Jazz saxophonist Coleman, who is almost 85, rarely makes records any more. In New Vocabulary, he joins up trumpet and drums — and peppers his solos with his signature catchy and earthy pet phrases.

Jazz’s version of the famous—or infamous—1913 Armory show that introduced Americans to modern art came on November 17, 1959, when Ornette Coleman began a run of shows at the Five Spot Cafe in New York ...

This week's staff song pick comes from News & Notes producer Roy Hurst. His choice is Ornette Coleman's "Only Once," a piece Hurst describes as an emotional and challenging composition. Time now for ...

Among Ornette Coleman's periods of relative quiet, the turn of the 1960s into the 1970s may well be the most frustrating. More than three years of musical life—from the final Blue Note sessions 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 ...

Few jazz musicians have been honored and reviled, celebrated and cursed more widely or more vigorously than Ornette Coleman, who died at 1 a.m. Thursday in Manhattan at age 85. An innovator to the ...

Shirley Clarke's final feature-length film centered on the jazz legend Ornette Coleman gets a loving polish as part of Milestone Films' "Project Shirley." By THR Staff Ornette Made in America Poster - ...

The first time I saw Ornette Coleman live was in my hometown of Syracuse in the summer of 1986; the next month I moved West to begin my studies at CalArts with Charlie Haden and the other fine faculty ...

ALL Hell broke loose when the alto saxophonist Ornette Coleman made his East Coast nightclub debut, at the Five Spot Cafe, in Greenwich Village on November 17, 1959--twenty-five years ago last fall.

Listen to favorite songs by an adventurous musician who pushed the boundaries of jazz, selected by writers and musicians including Nailah Hunter, Kieran Hebden and the artist’s son Eagle-Eye Cherry.