Ornette quotation

Image of Ornette Coleman playing saxophone

This image is from an excellent set of pictures by Frank Schindelbeck, published here. I found the following on Wikiquote:

His musical inspiration operates in a world uncluttered by conventional bar lines, conventional chord changes, and conventional ways of blowing or fingering a saxophone. Such practical ‘limitations’ did not even have to be overcome in his music; they somehow never existed for him. Despite this–or more accurately, because of this–his playing has a deep inner logic. Not an obvious surface logic, it is based on subtleties of reaction, subtleties of timing and color that are, I think, quite new to jazz–at least they have never appeared in so pure and direct a form.

Gunther Schuller, quoted in Rockwell, John (1983). All Ameican Music: Composition in the Late Twentieth Century.


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