Ornette Coleman: Fort Worth’s Free Spirit

Today is the birthday of Ornette Coleman. He would be 97 today.

Randolph Denard Ornette Coleman was born in Fort Worth, Texas on March 9, 1930. Fort Worth’s Southside was a thriving Black neighborhood with its own clubs, its own music economy, its own culture. Coleman grew up inside it. He taught himself to play alto saxophone in a fundamentally wrong way — or rather, a way that was entirely his own. He heard music differently from the start. That difference would eventually change jazz forever.

The Record That Broke the Lock

Coleman moved to Los Angeles in the early 1950s, then to New York, where he released The Shape of Jazz to Come on Atlantic Records in 1959. It remains one of the most consequential albums in American music history. It discarded the chord changes that had governed jazz improvisation for a generation. Ornette called it “free jazz” — a term he made literal with a 1960 double-quartet album of that exact name. Musicians either heard it as liberation or catastrophe. He kept playing regardless. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2007 for his album Sound Grammar. He died June 11, 2015, in New York. Fort Worth gave music its first free spirit. Find his place items on Texas Music Map.