Something Else.(Ornette Coleman)

Avid expectation invariably precedes a concert by Ornette Coleman, the revolutionary alto saxophonist, composer, and sometime trumpeter and violinist. But the revivalist fervor that accompanied his appearance at Town Hall on a recent Friday evening was something else. This was Coleman's first New York appearance since a flurry of institutional crownings last year: the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, the Kennedy Center Living Jazz Legend Award, and, from his native state, the Texas Medal of Arts. Most remarkably, he won the Pulitzer Prize for music, for his self-produced album "Sound Grammar," his first recording in a decade; it's the only time the award has ever been given for a commercial record. Broadway-scale ticket prices magnified the homecoming--Coleman has lived in New York for nearly half a century--with an aura of exclusivity, and, in an eighty-minute performance, he did not disappoint. The audience emerged awed by his undiminished vigor and capacity to surprise. As my wife and I pulled ourselves away from the Forty-third Street afterglow, she said, "Explain to me again why he was so controversial."

No musician has ever roiled the jazz establishment quite as much as Coleman. Musical history is filled with jeering audiences and critics, but not many musicians have inspired personal violence. In Louisiana, in 1949, Coleman was summoned from a bandstand and beaten bloody by a mob which also destroyed his saxophone. A decade later, when he arrived in New York to play at the Five Spot, in Cooper Square, the drummer Max Roach came to listen and, as Coleman tells it, ended up punching him in the mouth. But musicians with a grounding in the classical avant-garde were more encouraging: Leonard Bernstein declared him a genius, Gunther Schuller wrote a concerto with him in mind, and John Lewis, the pianist and musical director of the Modern Jazz Quartet, touted him as the most important jazz figure since Charlie Parker.

The object of this furor is a preternaturally gentle man who speaks, with a modest lisp, in visionary metaphors and bold assertions. Those assertions came initially, between 1958 and 1960, in a series of provocative album titles: "Something Else!!!!"; "The Shape of Jazz to Come"; "Change of the Century." His double-quartet album, "Free Jazz," ornamented with cover art by Jackson Pollock, made him, along with Cecil Taylor and John Coltrane, the most radical and divisive member of a movement that set aside fixed meters, harmonies, and structures. His phrase "free jazz" became the war cry of an entire generation.

Although Coleman performs to packed stadiums at European festivals, he remains unknown to most Americans. Perhaps the chief impediment to greater popularity is the very quality that centers his achievement: the raw, rugged, vocalized, weirdly pitched sound of his alto saxophone. Considered uniquely, radiantly beautiful by fans, it is like no other sound in or out of jazz. Within the space of a few notes--a crying glissando, say, or a chortling squeak--Coleman's sound is as unmistakable as the voice of a loved one. Even now, in a far noisier and more dissonant world than 1959, listening to Coleman can be a bracing experience for the uninitiated. Coleman's attitude toward intonation is unconventional. The classical composer Hale Smith once spoke to me of Coleman's "quarter-tone pitch," by which he meant that Coleman plays between the semitones of an ordinary chromatic scale. The core of Coleman's genius, Smith felt, is that, however sharp or flat he is from accepted pitch, he is consistent from note to note. Coleman hears so acutely that even when he is out of tune with the rest of the musical world he is always in tune with himself.

Much of Coleman's career has been dedicated to creating ensembles that complement this sound. He has usually avoided instruments with fixed pitch, like the piano, and instead has sought bassists and guitarists who, through special tunings or sheer empathy, can harmoniously balance his timbre and intonation. This search has led him to explore a wider range of contexts than any other jazz composer. He has written for symphony orchestra (most successfully, the 1972 magnum opus "Skies of America"), woodwind quintet, string quartet, and jazz trios, quartets, ...