New York - Groundbreaking jazz artist Ornette Coleman, who brushed aside convention with his prophetically titled 1959 album "The Shape of Jazz to Come," died Thursday aged 85.
The saxophonist and composer, who so polarized early audiences that many would walk out from his performances, died of cardiac arrest in his adopted home of New York, his publicist Ken Weinstein said.
Coleman, along with John Coltrane, was one of the original forces behind so-called "free jazz" that broke down traditional structures of harmony and allowed a more free-flowing form of expression.
Best known as an alto saxophonist, Coleman cast away traditional notions that a musician needed to stay within chord progressions and instead pursued solos that detractors considered chaotic but gradually became commonplace in jazz and rock.
Coleman said that jazz needed to "express more feelings than it has up to now," saying that chord structures were confining and unnatural.
Instead, the self-taught musician said that jazz should be a form of human communication.
"The idea is that two or three people can have a conversation with sounds, without trying to dominate it or lead it," Coleman said in a 1997 interview with the French philosopher Jacques Derrida.
"What I mean is that you have to be -- intelligent," he said.
"I think the musicians are trying to reassemble an emotional or intellectual puzzle, in any case a puzzle in which the instruments give the tone."
AFP
