When Ornette Coleman and his “free jazz” ethos arrived in New York’s jazz scene in the late 1950’s, he shook up one of the world’s great cultural hubs. He was attempting to throw off the constraints of Western harmonic and rhythmic systems. The results could be dizzying, or cacophonous, or plaintive, or just gorgeous. This track, from the album The Shape of Jazz to Come, captures that still captures that ethic more than 60 years later.
