Introduction

Freedom stood out as a politically charged word in American public discourse during the late 1950s and early 1960s. It would be hard, in fact, to find a term more explosive, more laden with depths of meaning. Or proclaimed with more emotion during those tumultuous years …

It is impossible to comprehend the free jazz movement of these same years without understanding how it fed upon this powerful cultural shift in American society.[1]

This passage by jazz historian Ted Gioia captures the essence of the free jazz movement.

And it’s impossible to fully comprehend this movement without experiencing the work of Ornette Coleman. The saxophonist even coined the phrase in 1960 when he released his album, Free Jazz.

Free jazz is an avant-garde jazz style that emerged in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Musicians aimed to break free of past notions of unity, tone, and structure. Created primarily by Black musicians such as Coleman, free jazz expressed an aspiration by many to make jazz an expression of African identity, unbound by Eurocentric musical constraints.

When free jazz emerged in the late 1950s, the jazz press, let alone the mainstream media, weren’t sure how to address it. But in the meantime, visionary artists such as Ornette Coleman engaged in bold experimentation while attracting followers. Ironically, the absence of media coverage perhaps helped Coleman find his voice in jazz’s avant-garde.  

When the media spotlight finally fell on Coleman after his first album was released, the reviews provided a fascinating study in how critics come to terms with music that disrupts the status quo. In particular, we’ll look at how a few of those critics reacted to Coleman’s first album, Something Else!

A Traveling Show

Ornette Coleman began his career in 1949 as a traveling musician in a tent show called Silas Green from New Orleans. The show was owned and run by African Americans and toured the South. An article in the African American newspaper, the Chicago Defender, described the scope of the production, which included a blackface routine, a dancer, and “blues singer Cherry Mills”:

In a Pullman, six trucks and two buses, they transport fifty people, including performers, musicians, porters, cooks, and canvas boys. The fireproof and waterproof tent can shelter several 1000 people.[2]

As singers and dancers performed within this immense tent, they were accompanied by a band that likely played traditional jazz. Such traveling-show bands had nurtured up-and-coming musicians since the birth of jazz. Thus, Coleman, who would become one of the most forward-thinking innovators in jazz history, started by playing the earliest form of the music, dating back to New Orleans marching bands.

Pee Wee Crayton

However, Coleman left the Silas Green show a year later, in 1950. He found work as a sideman in touring bands.   

One of the first was the band of guitarist Pee Wee Crayton.

Crayton derived his style from T-Bone Walker and recently had a hit record. Coleman played tenor sax in the group. While the Crayton band performed out West, the Black Dispatch newspaper reported:

Pee Wee Clayton, the Nation’s No. 1 hit parade favorite, has set another engagement for Oklahoma’s most popular dance spot, Joe’s Skyline.

And while you are really cooling, latch on to some of that good old-fashioned aristocratic barbecue.[3]

The Clayton band continued westward on its tour, landing in Los Angeles. It was there that Ornette Coleman went out on his own and formed a band in 1951. He obtained a regular gig at a V.F.W. hall in Long Beach, California, as affirmed by this ad:

At that time, American listeners loved New Orleans music, and the twenty-one-year-old saxophonist had the chops to cash in. 

L.A.

But Coleman remained unsettled, continuing to move from band to band, place to place.

He moved to Austin, Texas, where he jammed with local musicians. But by 1953, Coleman moved back to Los Angeles. One day, he bumped into one of the Austin musicians he had befriended, trumpeter Bobby Bradford. Reportedly, it was during this period that Coleman began working out his unorthodox sound and his first compositions, playing with Bradford and other L.A. musicians. They put a band together and began searching for work.  

However, that proved to be difficult. The once-bustling jazz scene on L.A.’s Central Avenue had died down. Coleman and his band began playing clubs in a mixed-race neighborhood known for its vice – and good music. While working day jobs, Coleman played every gig he could find while showing up for every jam session he could find.

