Pulitzer panel gets hip

Composer and instrumentalist Ornette Coleman logged another breakthrough on Monday.

In February, the avant-garde jazz patriarch had taken home a Grammy Award for lifetime achievement while also being nominated for his careening 2006 quartet release, “Sound Grammar.” This week, the Pulitzer Prize committee gave this year’s music award to Coleman for “Sound Grammar.”

Well known within jazz’s rarefied circles as an improvisational pathfinder, Coleman had established landmarks for 50 years. Why the award now?

The selection of Coleman’s disc over Elliot Goldenthal’s opera “Grendel” and Augusta Read Thomas’ orchestral work “Astral Chronicle” read as a progressive attempt to broaden and unwhiten the Pulitzer music category. From the music prize’s 1943 inception through 2006, there had been exactly one jazz-centered competitive Pulitzer -- in 1997 for the epic “Blood on the Fields” by Wynton Marsalis, the second African American to win a Pulitzer in the music category. (George Walker, in 1996, was the first; Coleman is now the third.)

The technical demands and artistic range of jazz had long earned it the description of “America’s indigenous classical music.” But more inclusive submission rules forced the Pulitzer doorway wider only after composer John Adams, the 2003 awardee, sniped at the music division’s credibility. Since then, avant-jazz leaders Muhal Richard Abrams and George E. Lewis have been among the Pulitzer judges. And special posthumous citations have gone to exploratory jazz deities Thelonious Monk (2006) and John Coltrane (2007).

At 77, Coleman was overdue for recognition. Since his first head-turning Los Angeles recordings in 1958, he has written symphonic and chamber music while making original contributions in group improv and electric jazz-funk. Unlike any past Pulitzer selection, including Marsalis’ “Blood on the Fields,” “Sound Grammar” is dominated by improvisation, the essence of jazz.

It’s a bold choice -- a hip choice, even. If the Pulitzer image shapers wanted to crack a mold, they’ve done it. Loudly.