Jazz legend Coleman still searching for new sounds

Charles J. Gans

NEW YORK — Ornette Coleman has always kept ahead of the curve, even as a teenager back in Fort Worth, Texas, when he’d play hot jazz licks on the saxophone and get a scolding from his church bandleader.

The jazz visionary, who turned 76 on Feb. 7, still refuses to slow down to let others catch up, launching his own record label with his first disc of new music in nearly a decade — the Grammy-nominated CD “Sound Grammar.”

As a largely self-taught musician who dared to be different in the late 1940s and ’50s, Coleman suffered worse indignities than even the most hapless “American Idol” contestant. One bandleader paid him not to solo; others simply fired him. Musicians walked off the stage when he showed up at jam sessions. Coleman was told he played out-of-tune and didn’t know the basics of jazz improvisation.

One incident remains deeply ingrained in the saxophonist’s memory — the night circa 1950 when he was playing with a R&B band at a Louisiana roadhouse and his unconventional bebop-inspired solo stopped the dancers in their tracks. Coleman was dragged outside the club and roughed up; his horn thrown over a cliff.

“One guy kicked me in my stomach ... and said, ‘You can’t play like that!’ He didn’t even know what I was doing,” recalled Coleman, perched on a stool in the music room of his Manhattan loft. “I think with dance music it’s the rhythm that people like and I was just playing musical ideas. But I really did grow when I realized that all music uses the same notes, whether it’s classical or religious or funk. ... And when I realized that ... I decided to take my beatings until I can establish where people can say, ‘Oh, don’t beat him, listen.’”

Coleman now is regarded as one of the greatest innovators in jazz history, along with Louis Armstrong and Charlie Parker. In the late ’50s, he originated “free jazz,” challenging the bebop establishment by abandoning the conventional song form and liberating musicians to freely improvise off of the melody rather than the underlying chord changes. Coleman broke down the barrier between leader and sidemen, giving his band members freedom to solo, interact and develop their ideas.

“In order to play with Ornette, you have to listen to every note that he plays as you’re playing, and you really learn about concentration and listening in that way. ... Ornette approaches improvisation completely different than most people,” said bassist Charlie Haden, a member of Coleman’s original quartet that rocked the jazz establishment when it burst on the scene in 1959 with the aptly titled album “The Shape of Jazz to Come.”

The jazz revolutionary has now become a respected elder statesman with the accompanying honors, including membership in the elite American Academy of Arts and Letters.

This year, even the National Academy for the Recording Arts & Sciences, the organization that presides over the Grammy Awards, got around to recognizing Coleman with a lifetime achievement award — even though he has never won a Grammy.

But Coleman feels an obligation to musicians and audiences to write new music for every concert he performs, rather than play his old compositions or jazz standards.

“‘Tea for Two’ — I don’t do that,” he said.

Frustrated by dealing with fickle record company executives, he started his Sound Grammar label because he wanted “to put out lots of music and some people’s tastes might not be the way mine is.”

The album “Sound Grammar,” which was nominated for a 2007 Grammy as best jazz instrumental album but lost, is Coleman’s first live recording in nearly 20 years. Its unusual sonic mix includes two acoustic bassists — the classically trained Tony Falanga, who mostly uses the bow, and Greg Cohen, who plucks his bass.

Coleman not only plays alto saxophone but also trumpet and violin, two instruments he taught himself to play in an unorthodox style in the 1960s to give himself a more colorful sound palette. The drummer is Coleman’s son, Denardo, who has developed an intuitive interplay with his father since his controversial debut in the saxophonist’s band at age 10 in 1966.

The recording, from a 2005 concert in Ludwigshafen, Germany, features six new Coleman compositions, including the heart-wrenching ballad “Sleep Talking,” on which he again shows his uncanny ability to make his saxophone cry out like a human voice with a full gamut of emotions.

