eJazzNews Archive

Ornette Coleman Concert

Originally published on eJazzNews ·

On October 30, 2005, eJazzNews posted a reader’s account of Ornette Coleman’s concert at Massey Hall in Toronto the night before, with bassists Tony Falanga and Greg Cohen and drummer Denardo Coleman. Two weeks earlier the same quartet had recorded the German concert that became Sound Grammar, the album that won Coleman the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Music. Coleman died in 2015.

What the 2005 report said

The writer, a reader who sent in the report, called it an exceptional concert and wrote that “Ornette at 75 sounds like Ornette at 25.” He described just over two hours of continuous music, with Falanga’s bowed bass working almost like a second horn alongside Coleman, while Cohen and Denardo Coleman drove the rhythm. Coleman also played trumpet and took a violin solo. The report noted that the Toronto audience gave the band a standing ovation when it walked on and two more at the end, and urged readers to catch the quartet if it came near them.

The same night, as the critics heard it

Two other published reviews of the October 29, 2005 concert agree on the main points. Writing in Exclaim!, Nilan Perera described the opening standing ovation, listed Coleman on alto saxophone, trumpet and violin, and said the evening closed with an encore of “Lonely Woman.” The online magazine textura reported that it was Coleman’s first Canadian appearance since a 1988 show at the Montreal International Jazz Festival, and described the two-bass setup as Falanga bowing as a secondary soloist on one side of the leader and Cohen holding down the pulse in pizzicato on the other. The same review recalled that Massey Hall was the site of the May 1953 concert by Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell, Charles Mingus and Max Roach, the subject of another eJazzNews archive page.

Who Ornette Coleman was

Coleman was born on March 9, 1930, in Fort Worth, Texas, and taught himself the saxophone as a teenager. His quartet’s residency at the Five Spot in New York from November 1959 and his Atlantic albums, starting with The Shape of Jazz to Come, made him the central figure of what came to be called free jazz, a term taken from his 1960 album Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation. His early sound owed something to the plastic Grafton alto he bought in Los Angeles in 1954 because he could not afford a metal one. In the mid-1960s he began playing trumpet and violin as well, and from the mid-1970s he led the electric band Prime Time, built on his theory of harmolodics. For the wider story of the style, see our guide to types of jazz.

What happened next

Sound Grammar, recorded in Ludwigshafen, Germany, on October 14, 2005, by Coleman, Falanga, Cohen and Denardo Coleman, was released on September 12, 2006, as the first release on Coleman’s own Sound Grammar label. In 2007 it won the Pulitzer Prize for Music, making him the second jazz musician to receive the prize after Wynton Marsalis. Coleman died of cardiac arrest in Manhattan on June 11, 2015, at 85.

Where to start listening

  • The Shape of Jazz to Come (Atlantic, 1959): the quartet record that introduced “Lonely Woman,” the tune he still played as an encore in Toronto.
  • Sound Grammar (Sound Grammar, 2006): the two-bass quartet heard at Massey Hall, recorded live two weeks earlier.

Sources

This page is based on an article from the original eJazzNews archive (2001 to 2018), with background and sources added in 2026. The original text is not republished here. You can read the original as it appeared on eJazzNews via the Internet Archive.
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