The father of harmolodics

SINCE the 1950s, Ornette Coleman has hacked his own trails in improvised music. It was lonely out there in the wilderness, but he never looked back. What made him do it?

“My mother and my father were both born on Dec. 25,” the sax-violin-trumpet virtuoso says quietly, crouched on a couch in his Midtown Manhattan loft, a week before last Sunday’s presentation of a Grammy lifetime achievement award that brought him his biggest prime-time recognition, just before the age of 77. Christmas? Coleman implies significance in his parents’ shared birth date: He was an ordinary Earth child, while they seemed like gods, “and that’s exactly how far away I was to them.” His father died before Coleman could know him; he was raised by women, the only male in the family.

“They wasn’t interested in nothing I could do or say,” he says. “To this very day, I feel like an outsider just breathing. Because let’s face it, you’d be seeking, trying to find something that you could enjoy, or something that you could do that would make you feel normal. But you can’t take that cure. There’s no medicine for that.”

Family was Coleman’s dry nurse; Los Angeles was his next desert -- he emigrated from Fort Worth in 1953 at age 23. It was here, amid a smog of hostility and conservatism, that he inspired a few allies (trumpeter Don Cherry, bassist Charlie Haden, drummers Ed Blackwell and Billy Higgins) to boost his transition from blues and bop to the “harmolodic” music he heard in his head -- joyous, jagged, chordless, free. It was here he made his first albums, for Contemporary Records. It was here that his unorthodox blowing got him kicked off a lot of bandstands while he supported himself with odd jobs.

“I was at the point where it was nothing but work,” he says. “But not professional work. You know -- like knees and hands.” And it was from here in 1959 that he fled like a bat out of hell to New York, where he instantly polarized the jazz world and made grave imprints on the heaviest contenders in his field, along with a whole generation to follow.

Coleman’s freedom and democracy found ready ears amid the 1960s’ racial struggle and countercultural mapmaking. In addition to John Coltrane and Don Cherry’s album “The Avant-Garde” (recorded 1960) and Sonny Rollins’ LP “Our Man in Jazz” (1962) -- both featuring Coleman sidemen and both launching years of reconsideration by the two tenor colossi -- numerous explosive projectiles by Roscoe Mitchell, Anthony Braxton, Evan Parker and others would never have made waves without Coleman’s initial harmolodic splashdown.

His influence, though, has been more conceptual than specific. Without drinking straight from the source, nobody could absorb Coleman’s feel and compositional song craft -- the urgent mournfulness of “Lonely Woman,” the stop-and-spin giddiness of “Ramblin’ ” or the shrouded intergalactic masses of the 1972 symphonic work “Skies of America.” And 2006’s Grammy-nominated “Sound Grammar” live set ripples with the same vintage energy. As Ornette’s alto lines leap and flutter, son and longtime drummer Denardo Coleman pushes a light metronomic counterweight to the rhythm while feathering the cushiest of bomb-drops; bassists Tony Falanga and Gregory Cohen seesaw bowed frenzy against driving heat. This ain’t moldy tradition, it’s just fun.

With a mainstream Grammy surge supporting Coleman for a change, it will be good to see him rake in some bonus clams with this release. Always revered yet minimally heard over the years with his various acoustic and electric ensembles on landmark albums such as “Free Jazz” (released 1961), “Dancing in Your Head” (1977), “In All Languages” (1987) and “Sound Museum” (1996), he’s never been a marketplace blockbuster. So his Sunday sparkle -- the lifetime achievement award; his nomination for best jazz instrumental album, individual/group, for “Sound Grammar”; and a stylin’ black-clad turn as a presenter for (appropriately) best new artist -- was like a finger in the AC socket.

“It’s a total turnaround,” says Coleman. (“Turnaround” is also a song title on “Sound Grammar.”) “I never thought that I would get to this level.” And the fact that the ceremony happened in Los Angeles -- well, we always love the one we hurt.

Coleman shows a glimmer of a smile when complimented on his sharp attire, saying he tries to look the part of a professional. “Without any money, but.... “

Thin, watchful, country-gracious, he patiently presents his observations, knowing he sometimes won’t be understood. It’s easy to see why interviews aren’t a high priority: He asks deeper questions of his own, answerable only in parables -- hard work for a man who continues to write and rehearse most every day for his periodic performances around the world, with a stamina his son says leaves the band panting. Also an artist who’s provided the images for some of his albums, Coleman still finds a little time to paint. And he and his manager-cousin, sax player James Jordan, have long labored over books about harmolodics that have yet to see print.

