paid to keep quiet. The second fallacy stems from the time Ornette was a member of R&B guitarist Pee Wee Crayton’s group in the late 1940s. Thus began the process which led to an improvising style based on freely moving melody unhindered by a repetitive harmonic substructure, and finally, to his theory of harmolodics – a democratic, holistic organising principle that accords equal weight to melody, harmony and rhythm. He eventually realised his mistake, but the misunderstanding made him examine pitch and harmony in a fresh way. When Ornette got his first alto saxophone at the age of 14, he taught himself to play from a piano tutor and mistook C on the alto for A. Such an impression is rooted in two anecdotes, neither accurately reported nor understood. Like the composer Charles Ives, Ornette Coleman has suffered from a commonly held misconception that he is a ‘naive artist’.
Below we have posted Barry Witherden's guide to Coleman's recordings, first published in The Wire in 1999, and revised and updated for inclusion in 2009's The Wire Primers. We are saddened to learn of the death of the great Ornette Coleman.