FESTIVAL ’90 : Coleman Forges Ahead While Taking a Look Back : Jazz: Revolutionary saxophonist Ornette Coleman reunites with original sidemen at the Orpheum tonight.

It’s been more than 30 years since Ornette Coleman left Los Angeles to head east with a remarkable quartet of musicians.

When the alto saxophonist, trumpeter Don Cherry, bassist Charlie Haden and drummer Billy Higgins opened at New York City’s Five Spot Cafe in autumn 1959, their startlingly liberated approach to improvisation set off a firestorm of revolutionary change in jazz.

Tonight at the Orpheum Theater, a rare reunion of that original quartet will take place and Coleman is determined to do so strictly for musical reasons.

He has recently been rehearsing with his former companions in an effort to not only recall past glories, but also to demonstrate the continuing viability of his unique view of jazz.

“I’ve had lots of offers for us to get back together,” he said, “but I didn’t want to do it if all we did was play the things from the past the same way.

“Everyone says, ‘Oh, you could make lots of money with your old band.’ And, poor as I am, I could use the money. But I don’t want to go out and exploit a name or some history just to make money.

“I rehearsed with Don, Billy and Charlie in Europe for a while this summer. What I want to do is make something new that will have the same kind of creativity as the things we did in the past.”

A soft-spoken, gentle man who turned 60 in March, Coleman is dedicated to a highly personalized perception of music that he has labeled “Harmelodics.” At its core is a belief that each note possesses within itself the echoes of three other notes.

“If you’re writing a song based on the changes of ‘Out of Nowhere,’ ” he said, “you can get together with some guys and quickly work out a way to play it. But with the kind of music I play, it’s not that easy.

“Don, Billy and Charlie and I haven’t been in the same musical environment and spent enough time together lately to be perfectly clear yet about what we can do today. But we’re getting there, and, on a spiritual and emotional level, they’ve been very receptive to the possibilities of what we can do. So I’m looking forward to playing together.”

Coleman’s appearance at the L.A. Festival will be part of a collection of performances identified as “Local Heroes.” Although the intensity and fury of Coleman’s free jazz style became a media cause celebre after the well-publicized New York appearance, his musical preparation--the careful trials and errors, the false starts and the negative critical responses--had been taking place during some hungry years in Los Angeles in the mid-’50s.

At the time, Coleman worked with a variety of local musicians, including fellow Texan expatriates James Clay, Bobby Bradford and Don Payne, as well as such then-prominent figures as Shelly Manne and Red Mitchell.

“It’s interesting,” said music coordinator Titus Levi, who persuaded Coleman to appear at the festival, “when you consider the powerful symbiosis between Los Angeles and New York that existed for the Coleman band.

“It took a very theatrical opening in New York to give them the attention they needed. But, had they gotten together in New York, I don’t think the group would have developed the same way that they did here. Working in Los Angeles, away from what was at that time the contemporary mainstream on the East Coast, gave them the time and the freedom to build a four-man cadre that could work together on all those new ideas without distractions.”

Coleman’s career has had its ups and downs in the intervening decades. Still viewed by many observers as one of the seminal figures of contemporary music, he is seen by others as an eccentric.

Some of his groups have generated an iconoclastic blending of rock, funk and aleatoric tumult. Others have recalled the sound of his earliest ensembles. Regardless of the setting, Coleman--arguably one of the most unique improvisers in jazz history--has continued throughout his career to play with the soaring, vocalized sound that is the hallmark of his music.

Coleman’s compositions--many for large classical ensembles--reflect the influence of his Harmelodic theories.

“When I started using the Harmelodic system,” he said, “I found I could write freer lines. I didn’t have to worry about styles. Then, when I started writing for instruments that you don’t ordinarily hear in jazz, I found even more notes that I could use. The oboe, for example, has a minor sound built into its tuning.”

An early interest in ethnic music has been expanded by the connections he finds with Harmelodics.

“I’ve become interested in instruments that are played with both tempered and untempered sounds,” he said. “I sat in with some Moroccan musicians once, and there were 20 guys playing in unison, without using a tempered Western scale. Two months ago I was in Catania (Italy), and I met a 75-year-old man who was playing a reed instrument; he could play the melody, the harmony and the rhythm, all at the same time--three different sounds.”

But Coleman is not bound to his music theories in any restrictive kind of way. “Basically,” he said, “the end result is what you hear and feel. If you’re blind, you can’t read, but that doesn’t mean you can’t play. I came to the music naturally, and the theory came later.”

Coleman’s recent work includes the continuing maintenance of his seven-piece band, which now includes, for the first time since his initial recording, a keyboard player. Last year, a commission from the French government resulted in a chamber piece for 17 musicians titled “The Country That Gave the Freedom Symbol to America.” And he has an offer to write an opera for Milan’s La Scala Opera Company.

Fully recovered from injuries received in a mugging a few years ago that collapsed his lungs, Coleman persists, as he has for most of his life, in keeping music at the center of his world. Passed over recently by some of the large grants and awards, he reacts with a stoic, “Well, let’s see what happens next time.”