Most who’ve experienced Coleman’s music say it makes them feel good, but it’s not feel-good music -- it’s art. The choice came early. Coleman remembers ‘50s nights playing blues at a Fort Worth gambling joint called Upstairs. If cops came by, a lookout would push a button and the gamblers would scramble into dancing posture with a “lady of the night,” as if on a date with their wives.

“I was the front for them,” says Coleman. “So that job didn’t improve my ability. I didn’t want to go down that road.”

He wanted something purer, because he was on a mission. Coleman has said that in the ‘50s he looked like Moses and thought he was a kind of Jesus -- though Central Avenue godfather Buddy Collette, remarking on Coleman’s shaggy coif, has verbalized the more common opinion: “He looked like a dog.”

Coleman’s gospel: “To me, the idea is all there is. The idea is all that we as humans can use to respect and include. You make a connection to all that lives and all that’s been. It’s what religion can’t do for you. To me, music is the only substance where everyone can participate in the idea.”

It’s communion through sound, and sound is something like God.

“Sound has no parents,” says Coleman. “Nobody created sound.” And music? “An invisible emotion. Everyone gets the same value from it, without having to know it. You don’t have to spell to talk, do you?”

Coleman thinks that, in essence, we can all tap straight into the source. But we need to bypass influences and preconceptions, all the “baptisms” that the world bestows.

“I have been baptized so much,” he remembers, “I feel like I don’t need to take a bath.” But his ambition is stratospheric: “How do you create a music idea that you haven’t heard? Imagine Robert Johnson singing a duo with Mahalia Jackson. That would be something else!”

Sound thinking

THE universal language of sound, Coleman believes, is in constant conflict with mere words -- symbols that imperfectly approximate experience.

“Sound hasn’t actively been liberated, because of language,” he says, maybe thinking of all the lame attempts to describe his music. “Meaning and knowledge are two different worlds.” Coleman gives an example of the verbal dichotomy. “Can you imagine that life doesn’t have to exist for you to die? When you die, then you no longer think you’re alive!” He chuckles loudly. Life and death are suddenly both hilarious.

Coleman’s attitude strikes at the root of the way we think. Like the jazz savant Sun Ra (“Can’t you feel that this world is not real?”) and the Rastafarians with their language manipulations (coinages such as “polytricks”), he sees words as chains to be broken and reforged to his own use. In a nice piece of programming, the late deconstructionist Jacques Derrida, avatar of textual mutability, once delivered a lecture to open a Coleman concert.

“Sound stimulates the newborn baby and could cause the infant to cry,” Coleman wrote in the notes for “Sound Grammar.” Asked what he meant, he suggests that a child may possess innate perceptive abilities that quickly get conditioned away. “Babies seem like they make contact with something, with where they are and where they aren’t. And they then try to figure out, ‘How can I get out of this?’ ” So they cry. And music can offer the escape sought by infants and everybody else: “If someone says something to you that makes you feel uncomfortable, and you can’t explain it in the way you want, you might go into some music and get satisfied by a higher form of what you were experiencing.” Milk isn’t always the answer.

In a way, it seems that Coleman would like to start over again from the womb -- but on his own terms: “I’m beginning to realize that being born has nothing to do with your parents.” Parents mean control, and Coleman, perhaps because of his upbringing, sees women as possessing more power than people realize; he’s always in the process of cutting his umbilical. “I want to free myself,” he says, “of intelligence, sex, religion and racism. I’ll never make it -- I’m gonna try, though.”

Why sex? “Sex is very powerful. That’s why we’re here. You can’t kill sex.” But he wanted to at one time. “Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure.... And I haven’t really given up that idea.... I like enjoyment. But I would give that up to be truthful to life.”

The light is fading in the loft windows. It’s time for Coleman’s photo session, and he’s resigned to what he considers an unprofitable ordeal. He says, though one hardly believes him, that nowadays he just does what people tell him.

Why does he dislike being photographed? “Because I’d like to see who I am, and I’ve never seen it.”

Does he see it when he looks in the mirror? “No. No, I don’t.”