Although shunned by jazz stars, Coleman developed a following among like-minded iconoclasts, including up-and-coming comic Lenny Bruce. And like Bruce, Coleman discovered that it was the dives that allowed experimental artists to improvise and cross boundaries.[5]    

During that time, Coleman continued to tour with other bands. For instance, in 1957, he played in Vancouver in a group called the L.A. Jazz Stars. But Coleman aspired to assemble his own band.

And so, he put together a group with double bass player Charlie Haden and drummers Ed Blackwell and Billy Higgins. Also in the band was a young cornet player, Don Cherry, who shared Coleman’s vision of jazz freedom.

It was then that a fortuitous opportunity came Coleman’s way – a friend of Cherry introduced Coleman to music producer Lester Koenig of Contemporary Records. Koenig invited Coleman to put a band together and record an album.   

Something Else!

The recording session occurred in February and March of 1958. In addition to Coleman, Cherry, and Higgins, it included pianist Walter Norris and double bassist Don Payne. Renowned jazz writer Nat Hentoff had been recruited to write the liner notes and attended the session. In his memoir, Hentoff wrote of the humanity of Coleman’s style:

Startling as Coleman’s playing was, it had, at its core, the cry and cadences of the human voice. If he’d come from another background, he could have been a Jewish cantor.[6]

The title of the LP was Something Else! The Music of Ornette Coleman.

In his liner notes, Hentoff explained the title to square listeners:

According to current jazz argot, if a musician is “taking care of business,” he is playing very well. If he is, however, “something else,” he communicates with exceptional force. Altoist Ornette Coleman is something else, in several overtones of that term. As a player, a writer, and a person. Ornette’s story is so very much his own that he’s had a lonely time getting people, including musicians, to begin to listen. And yet once they do, it becomes clear, whether they like his music or not, that far from being esoteric or abstract, Ornette’s story is as basically rawly emotional as anyone’s in jazz, and more than most.[7]

Throwing the Cliches Overboard

Today, free jazz enthusiasts would find it hard to understand why Coleman’s music at that time, as captured on Something Else!, was controversial.  

Gioia explained:

In retrospect, we can see that Something Else! represents a less radical departure from the jazz tradition than both its critics and supporters claimed at the time. Conventional 32-bar and 12-bar structures are evident and familiar chord changes borrowed from standards … underpinned the solos. Moreover, Coleman’s improvisations capture a modal flavor and only hint at the atonality of his later work. Yet the freshness of Coleman’s and Cherry’s melodic lines stood out despite these remembrances of jazz past. It was as though the music had undergone an exemplary unburdening, as if all the cliches and hoary riffs accumulated over a half-century of jazz music were thrown overboard, lightening the load and opening up the horizon.[8]

With the recording completed, Coleman, still a relatively unknown musician, continued working. In April 1958, he performed in three concerts of “word jazz” presented by voice-over artist Ken Nordine. Nordine had been part of the jazz poetry movement by the Beats, where he conceived of “word jazz,” a similar concept. Nordine’s recordings ranged from lightly humorous to darkly bizarre. Some compared his poems to Kafka and Poe.

Meanwhile, Contemporary Records finished up the masters for Something Else! and sent out review copies in the summer of 1958.  

Pre-Release Reviews

Up to that point, Coleman had received little or no attention from the mass media. That changed as record reviewers around the country put Something Else! on their turntables and gave it a spin.

Russ Wilson of the Oakland Tribune published one of the first reviews in his column, “Needle Talk”:

This significant modern jazz album introduces 28-year-old alto saxophonist Ornette Coleman, who has something to say that’s worth hearing. He speaks in a highly personal and rawly emotional manner and, as Nat Hentoff points out in his comprehensive liner notes, communicates with exceptional force. Coleman displays some provocative ideas concerning pitch, sound and rhythm on the nine originals comprising the LP, and demonstrates that while he stems from Parker, he is his own man … The quintet is well integrated and has the potential of becoming a noteworthy group.[9]

 Although the capsule review drew heavily from Hentoff’s liner notes, Wilson was open to Coleman’s unconventional sound.

