Ornette Coleman Double Quartet
Biography
In the pantheon of jazz revolutionaries, few moments burn as brightly as December 21, 1960, when Ornette Coleman walked into Atlantic Studios in New York City with not one, but two complete jazz quartets and proceeded to detonate every convention the music had ever known. The resulting album, "Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation," wasn't just a recording – it was a manifesto written in sound, a 37-minute sonic earthquake that split jazz history into before and after.
Coleman had already been stirring up trouble since arriving in New York in 1959, his plastic alto saxophone and harmonically liberated approach sending traditionalists into apoplectic fits. Critics called his music "anti-jazz," club owners banned him, and fellow musicians either worshipped or wanted to strangle him. But Coleman was undeterred, driven by a vision of music freed from the tyranny of predetermined chord changes and rigid structures. The Double Quartet was his ultimate statement of intent.
The concept was audacious in its simplicity: take two complete quartets, place them in stereo separation – one group in each speaker – and let them engage in collective improvisation without a safety net. Coleman led one quartet with his alto sax, joined by trumpeter Don Cherry, bassist Scott LaFaro, and drummer Billy Higgins. The second quartet featured trumpeter Freddie Hubbard, bass clarinetist Eric Dolphy, bassist Charlie Haden, and drummer Ed Blackwell. Together, these eight musicians created what Coleman called "harmolodics" – a musical democracy where melody, harmony, and rhythm held equal weight, and every player was simultaneously soloist and accompanist.
The music that emerged was unlike anything jazz had produced. Sometimes the quartets played in unison, their lines intertwining like DNA strands; other times they diverged into separate conversations, creating a stereophonic dialogue that anticipated the spatial experiments of electronic music by decades. The rhythm section abandoned the traditional timekeeping role, instead becoming active participants in the melodic conversation. Horns shrieked, moaned, and sang in languages that seemed to bypass the brain and speak directly to the nervous system.
"Free Jazz" became the unwitting namesake for an entire movement, though Coleman always bristled at the term. To him, the music wasn't "free" from everything – it was free to be everything. The album's iconic cover, featuring a Jackson Pollock painting, perfectly captured the controlled chaos within. Like Pollock's action paintings, Coleman's music appeared random to casual observers but revealed deep structural intelligence to those willing to listen closely.
The critical reception was volcanic. Jazz purists denounced it as noise, while avant-garde enthusiasts hailed it as liberation. Miles Davis, never one to mince words, dismissed Coleman's music as "psychologically sick," while John Coltrane studied it obsessively, eventually incorporating its lessons into his own spiritual explorations. The album's influence rippled outward, inspiring not just jazz musicians but rock experimentalists, classical composers, and electronic pioneers.
The Double Quartet was never intended as a permanent ensemble – it was more like a controlled explosion, designed to demonstrate possibilities rather than establish traditions. The individual musicians scattered to pursue their own visions, but the seeds planted during that December session grew into entire forests of experimental music. LaFaro's melodic bass approach influenced generations of players before his tragic death in 1961. Cherry became a global musical ambassador, incorporating world music elements decades before "fusion" became fashionable. Dolphy pushed woodwind techniques into previously unimaginable territories before his own premature death in 1964.
Coleman himself continued evolving, forming his electric band Prime Time in the 1970s and winning a Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2007 – the first jazz musician so honored for a body of work rather than a specific composition. His harmolodic theory influenced everyone from Pat Metheny to Sonic Youth, proving that the Double Quartet's radical propositions had permanent value.
Today, "Free Jazz" stands as one of the most important recordings in American music, a document of artistic courage that expanded the very definition of what music could be. The Ornette Coleman Double Quartet existed for barely 40 minutes, but those minutes contained enough revolutionary energy to power decades of musical exploration. In an art form built on the tension between structure and freedom, Coleman and his eight-piece collective found a way to have both simultaneously, creating a template for musical democracy that remains as radical today as it was over sixty years ago.
