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 ...

Craft Recordings does its usual excellent job with 180G vinyl recordings that will allow a listener with good ears to really appreciate what Coleman was struggling to express. Weird tricks of pitch ...

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 ...

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.

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 ...

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 ...

On June 11, the world lost one of modern music’s most revolutionary and controversial thinkers. Ornette Coleman’s entry into the recorded jazz world, 1958’s Something Else!!, ruffled many a feather.