Coleman, like Miles Davis before him, took to playing with electrified instruments. Albums like Virgin Beauty and Of Human Feelings used rock and funk rhythms, sometimes called free funk. On the face of it, this could seem to be an adoption of the jazz fusion mode fashionable at the time, but Ornette's first record with the group, which later became known as Prime Time (the 1976 Dancing in Your Head), was sufficiently different to have considerable shock value. Electric guitars were prominent, but the music was, at heart, rather similar to his earlier work. These performances have the same angular melodies and simultaneous group improvisations – what Joe Zawinul referred to as "nobody solos, everybody solos" and what Coleman calls harmolodics – and although the nature of the pulse has altered, Coleman's own rhythmic approach has not.
Some critics have suggested Coleman's frequent use of the vaguely defined term harmolodics is a musical MacGuffin: a red herring of sorts designed to occupy critics overly focused on Coleman's sometimes unorthodox compositional style.
Jerry Garcia played guitar on three tracks from Coleman's Virgin Beauty (1988): "Three Wishes," "Singing In The Shower," and "Desert Players." Coleman joined the Grateful Dead on stage twice in 1993 playing the band's "The Other One," "Wharf Rat," "Stella Blue," and covering Bobby Bland's "Turn On Your Lovelight," among others. Another unexpected association was with guitarist Pat Metheny, with whom Coleman recorded Song X (1985); though released under Metheny's name, Coleman was essentially co-leader (contributing all the compositions).
In 1990, the city of Reggio Emilia in Italy held a three-day "Portrait of the Artist" featuring a Coleman quartet with Don Cherry, Charlie Haden and Billy Higgins. The festival also presented performances of his chamber music and the symphonic Skies of America.
In 1991, Coleman played on the soundtrack for David Cronenberg's Naked Lunch; the orchestra was conducted by Howard Shore. It is notable among other things for including a rare sighting of Coleman playing a jazz standard: Thelonious Monk's blues line “Misterioso.” Two 1972 (pre-electric) Coleman recordings, "Happy House" and "Foreigner in a Free Land" were used in Gus Van Sant's 2000 Finding Forrester.
The mid-1990s saw a flurry of activity from Coleman: he released four records in 1995 and 1996, and for the first time in many years worked regularly with piano players (either Geri Allen or Joachim Kühn).
Coleman has rarely performed on other musicians' records. Exceptions include extensive performances on albums by Jackie McLean in 1967 (New and Old Gospel, on which he played trumpet), and James Blood Ulmer in 1978, and cameo appearances on Yoko Ono's Plastic Ono Band album (1970), Jamaaladeen Tacuma's Renaissance Man (1983), Joe Henry's Scar (2001) and Lou Reed's The Raven (2003).
In September 2006 he released a live album titled Sound Grammar with his newest quartet (Denardo drumming and two bassists, Gregory Cohen and Tony Falanga). This is his first album of new material in ten years, and was recorded in Germany in 2005. It won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for music.
Jazz pianist Joanne Brackeen (who had only briefly studied music as a child) stated in an interview with Marian McPartland that Coleman has been mentoring her and giving her semi-formal music lessons in recent years.
Coleman continues to push himself into unusual playing situations, often with much younger musicians or musicians from radically different musical cultures, and still performs regularly. An increasing number of his compositions, while not ubiquitous, have become minor jazz standards, including "Lonely Woman," "Peace," "Turnaround," "When Will the Blues Leave?" "The Blessing," "Law Years," "What Reason Could I Give" and "I've Waited All My Life", among others. He has influenced virtually every saxophonist of a modern disposition, and nearly every such jazz musician, of the generation that followed him. His songs have proven endlessly malleable: pianists such as Paul Bley and Paul Plimley have managed to turn them to their purposes; John Zorn recorded Spy vs Spy (1989), an album of extremely loud, fast, and abrupt versions of Coleman songs. Finnish jazz singer Carola covered Coleman's "Lonely Woman" and there have even been progressive bluegrass versions of Coleman tunes (by Richard Greene). Coleman's playing has profoundly influenced, directly or otherwise, countless musicians, trying as he has for five decades to understand and discover the shape of not just jazz, but all music to come.
In 2004 Coleman was awarded The Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize, one of the richest prizes in the arts, given annually to “a man or woman who has made an outstanding contribution to the beauty of the world and to mankind’s enjoyment and understanding of life.”
On February 11, 2007, Ornette Coleman was honored with a Grammy award for lifetime achievement, in recognition of this legacy.
On July 9, 2009, Ornette Coleman received the Miles Davis Award, a recognition given by the Festival International de Jazz de Montréal to jazz musicians who have contributed along their careers to the evolution of the jazz music.
On May 1, 2010, Ornette was awarded a honorary doctorate in Music from the University of Michigan for his musical contributions.
Source: Wikipedia
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