Ornette Coleman: The Shape of Jazz to Come

Copy at Case Memorial Library
Gary Giddins wrote in the New Yorker: "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 … the drummer Max Roach came to listen and … 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'" (4/14/08).