In the beginning of free jazz, there was Ornette Coleman. Actually, the alto saxophonist was the beginning of free jazz. His 1959 Atlantic recording The Shape of Jazz to Come followed on the heels of ...

Ornette Coleman has long been a puzzle to casual jazz fans, his name as baffling as his music, which seems to go everywhere and nowhere. If jazz is the “sound of surprise,” as Whitney Balliett once ...

Jazz legend Ornette Coleman plays the sax during a 2007 concert in Germany. (The Associated Press) Editor's note: In September 2006 The Oregonian's music critic Marty Hughley wrote the following ...

Some music embeds itself into our minds so deeply that it seems to congeal in the memory from our first hearing. So it is with the four-note theme of A Love Supreme, which from the moment most of us ...

A small shock wave rippled through the jazz world two years ago when the saxophonist Ornette Coleman started performing regularly again after a long absence. His new group was an acoustic quartet, ...

It's been a decade since the last bounty of Ornette recordings. 1995-96 saw releases from his free-funk mélange Prime Time; a robust quartet with pianist Geri Allen and bassist Charnett Moffett; and ...

Editor's note: In September 2006 The Oregonian's music critic Marty Hughley wrote the following review of "Sound Grammar," which was at the time Coleman's first album in about a decade and which later ...