Across the Bay, C. H. Garrigues of the San Francisco Examiner wrote a more detailed and nuanced evaluation of the album:

The jazz musician who has been blowing up the most storm in southern California in recent months is Ornette Coleman, a sad-faced 28-year-old altoist who, after years of being overlooked by critics, musicians and the public has suddenly started marking it …

The arrival of his first record, Something Else!!!! establishes that the furor is not for nothing. It would be presumptuous to call him the first original altoist since Charlie Parker, and yet, in a sense, that is precisely what he is. He plays, in fact, as though he had never heard of Bird (nor of Diz, nor of 52nd Street) and yet as though he had discovered – just now – the bright new things Bird and Diz and the others were doing in the early and mid-forties …

To say this is not to say that Coleman will have the impact of another Parker. From these tracks, at least, there is missing much of the soaring lyric quality which was so much a part of Parker; missing too, is the fantastic technique which belonged to Bird. Nevertheless, his voice is one which demands and will receive a great deal of attention from now on. In a jazz world given over  increasingly either to sweetness and light, or to vain attempts to reproduce exactly and faithfully how Bird felt, it is no slight thing to find an altoist who knows and can play how HE feels.[10]

Billboard

However, it was after Contemporary Records released Something Else! in September 1958 that reviews began rolling in. 

One of the first was in the music trade paper Billboard. Up until then, it had barely covered Coleman. Billboard gave the LP three out of four stars and a positive review: 

Altoist Ornette Coleman … displays a sensitive and interesting modern style, one that is warm and appealing in the current genre. The tunes in the collection are all Coleman’s, written about five years ago. Coleman’s style is distinctly his own, but basic and emotional …[11]

After this, Coleman’s stock rose at Billboard, and they began covering him regularly. 

Indeed, for most of 1959, many record reviewers deemed Something Else! the “record of the day” or “record of the week.” Most critics praised it, though some didn’t like its discordant tone. Others said the LP would have a limited audience because of its unconventional music. Followers became evident, such as Russ Wilson of the Oakland Tribune, who continued to praise Coltrane as the future of jazz. And other critics were neutral about the album, noting the criticisms but not answering them.

But one thing was clear: the album was a barometer of critics’ open-mindedness.

A Non-Committed Critic

And as with the weather, that barometer occasionally plunged downward.

For example, the jazz critic for the Berkshire, Massachusetts Eagle penned a deeply troubling article in which he excused those who shunned musical controversy, including himself:

It is easy enough for people who have little contact with jazz to make up their minds about what and whom they like. They just don’t know any better. But those of us who hang around jazz musicians and follow the trends in the popular and esoteric journals have a much more difficult task. You see, the musicians themselves are about as mixed up and prejudiced a bunch as you could find anywhere, and they spend so much time ripping apart the music and theories of their colleagues that it’s no wonder they have little time to improve their own offerings.

The recently ended School of Jazz in Lenox is a case in point. This year, there appeared at the school a 29-year-old alto saxophonist from the West Coast named Ornette Coleman. This talented young man split the faculty of the school smack down the middle because he plays in a style that is uniquely his own, a chaotic effusion that enraged the more traditionally oriented of the teachers.

Coleman grabs a handful of notes and rides them down and around. Some faculty members regarded this as the new slipstream off the mainstream of jazz, speaking in tones that had formerly been reserved only for the late Charlie “Yardbird” Parker. Other faculty members decried the seeming formlessness, which ripped down all standards and the surging bitterness that dominated the sound …

The school ended its session with no definite victory for either side. Even the most enthusiastic propagandists began to hedge a little, and people went their various ways, shaking their various heads.[12]

The writer then advised the reader to take no sides and conceal their ignorance:

I’ve been getting away with it now for 19 years, and I have the kind of face that fools nobody.[13]

Monterey Jazz

However, following the release of Something Else!, Coleman had the support of a handful of American critics willing to put their reputation on the line and support his music. Their faith was confirmed as the sax player climbed the ladder to jazz legitimacy, starting with an invitation to perform at the 1959 Monterey Jazz Festival.

