Fort Worth-born sax player Ornette Coleman, who reinvented jazz, has died at 85

Ornette Coleman, the Fort Worth-born-and-raised saxophone player-composer who led the free-jazz revolution of the 1960s, died this morning in a New York City hospital, according to The New York Times. He'd just turned 85 in March; at the time of this writing, his website still featured birthday best-wishes.

According to The Times, citing a family representative, Coleman died of cardiac arrest at Beth Israel Hospital.

Coleman, born March 9, 1930, attended I. M. Terrell High School, where, briefly, the self-taught sax player blew in the high school band; legend has it he was booted for trying to inject some swing into the stiff marching-band sound. From there he ended up playing with local R&B bands and started his own, the Jam Jivers, whose playlist consisted of Louis Jordan and other jump-blues tunes, according to fellow Fort Worth great Dewey Redman.

He eventually found his way to New Orleans, then Los Angeles, where, Redman told Miles, Ornette, Cecil: Jazz Beyond Jazz author Howard Mandel, "he just blossomed." Coleman had discovered Charlie Parker, the man who liberated jazz from the bandstand,  and managed to "play Bird just like Bird," Redman said.

But by the late 1950s, Coleman was beholden to no influence or predecessor: After some early records as bandleader, including the essential Something Else!!!, in '59 he released The Shape of Jazz to Come on Atlantic Records and changed everything. It's bebop unleashed, the blues unhinged -- its sounds familiar at first but increasingly, strikingly out there as it sprints toward the finish line. As John Fordham wrote in The Guardian in 2010, "Some of it was hauntingly intense, like 'Lonely Woman.' Performed by Coleman, Don Cherry, Charlie Haden and drummer Billy Higgins, the music embodied its principal creator's childhood conviction, as he expressed it to Jez Nelson on Jazz on 3, that 'music was just something human beings done naturally, like eating.'"

Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation, released in 1961, only cemented his legend -- and he was only getting started. Ultimately, John Coltrane covered Ornette Coleman -- that's how much of a titan he was. And Coleman's quartet played Train's funeral in July 1967. It was in Manhattan, Coleman's long-adopted home.

But one of his most famous records was cut here, during the opening of Caravan of Dreams in 1983, with his at-the-time band Prime Time.

"Each of the six tunes on Opening the Caravan of Dreams' has its own approach and mood," Robert Palmer wrote in The New York Times in 1986. "'Sex Spy'' is sultry and atmospheric; 'See Thru' opens out from a reflective, cyclically modulating ballad theme that never quite resolves into the album's most urgently dramatic alto saxophone improvisation. ''To Know What to Know,' a weary future-blues, shambles along at a crawl and then accelerates raggedly into a full-tilt collision, like a jalopy lurching into a brick wall. 'Compute' is the most varied single performance Prime Time has recorded, with passages for electronics and small percussion instruments, and Mr. Coleman's trumpet and violin as well as his alto saxophone. But Mr. Coleman is a carefully thematic improviser, and despite its episodic construction, the tune hangs together, making a strong, unified impression."

Coleman gave perhaps the most thoughtful, introspective, way-out interviews recorded; the man spoke like he played -- he touched on everything.

"Ornette always was pretty reflective," his half-brother and manager James Jordan told Fort Worth writer Preston Jones in 2010. "When he was 10 years old he told his mother he wanted a saxophone. She told him, 'OK, you can have one if you get a little bit of money.' We both shined shoes and pressed clothes ... but he got the instrument."

Coleman made headlines only weeks ago, when he sued over the release of an album he said were jam sessions never intended for public consumption. He played with Lou Reed. He was a MacArthur Genius, a Lifetime Achievement Grammy-winner and, in 2007, the recipient of a Pulitzer Prize for music.

"Though his early work, a kind of personal answer to Charlie Parker, lay right within jazz -- and generated a handful of standards among jazz musicians of the last half-century, he later challenged assumptions about jazz from top to bottom, bringing in his own ideas about instrumentation, process and technical expertise," Ben Ratliff writes on The Times' website today. "He was also more voluble and theoretical than John Coltrane, the other great pathbreaker of that era in jazz, and became known as a kind of musician-philosopher, with interests much wider than jazz alone; he was seen as a native avant-gardist, and symbolized the American independent will as effectively as any artist of the last century."

"I don't know how long I'll live," Coleman told Jones on the occasion of his 80th birthday, "but I'd rather die to live than live to die."