Improvisation for Ornette Coleman #4

T. Renner, "Improvisation for Ornette Coleman #4," 2009, oil on canvas, 18" x 24".

Ben Ratliff writes in today's New York Times:

"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 morning in Manhattan. He was 85.

"The cause was cardiac arrest, a representative of the family 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, and gained more distance from the American songbook repertoire. His own music, then and later, became a new form of highly informed folk song: deceptively simple melodies for small groups with an intuitive, collective language, and a strategy for playing without preconceived chord sequences."