 This video is brought to you by ExpressVPN. If you go to the link in the description, you can get three months of ExpressVPN absolutely free. The more you learn about Ornette Coleman, the more he seems to become a kind of unbelievable, mythical figure. He talked with Jacques Derrida and played music alongside the Grateful Dad. He once recorded an entire album with his 10-year-old son playing the drums. One of his first gigs in New York ended with the drummer punching him in the mouth. He started off his musical career with nothing to his name but a plastic saxophone and went on to become one of only two jazz musicians ever to win a Pulitzer Prize. Along the way, he even invented his own philosophy of musical thought, harmonotics. But really, it takes a near mythical figure to accomplish all that Coleman has in his career. Few others would have had the audacity to release an album called The Shape of Jazz to Come. And even fewer would have had the vision and talent to make that album live up to its name. Let's take a closer look. Ornette Coleman's playing has always pissed people off. As a kid, he was kicked out of his high school band for improvising during a march. Early in his career, a show in Baton Rouge offended some audience members so much that they assaulted him backstage and destroyed his saxophone. And when he broke into the New York jazz scene in the 1950s, his reception was contentious to say the least. The jazz establishment were shook by Coleman's music. Miles Davis, even called Coleman, all screwed up inside. If you want to understand why Coleman inspired such a response, you need only listen to his music. Take eventually the second track on The Shape of Jazz to Come. When you listen to this song, you start to get a sense of the radical musical ideas that confounded New York's jazz scene. It's a song that's manic, squeaky, and completely unhinged. It's strange and abrasive because it actively defies so many of the conventions of jazz music and of the Western musical tradition as a whole. This is because of Coleman's musical philosophy of harmonics. While he didn't coin the term until the 1970s, the theory behind harmonics has defined Coleman's entire musical career. Harmonics is, at its core, built on improvisation. But it's not the kind of improvisation practiced by most other jazz musicians. Typically jazz is improvised around rigid chord progressions or more loose modes and keys. These act as guidelines and roadmaps, keeping the musicians on the same page and allowing the music to speak in a vocabulary that's familiar to listeners. And Coleman had lots of experience improvising like this. He cut his teeth playing bebop, one of the most complex, challenging improvisational styles of jazz. But all this rigid structure didn't sit right with Coleman. He thought adhering to these structures created hierarchies in music. He would even call traditional music a caste system. Coleman made it his mission to tear music away from the cultural structures that had created this system. In throwing away tradition like this, Coleman hoped to democratize music. Within a harmonic framework, Coleman said, quote, Harmony, melody, speed, rhythm, time, and phrases all have equal position in the results that come from the placing and spacing of ideas. Coleman said that by focusing on only a few parts of music, you missed out on everything else that it could be. For him, music was a conversation, an active and spontaneous act of creation. He elaborated on this in a 1995 interview with Cadence magazine. In music, you have something called sound. You have speed, you have timbre, you have harmonics, and you have more or less the resolutions. In most music, they only use one dimension. Whereas, like, say I'm having this conversation with you now, I'm talking, but I'm thinking, feeling, smelling, moving, yet I'm concentrating on what you're saying. So that means that there's more things going on in the body than just the present thing that the person's got you doing. If these conversations sound heady to you, you're not the only one. Ornette Coleman is famous for the way he's able to philosophize about music. While he was stirring up New York's jazz scene, he would often talk into the early hours of the morning with John Coltrane, who was shaping jazz in his own way at the same time. Coltrane would record an album influenced heavily by these conversations called The Avant Garde in 1960. That album was recorded alongside the trumpeter Don Cherry, a frequent collaborator of Coleman's. And Cherry was more than just a collaborator, he also played an important role in helping Coleman change jazz. Because at the end of the day, music is a conversation between the players. In order for Coleman's harmonic theories to play out, he needed musicians that were just as creative and just as radical as himself. After years of searching, Coleman found those musicians in New York. Alongside Cherry, bassist Charlie Hayden and drummer Billy Higgins joined Coleman to form the Ornette Coleman quartet. Even the instrumental makeup of that quartet defied jazz tradition through its lack of piano. Typically, pianos provide a