Ornette Coleman loves repeating the story about giving saxophone lessons to his grandson, Ornette Ali Coleman. When the child had become competent at fingering, the jazz master asked him to show “the passion” in his playing. “He picked up the horn and played, and I said, ‘You didn’t play what I wrote, what I showed you.’ He said, ‘Yes, I did, but I did it my way.’ He was about six or seven, but instead of repeating exactly what I had shown him, he took the concept and then played his own idea. He got way ahead of me,” Coleman says, chuckling. The irony is that seventy-year-old Randolph Denard Ornette Coleman has spent more than half a century performing “instrumental music,” as he calls it,…
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