For many, one of the best parts of the festival was when Coleman and Cherry played “Relays,” a piece written for them by John Lewis of the Modern Jazz Quartet. The Examiner’s C. H. Garrigues called it a highlight of that day, as did the Oakland Tribune’s Russ Wilson.

Gene Lees, managing editor of DownBeat, watched the performance and wrote:

One of the most stimulating performances came from Ben Webster, Coleman Hawkins and Ornette Coleman. This is a study in contrast. With Webster and Hawkins embodying the vital tradition of jazz, and Coleman hinting at another and esoteric direction that may be in its future.

Various musicians and writers-on-jazz at the festival admitted that they did not understand what Ornette was doing, though how many of them would admit that publicly is questionable. Ornette frankly puzzled this writer … Yet whatever it is that he is doing on his plastic alto, his work with Webster and Hawkins was intensely exciting.[14]

Thus, after years in the media wilderness, a wandering sax player with an iconoclastic style garnered attention from top jazz critics. In fact, one has to wonder if being under the radar contributed to Coleman’s norm-breaking sound. Perhaps being outside the glare of criticism creates a safe space for sensitive young artists seeking their voices.    

Conclusion

Of course, this was just the start for Ornette Coleman, whose landmark albums like The Shape of Jazz to Come and Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation opened the door for future generations of musicians. Coleman continued his ceaseless experimentation until his death at the age of 85 in 2015.

When free jazz emerged in the late 1950s, the jazz press, let alone the mainstream media, weren’t sure how to address it. But in the meantime, visionary artists such as Ornette Coleman engaged in bold experimentation with tone, rhythm, and structure. Ironically, the absence of media coverage during that period provides insight into how Coleman found his voice in jazz’s avant-garde without press commentary.    

Conversely, the presence of media coverage after Coleman’s album debut provides a fascinating study in how critics come to terms with music that disrupts the status quo.  

Notes

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[1] Ted Gioia. The History of Jazz (Oxford University Press, 2011): 309.

[2] Ramona Lowe. “‘Silas Green From New Orleans’ Still the Apple of Dixie’s Eye,” Chicago Defender, Jan. 29, 1949: 20.

[3] Uncredited. “Pee Wee Clayton at Skyline,” Black Dispatch, Sept. 16, 1950: 6.

[4] Ad. Long Beach Independent, April 27, 1951:46.

[5] Matthew Duersten. “How Ornette Coleman Created the L.A. Underground,” PBS SoCal, June 12, 2015. Webpage retrieved Aug. 8, 2025:

https://www.pbssocal.org/shows/artbound/how-ornette-coleman-created-the-l-a-underground.

[6] Nat Hentoff. Speaking Freely: A Memoir (Alfred A. Knopf, 1997): 46.

[7] Nat Hentoff. Liner notes for Something Else!!!! The Music of Ornette Coleman, Contemporary Records, LAC 12170, Sept. 1958.

[8] Ted Gioia. The History of Jazz (Oxford University Press, 2011): 314. 

[9] Russ Wilson. “Needle Talk: New Altoist Makes Debut,” Oakland Tribune, July 27, 1958: B-15.

[10] C. H. Garrigues, “An Altoist Who Blew Up a Horn,” San Francisco Examiner, Aug. 31, 1958: 8.

[11] Uncredited. “Reviews and Ratings of New Jazz Albums,” Billboard, Dec. 8, 1958: 38.

[12] Milton R. Bass. “The Lively Arts,” Berkshire Eagle, Sept. 10, 1959: 6.

[13] Milton R. Bass. “The Lively Arts,” Berkshire Eagle, Sept. 10, 1959: 6.

[14] Gene Lees. “The Monterey Festival: This One Was For Jazz,” DownBeat, Nov. 12, 1959: 23.