Ornette Coleman

Randolph Denard Ornette Coleman was born on March 9, 1930, in Fort Worth, Texas. His parents, Randolph and Rosa Coleman, had Texas roots reaching back to Calvert; his father, a singer whom the boy chiefly remembered glimpsed once in a baseball uniform, died when Ornette was about seven, leaving his mother, a seamstress, to raise the family through hard and disciplined work.

Largely self-taught, Coleman took up the saxophone around the age of fourteen, his mother saving to buy him his first horn. At Fort Worth's I.M. Terrell High School he came up alongside future musicians such as Dewey Redman, Prince Lasha, Charles Moffett, and John Carter, absorbing the blues and rhythm-and-blues of the region before carrying his restless ear westward.

By the late 1950s, working in Los Angeles, Coleman assembled the pathbreaking quartet whose 1959 arrival in New York shook the jazz world. Abandoning fixed chord changes, tonality, and set rhythm, he rooted improvisation in ensemble feeling and blues phrasing. His 1960 album Free Jazz gave a movement its name, and his later theory of "harmolodics" reframed how melody, harmony, and rhythm might share equal weight.

A saxophonist, trumpeter, violinist, and composer of songs, chamber works, and symphonic pieces, Coleman received the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Music for his album Sound Grammar. He died in New York City on June 11, 2015. May the honored Ornette Coleman be remembered as a fearless voice who taught music itself to breathe freely.