Fluid and elusive

On June 11, cardiac arrest claimed the alto saxophonist Ornette Coleman. He was 85. For over 50 years, he’d been one of the most fascinating musicians and composers in jazz.

He was also one of its greatest paradoxes.

The scene of his 1959 breakthrough, for instance, was New York City’s Five Spot Café, one of the top jazz venues in the world, but he’d grown up in a Texas ghetto unpromisingly known as “the Bottoms.” He was an undisputed virtuoso, but he often performed on a plastic saxophone. His structurally fluid music, usually referred to as “free jazz,” could be dismaying in its demands on listeners and performers alike, yet its emphasis on intuition over intellectuality made it something that even a child could play (at least if the child was Coleman’s son Denardo, who made his recording debut at age 10 by drumming on his father’s 1966 album The Empty Foxhole).

And although enjoying Coleman’s music was never as difficult as what a lot of what’s been written about it might lead one to believe, putting that enjoyment into words was sometimes a different matter.

In his 1998 book Visions of Jazz: The First Century, the critic Gary Giddins cites Coleman’s “genius for rich and ribald melody,” adding that his “challeng[ing of] every preconception of Western music … was secondary to his magnanimous spirit, his blinding unison of purpose.” And rather than “free jazz,” which he tolerates, Giddins prefers describing Coleman’s “formidable sound” as “unalloyed blues.”

Wynton Marsalis hears the blues in Coleman too. “He brought another way of playing the blues, a real country way of playing the blues, the Texas blues,” Marsalis told American Heritage in 1995. “The sound of Charlie Parker, the whole tradition of the saxophone—Parker, Johnny Hodges—really resonates when Ornette plays. He plays very short themes, but they’re very melodic. He’s a genius melodic improviser.”

To describe his 1972 orchestra and jazz combo Skies of America, Coleman combined “harmony,” “movement,” and “melodic” into the portmanteau “harmolodic,” a portmanteau that eventually applied to his approach to composing and playing in general. Its meaning, however, has proved elusive. Given Coleman’s admiration for and identification with the architect Buckminster Fuller, a more useful adjective might’ve been “tensegrity,” which Fuller coined to describe his geodesic domes.

In Shirley Clarke’s documentary Ornette: Made in America, Coleman recalls attending a Fuller lecture in 1954 and experiencing an epiphany. “When he demonstrated the way his domes were put together and how geometric they were done,” Coleman says, “it just blew me away because I said, ‘This is how I’ve been writing music!’”

Merriam-Webster defines “tensegrity” as the “property of a skeletal structure having continuous tension members … and discontinuous compression members … so that each member performs efficiently in producing a rigid form.” Rewritten as the “property of a musical structure having continuous musical improvisation … and intuitively agreed-upon objective musical elements … so that each musician performs efficiently in producing a fluid form,” the definition does Coleman’s music considerable justice.

Ultimately, however, no one-size-fits-all term suits Coleman’s output. There’s full-bodied sensuality (the early albums Tomorrow Is the Question [1958] and The Shape of Jazz to Come [1959]). There’s full-contact appeal to the mind-body continuum (Free Jazz [1961], Chappaqua Suite [1965]). There’s relentlessly frenzied catchiness (Dancing in Your Head [1977]). There’s even World Music (Coleman’s cameo on the 2013 Master Musicians of Jajouka’s The Road to Jajouka). And all of it is executed with mastery and joy.

Coleman won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2007. Ask anyone: It was long overdue.