He also revisits two older pieces — the frenetic “Song X,” the title track from a 1985 album with guitarist Pat Metheny, and “Turnaround” from his 1959 album “Tomorrow Is The Question,” on which the alto saxophonist’s bluesy wails reflect his R&B roots with quotes thrown in from “Beautiful Dreamer” and “If I Loved You.”

“I want everyone to have an equal relationship to the results,” said Coleman. “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.”

Coleman may be one of the most controversial figures in modern American music, but in person the slightly built musician comes across as a modest, gentle revolutionary — soft-spoken with a high-pitched voice that still bears a trace of a Texas twang.

“I don’t claim [to be] the best at anything,” said Coleman, whose mustachioed angular face is deeply lined. “But I do know that I have learned how to avoid making musical mistakes.”

In conversation, Coleman shapes his responses almost as if he is improvising a jazz solo in words rather than notes, stating a theme and stretching it out in an unpredictable way, then returning to it and taking off in a different direction, occasionally bouncing an enigmatic question off of his interlocutor (“What is the purpose of human beings?”).

One theme he constantly returns to is motherhood, and he likes to recall what his mother told him whenever he sought her approval: “Don’t worry, Junior, I know who you are.”

Coleman credits his mother with giving him the strength to overcome the adversity he faced growing up in largely segregated Fort Worth. Coleman’s father died when he was 7, and his mother supported the family on her seamstress earnings. She bought him his first saxophone when he was 14 from money he earned shining shoes.

“At that time, bebop was just being born and Charlie Parker was the main man,” said Coleman. “I said, ‘Oh man, what kind of music is that?’ And I thought I’m going to play that.”

Coleman’s bebop solos made him a poor fit with the R&B bands dominating the local circuit. Tired of rejection, he moved to Los Angeles in 1952, landing a job as a department store elevator operator and studying music theory on his breaks.

Coleman, who a decade before the Beatles had shoulder-length hair and a beard, soon found a like-minded group of musicians, including Haden, who had performed in his family’s bluegrass band back in Missouri; Don Cherry, who played a tiny pocket trumpet; and drummer Billy Higgins.

“I wanted to play on the inspiration of a composition rather than on the chord structure ... and every time I tried to do this the other musicians that I was playing with would be upset with me,” said Haden. “And the first time I played with Ornette, all of a sudden the lights were turned on for me because here was someone else who was ... doing the same thing I was trying to do.”

Coleman recorded his first album, “Something Else,” for Los Angeles-based Contemporary Records in 1958. The new sound caught the attention of the Modern Jazz Quartet’s pianist and musical director John Lewis, who introduced Coleman to Atlantic Records producer Nesuhi Ertegun.

The November 1959 New York debut of Coleman’s quartet at the Five Spot set off a musical firestorm. Coleman’s radical new approach had its champions, including the classical composers Leonard Bernstein and Virgil Thompson. But many leading jazz musicians denounced him as a charlatan.

Miles Davis remarked that “psychologically, the man is all screwed up inside.”

Undaunted, Coleman went on to release a series of groundbreaking albums for Atlantic, most notably the double-quartet recording “Free Jazz,” which featured a nearly 40-minute collective improvisation.

Coleman has always considered himself more than a jazz player. He has journeyed to Morocco to play in a mountain hut with the Master Musicians of Joujouka, performed with Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead and composed works for string quartet, woodwind quintet and even a symphony, “Skies of America,” that he performed with the New York Philharmonic and his own electric free-funk fusion band Prime Time.

Coleman, who previously called his musical system “harmolodics,” now prefers to call it “sound grammar.” He is seeking to decode that universal musical language that crosses all borders.

“I would like to go around the world and play with people that don’t worry about the key they’re in or the song they’re playing ... because I really do play from sound,” said Coleman, who has decorated the main room of his loft with folk art he has collected on his musical odysseys to Morocco, Nigeria, India and elsewhere.

“To me sound is eternal ... and there are still some notes that haven’t been heard. I don’t know where to find them, but I know they are there.”

(Associated Press)