Ornette Coleman, one of jazz's most influential and innovative musicians and composers, died Thursday at 85.
The cause was cardiac arrest, a family representative said.
Coleman, whose primary instrument was the alto saxophone, was a pioneer of the avant-garde movement of the '50s and '60s, helping to steer jazz away from bebop and taking both melodic and rhythmic interpretation in new directions.
The "free jazz" that Coleman spearheaded -- a new approach to melody and harmony, essentially coined as a term by 1961's Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation, one of his landmark albums – was but one of the contributions that made his work both controversial and fundamental to the progress of his form.
"The whole notion of postmodern jazz is essentially his creation," says veteran jazz critic and author Will Friedwald of Coleman. "But he is very different from other jazz innovators in one key aspect: Musicians influenced by Charlie Parker tend to play like Charlie Parker, but most of the musicians who were inspired by Coleman sound nothing like him."
Coleman's music continued to evolve through the decades, incorporating elements of funk and rock in the '70s and '80s when he worked intermittently with the group Prime Time.
Coleman also teamed with artists from outside his genre, including Jerry Garcia and Lou Reed. In 2007, Coleman was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his album Sound Grammar.
For Friedwald, Coleman was "easily the most important figure in jazz" since Parker. "Virtually everyone in the music, from Miles Davis to John Coltrane to Cecil Taylor to Wynton Marsalis to Keith Jarrett, owes a huge debt to him."
Randolph Denard Ornette Coleman was born in Fort Worth on March 9, 1930, and lived in a house near railroad tracks.
According to various sources, his father, Randolph, who died when Ornette was 7, was a construction worker and a cook; his mother, Rosa, was a clerk in a funeral home. Both, he liked to say, were born on Christmas Day.
He attended I.M. Terrell High School, a veritable seedbed of modern American jazz. Three of his future bandmates — the saxophonist Dewey Redman and the drummers Charles Moffett and Ronald Shannon Jackson — were graduates, as were the saxophonists King Curtis, Prince Lasha and Julius Hemphill; the clarinetist John Carter; and Red Connor, a bebop tenor saxophonist who, Mr. Coleman said, influenced him by playing jazz as “an idea” rather than as a series of patterns.
Coleman’s melodies may be easy to appreciate, but his sense of harmony was complicated.
When he was learning to play the saxophone — at first using an alto saxophone his mother had given him when he was about 14 — he did not yet understand that because of transposition between instruments, a C in the piano’s “concert key” was an A on his instrument.
When he learned the truth, he said, he developed a lifelong suspicion of the rules of Western harmony and musical notation.
In essence, Coleman believed that all people had their own tonal centers. He often used the word “unison” — though not always in its more common musical-theory sense — to describe a group of people playing together harmoniously, even if in different keys.
“I’ve learned that everyone has their own moveable C,” he said to the writer Michael Jarrett in an interview published in 1995; he identified this as “Do,” the start of anyone singing or playing a “do-re-mi” major-scale sequence. In the same conversation, he said he had always wanted musicians to play with him “on a multiple level.”
“I don’t want them to follow me,” he explained. “I want them to follow themselves, but to be with me.”
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