BY Oladipo Akinkugbe
Iconic American jazz saxophonist, Ornette Coleman died, on Thursday in Manhattan after a cardiac arrest, aged 85.
Coleman is celebrated as one of the prime innovators of the free jazz form and is credited with inspiring free Jazz movement of the 1960s after the release of his sixth studio album titled Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation in 1961.
He is arguably the most respected figure in Jazz and surely the most controversial.
Coleman began his career in late 1940s, performing R&B and bebop initially on a tenor saxophone. From the beginning of his career, his approach to music was unorthodox.
His freestyle approach to chord progression and melody made him infamous to the point that he was beaten up outside a club in Los Angele and his tenor saxophone was smashed in the assault.
After the incident, Coleman switched to a white alto saxophone, which then became his trademark. After the release of two albums in 1958 Something Else!!!!: The Music of Ornette Coleman and 1959 The Shape of Jazz to Come, jazz aficionados and the music industry began coming around to his radical idea of Jazz improvisation.
Since then, Coleman has released over 50 albums through his career. In 2007, Coleman’s album, Sound Grammar, received Pulitzer Prize for music as well as a Grammy Award for Lifetime Achievement.
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