Alto saxophonist Ornette Coleman's masterpiece, Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation by the Ornette Coleman Double Quartet, is one of the hinges of jazz evolution. As a musical hinge, Free Jazz, ...

Few Americans know much about it, but a radical midcentury revolution in jazz was born in Los Angeles in the late 1950s. Some of the most exciting and challenging (and forgotten) American music was ...

Abstraction came late to jazz. New York's abstract expressionism art movement emerged in the late 1940s and flourished throughout the 1950s. By contrast, free jazz didn't coalesce until the late 1950s ...

Revolutionary composer Ornette Coleman died two years ago at age 85, his unorthodox ideas, liberated approach to collective improvisation and ear-worm melodies having forecast “the shape of jazz to ...

During Ornette Coleman’s legendary 1959 run of shows at the Five Spot club in New York, there was a joke going around: “A waiter drops a trayload of drinks and a man says to his lady-friend, ‘Listen ...

What happens after you set the world on fire? On six Blue Note LPs following landmark albums The Shape of Jazz to Come and Free Jazz, the mercurial saxophonist endeavored to find out. Conversely, the ...

Ornette Coleman, the jazz saxophonist, violinist, composer and icon known for his unorthodox style, died Thursday of cardiac arrest. He was 85. An integral part of the experimental free jazz movement ...

ALL Hell broke loose when the alto saxophonist Ornette Coleman made his East Coast nightclub debut, at the Five Spot Cafe, in Greenwich Village on November 17, 1959--twenty-five years ago last fall.

While his name and visage may not be as immediately recognizable as those of Miles Davis, John Coltrane, jazz composer and saxophonist Ornette Coleman did as much (or perhaps even more) to push the ...

Jazz pioneer Ornette Coleman has died at the age of 85. A representative of his family confirmed that he passed away in Manhattan today (June 11) after suffering a cardiac arrest. Coleman was a major ...

A protégé of the saxophonist Ornette Coleman, he borrowed from and greatly influenced styles like funk, punk, jazz and the blues. By Clay Risen Listen to favorite songs by an adventurous musician who ...

Ornette Coleman, an alto saxophonist whose highly expressive approach to jazz both jolted listeners and deeply influenced jazz, rock and funk musicians in the 1960s and beyond, died Thursday morning ...