If you asked jazz firebrand Ornette Coleman about his music and philosophy, he probably would have referred you to an obscure music book, The Harmolodic Theory. First cited in his own liner notes to his 1972 symphonic album Skies of America, the alto saxophonist and composer was also the book's author. Only it was never published as a book and largely existed in Coleman’s head. Such elusiveness illustrated Coleman’s own music and life outlook. His melodies and compositions embodied whimsy and cosmic consciousness, all with an ever-curious, childlike mentality, right down to the fart jokes. “Sound is as free as the gas that passes through your butt,” he once told writer Philip Clark.
Starting with a sprint of albums made for Atlantic Records across a breathless 17-month period from May 1959 through December 1960, Coleman seemed to arrive on New York’s jazz scene fully formed, like Athena from Zeus’s split forehead. Albums like The Shape of Jazz to Come and Free Jazz – as dizzyingly complex or curiously hummable, unhinged and considered as they might be – were full of new possibilities. Even a detractor like Charles Mingus described Coleman’s playing succinctly in DownBeat magazine in 1960: “organized disorganization, or playing wrong right.” That ability to invert expectations inspired generations of jazz composers and rockers alike who arose in his wake. Lou Reed and Patti Smith brought such sensibilities to their own work, as did other New York punks, and critic Ben Ratliff could even hear an echo of Coleman’s horn in Bob Dylan’s “plaintive crying rasp”.
