|
 Ken Weinstein confirmed the death but said he would not be
issuing any further information. Media reports said the cause of
death was cardiac arrest.
Coleman's motto for his music, often uttered before starting his
performances, was "I'd like to go out in space tonight." He
would then launch into music that broke the limits of
conventional bars, keys, chord changes and harmony.
Coleman so divided jazz musicians, critics and fans that in his
early years some musicians at jam sessions would leave the stage
during his solos.
His fans labeled him the greatest jazz innovator since Louis
Armstrong and Charlie Parker but he also was called crude and
self-indulgent by skeptics - although many of them reversed
their opinions over the years.
"I listened to Coleman high and I listened to him cold sober,"
trumpet player Roy Eldridge once told a jazz writer. "I even
played with him. I think he's jiving, baby."
Coleman's outlaw approach involved what he called "harmolodics"
- breaking away from traditional harmonic structure and
"removing the caste system from music."
He found approval through the years and in 2007 was given a
Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award and was an award presenter at
the ceremony. He also won a Pulitzer Prize for Music, as well as
a Grammy nomination, for the 2007 album "Sound Grammar" and in
2014 released "New Vocabulary."
Often working with trumpeter Don Cherry, Coleman recorded
40-plus albums.
"I wasn't so interested in being paid. I wanted to be heard,"
Coleman said in a 2009 interview with Esquire magazine. "That's
why I'm broke."
Born in a poor, black neighborhood of Fort Worth, Texas, Coleman
said he grew up "so po' we couldn't afford the 'o' and the 'r.'"
At 14, he bought a cheap alto saxophone and mimicked radio
melodies. He began playing in honky tonks and at 19 traveled the
South, playing blues with a minstrel show.
He made his way to Los Angeles, where he began perfecting his
free-form style. Coleman was inspired by the inventive bebop
jazz performers of the time and also wove honky tonk, blues and
dance music into his unconventional harmonies.
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"I didn't know I was improvising," Coleman said. "I just thought
that was the way you played music ... I didn't think of a structure
and what you could and couldn't do."
In 1958, Contemporary Records bought some of Coleman's compositions
but studio musicians could not play them. Coleman himself was hired
to record them, leading to his first album, "Something Else!"
He first played in New York a year later at the Five Spot nightclub.
Composer Leonard Bernstein and John Lewis, founder of the Modern
Jazz Quartet, were among his supporters.
Many critics, however, echoed the comments of a journalist who
called Coleman's music "incoherent, ugly and sick, not only hybrid
but meaningless."
Coleman was signed by Atlantic Records and made such albums as "The
Shape of Jazz to Come" (1959), which Rolling Stone magazine ranked
No. 248 on its list of 500 greatest albums, "This Is Our Music"
(1960) and "Free Jazz" (1961). Sales were low and he was soon
dropped by the label.
Coleman studied various musical forms and in 1972 released a
symphony called "Skies of America." Another work was a 1977 album
called "Dancing in Your Head" that featured a jam session recorded
in Morocco with tribal musicians.
In the '70s he began working with electric guitarists and formed the
band Prime Time, which incorporated rock-funk sounds.
Coleman married poet Jayne Cortez in 1954 and they divorced 10 years
later. Their son, Denardo, was a drummer who began performing with
his father at age 10 and managed his career in the 1980s.
(Reporting by Patricia Reaney in New York; Editing by Franklin Paul
and Matthew Lewis)
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