harmonic framework for songs. So by leaving it behind, Coleman was able to lean further into improvisations that were pure melody. Sometimes this manifested itself in wild, chaotic runs like in congeniality. But this style can also be used to create more laid back, calm pieces like peace. Even at its calmest, though, the music of Ornette Coleman can be abrasive to many years. Part of the reason behind that is the instrumentation. Throughout his entire career, Coleman used a graft and saxophone, a cheap, molded plastic instrument responsible for his famous squeaky sound. Meanwhile, Don Cherry frequently played a pocket cornet, a similarly atypical instrument. The end result is something the likes of which the New York jazz scene had never heard before. It was music that defied so many of the rules about what jazz was supposed to be. Now, this isn't to say that there was no structure whatsoever to Coleman's music. Some of his later work would push the limits of jazz even more. Two years after the shape of Jazz to Come, Coleman released Free Jazz, which sounds like this. But in the shape of Jazz to Come, you can still hear a lot of familiar jazz elements. Charlie Hayden's walking bass lines anchor the entire album, meshing seamlessly with Billy Hagan's energetic beats. Listen to the synergy on chronology. That synergy is important to the entirety of Coleman's process. All of his musicians were completely in sync with one another. They were on the same page and they understood that making this music was a democratic process. And within this democracy, they were free to experiment and push any and all boundaries they dared. There is one consistent structure to the shape of Jazz to Come. Each song begins on a head, a main theme that it will return to later in the song. This structure is borrowed from Bebop, but Coleman didn't like placing music into labels like Jazz or Bebop. He wanted his music to be viewed simply as music. A 2001 article in The New York Times has Coleman elaborating on this. Music is not a style. Music is ideas. In any normal style, you have to place certain notes in certain places. You play in that style and try to make people believe that style is more important than other styles, which removes you from the idea. With harmonics, you go directly to the idea. This means that trying to apply theoretical frameworks to Coleman's music is kind of missing the point. Coleman's music is meant to be musical expression in its most abstract, free form. And this comes through best in the opening track of The Shape of Jazz to Come, Lonely Woman. Being interviewed by Jacques Derrida, Coleman described the inspiration for that song. One day during my lunch break, I came across a gallery where someone had painted a very rich white woman who had absolutely everything that you could desire in life. And she had the most solitary expression in the world. I had never been confronted with such solitude. And when I got back home, I wrote a piece that I called Lonely Woman. That song was born not out of any musical structure, but out of pure emotion. It's loneliness put into musical form. The head reflects this. It's full of distant sorrow aided by the dissonance of Coleman and Cherry's instruments. In the improvised middle section, the song continues to meditate on the loneliness, but adds a tinge of desperation. It's not an improvisation on harmony. It's not an improvisation on chord changes. It's an improvisation on emotion and on the concept of loneliness. Lonely Woman became one of Coleman's best-known songs and is even seen by many as a jazz standard to this day, and it's a stirring example of the power that a song can have when you set it free from the constraints of musical hierarchy. When Ornette Coleman released The Shape of Jazz to Come, it was like someone had dropped a bomb on the New York jazz scene. Its audacious name drew attention and controversy, and that was amplified by its radical music. Some celebrated it as the most innovative jazz album ever recorded, while others dismissed it entirely. But soon enough, The Shape of Jazz to Come was living out its prophetic name. Coleman tore down the rules and conventions of jazz music and all music really. And suddenly, new art was allowed to thrive. It became clear that free jazz and avant-garde jazz was the next place for the genre to go. And artists like John Coltrane, Sun Ra, and Miles Davis dove head first into those waters. Even generations later, the influence of Coleman can be felt clearly on experimentalists like John Zorn. Coleman's influence echoes outside of the jazz world, too. You probably don't get the likes of Captain Beefheart or Frank Zappa without Coleman's daring rule-breaking. And that isn't even to speak of the rest of Coleman's career. The Shape of Jazz to Come was only the beginning. Over the next 50 years, Coleman would continue to innovate relentlessly, and he would establish his legacy as a truly singular musician and a creative force, the likes of which we may never see again. So, a lot of people have reached out to me to say that my Layla video has disappeared. 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