Ornette Coleman, legend behind free jazz, dead at 85

Ornette Coleman, one of jazz's most groundbreaking artists who brushed aside convention with his prophetically titled 1959 album "The Shape of Jazz to Come," died Thursday. He was 85.

His death was confirmed to AFP by his publicist, Ken Weinstein. Coleman was born and raised in Texas but died in New York, where he had become both dapper fixture on the social circuit and an opinionated voice of the direction of music.

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," he said.

- Radical change to harmony -

"The Shape of Jazz to Come" stunned the jazz world, with leading artists including Miles Davis among the critics.

Not only did Coleman defy concepts of harmony with his saxophone playing, but the album lacked any piano or guitar, so often used to keep the songs together through chords.

The album featured the intense song "Lonely Woman," written by Coleman about a high-society shopper he spotted when he was working at a Los Angeles department store, which went on to become a standard among jazz musicians.

Coleman followed up the next year with the album "The Change of the Century," also recorded in young-spirited California rather than one of the more established jazz capitals.

But Coleman's career took numerous turns and in 1962, with his star power just established, he abruptly but temporarily retired from music.

He later re-emerged by learning the trumpet and violin, showing a musical innovation that stayed with him throughout his life.

In the 1990s, he found inspiration in India and brought out tabla players to perform with jazz and classical musicians in a piece he wrote for the New York Philharmonic.

Coleman was known for his dapper suits and counted prominent rock musicians, notably Lou Reed, among his friends and collaborators.

But he had a notorious relationship with music labels. His groundbreaking works were released on Atlantic Records, then considered on the cutting edge, but he had little patience for the industry's business side.

"I've never had a relationship with a record executive. I always went to the record company (because of) someone that liked my playing. Then they would get fired, and I'd be left with the record company," Coleman told Cadence magazine in 1995.

- Acclaimed, but an outsider -

Coleman grew up in Fort Worth, Texas, where he said that he thought that a saxophone was a toy when he saw one.

His mother gave him his first saxophone as a gift after Coleman had helped save up money by working as a shoeshine boy.

He would later describe being affected by watching the oppression of fellow African Americans in the South. But he also felt like an outsider when he left, recalling that he was initially considered too effete by black artists in Los Angeles.

In New York, he recalled that fellow musicians at first doubted his intellectual caliber skills due to his Southern background.

His survivors include Denardo Coleman, a prominent jazz drummer who often recorded with his father and served as his manager.