Ornette Coleman Dead At 85 Another legendary musician was lost today. Jazz composer and saxophonist Ornette Coleman has passed away at age 85. Via NYTimes : Ornette Coleman, the alto saxophonist and composer who was one of the most powerful and contentious innovators in the history of jazz, died on Thursday in Manhattan. He was 85. The cause was cardiac arrest, a family representative said. Mr. Coleman widened the options in jazz and helped change its course. Partly through his example in the late 1950s and early ’60s, jazz became less beholden to the rules of harmony and rhythm while gaining more distance from the American songbook repertoire. His own music, then and later, embodied a new type of folk song: providing deceptively simple melodies for small groups with an intuitive, collective musical language and a strategy for playing without preconceived chord sequences. In 2007, he won the Pulitzer Prize for his album “Sound Grammar.” So sad. May he rest in peace.
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R.I.P. Jazz Saxophonist Ornette Coleman Passes Away At Age 85
