In 1959, Ornette Coleman walked into Radio Recorders in Hollywood, California with a plastic saxophone, no piano player, and a radical new idea about what jazz could be. The result was The Shape of Jazz to Come, an album so controversial it got him punched in the mouth by jazz legend Max Roach, dismissed by Miles Davis, and declared not jazz at all by Dizzy Gillespie. It also earned him the admiration of Leonard Bernstein, inspired John Coltrane to call their time together the most intense moment of his life, and invented an entirely new genre of music called Free Jazz.
This infographic documents the whole story … the quartet, the radical Harmolodic philosophy that threw out chord changes and hierarchy, the split reception that divided the jazz world, and the geographic footnote that says everything about Coleman’s outsider status: of the five landmark albums of 1959, four were recorded in New York City. He made his in Hollywood. The print is part of bopdb’s 1959 Series — five albums, five infographics, one extraordinary year in music history.