The return of Coleman, minus the body-piercing

Alto saxophonist Ornette Coleman returned to the San Francisco Jazz Festival Thursday night for the first time since his controversial appearance in 1994. That now-legendary performance was a multimedia presentation featuring music, video, contortionists and multiple body piercing. In dramatic contrast, Coleman’s Thursday night concert at Davies Symphony Hall was a spare, to-the-point offering of his music, performed with the sole accompaniment of drummer Denardo Coleman (his son) and bassist Charnett Moffett (the son of an earlier collaborator, drummer Charles Moffett).

Making only his second appearance with the trio this year, the 72-year-old Coleman offered a program of all newly composed material. Typically, however, it was often difficult to determine where one selection ended and another began, to ascertain where written passages transited into improvisations.

Coleman burst onto the jazz scene in 1959, playing an innovative style incorporating improvisation unrestricted by harmonic cadences or metric bar lines. Embraced by a number of influential jazz figures, his music also affected a generation of new young players, many of whom adapted, to varying degrees, aspects of his freely improvised techniques.

Relying upon a relatively small collection of melodic fragments, he built his solos by continually shaping and reshaping them across the length and breadth of his horn.

Some of the fragments he employed in the approximately 10 new pieces were tinged with the blues of his Texas roots; others were employed as splashes of color to contrast with his frequent use of relatively simple, scale-based runs. And virtually everything he played was heavily dependent upon sequential passages -- that is, playing a phrase, then repeating it at a higher or lower level (one of the most essential aspects of composition and improvisation).

The high points in his playing and writing almost all took place during more pensive numbers. In part, their appeal -- ironically, given Coleman’s free style -- traced to the specific harmonic implications in his engaging, but clearly sequence-based melodies. One piece (all were untitled and unannounced) recalled the blues shuffle style that occasionally surfaced in his early work; on others, Coleman picked up a trumpet or a violin, cranking out bursts of sheer musical noise, often in combination with sounds generated by Moffett’s electronically enhanced bass.