Ornette Coleman's Greatest Hits

Born Randolph Denard Ornette Coleman in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1930, Coleman got his first saxophone as a child. Right away, he knew what to do with it: just start playing, he said in an interview with Cadence magazine published in 1995. "No one has to 

The New York Times reports that the alto saxophone great and free jazz pioneer Ornette Coleman died this morning in Manhattan after suffering from cardiac arrest. Coleman was 85, and we will not see his like again.

Ornette Coleman, the American saxophonist and composer who liberated jazz from conventional harmony, tonality, structure and expectation, died early on Thursday of cardiac arrest in Manhattan. He was 85. Coleman was an American icon and iconoclast 

Alto Saxophonist, composer and overall innovator in the world of jazz, Ornette Coleman, passed away Thursday at the age of 85. According to a family representative, the cause of death was cardiac arrest. Coleman altered the parameters of jazz through

Every jazz musician, it seems, has an Ornette Coleman story. Here are some of them.