Coleman was an American icon and iconoclast — a self-taught musician born poor and fatherless in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1930, who went on to win the Pulitzer Prize, the Japanese Praemium Imperiale, two Guggenheims, a MacArthur, honorary doctorates and a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master honor.

Ornette Coleman played his alto saxophone the way someone whistles to themselves walking down the street, unconcerned with rules about how a song is supposed to go. In 1997, Coleman told NPR that he believed in the unfettered, imaginative, original, expressive powers of melody.

“As a music, it allows every musician to participate in any form of musical environment without them changing their own personality, their own tone or their way of phrasing,” Coleman said.

And he put that belief into practice when he could. Coleman was raised by his single mother and sister. He learned music on his own and left home as a teenager to tour the deep south with a minstrel show. On the road, he faced rejection and even assault for an unorthodox, free style built on Texas blues. He wound up in Los Angeles, working as an elevator operator and trying to get a hearing in jam sessions. He finally made his first recording as a leader in 1958, Something Else.

Some praised Coleman for returning jazz to the kind of collective improvisation its earliest players used. Others heard only cacophony.

“In jazz before Ornette Coleman,” New York Times writer Jon Pareles told NPR in 1985, “people would devise solos that were designed to fit on top of the tune. If the tune was 32 bars long, the improvisation was 32 bars long, and it fit into whatever 32 bars of chords were in the tune. Ornette came along and said, ‘We don’t have to do it that way, we can take an improvisation that tells its own kind of story, that elapses according to the freedom of the song.’ He basically showed people a new kind of freedom. He broke them out of the maze of harmony.”

Coleman himself described his system as “sound grammar” or “harmolodics.”

“It’s the scientific form of sound based upon the human emotion of expression,” Coleman said. “That’s basically what it is and what it does.”

Coleman’s principle idea — that anyone can make music with anyone, and they don’t have to know much about each other to do it — made him able to retain his cry of the blues even while jamming with the Master Musicians of Jajouka from the mountains of Morocco. Musicians flocked to Coleman like he was the Pied Piper — and he played with them: Yoko Ono, Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead, Laurie Anderson and Lou Reed, not to mention the many jazz musicians who graduated from his bands. Yet Coleman himself was unfailingly modest. He was shy about cameras and might be oblique in conversation. It wasn’t that his vocabulary was peculiar, but his point of view was unique, coming from all directions, seeming to take in everything, imagistic and fundamental. But his musicians understood him.

“It was very easy for me to follow him,” said longtime bassist Charlie Haden in 1997. “And it’s always been easy for me to follow him because he’s very articulate, just in his own language, just as he is in his music.”

In December of 1960, Haden was part of Coleman’s radical experiment in collective improvisation — two quartets playing simultaneously — titled Free Jazz.

The recording inspired, licensed — or provoked — many better-established jazz musicians of the ’60s. But his experiments didn’t stop there.

“I never have classified music as being in different categories, so I started writing music which consists of violins and stuff like that,” Coleman said. “I think most people classify you as what you do when they see you in the contents of drums and things like that everybody they call that jazz. But when they see a violin or French horn something they call that classical music. And I really believe that any instrument can become the soloist instrument in any kind of contents.”

Skies of America, too, was scorned until 1986, when conductor John Giordano of the Fort Worth Symphony worked closely with Coleman on a revision. Performances by orchestras in Europe and the New York Philharmonic followed.

Ornette Coleman said that he liked to tell people, “‘I’m a composer who performs.’ Whenever I would hear a band with guitars and bass the melodic line sounded so full, it sounded like a full orchestra. So I said, well, if I could expand the melodic writing into a much fuller sound, I would be able to express more music.”

In the mid-1970s, Coleman re-invented himself again, forming an electric band that often included his son, Denardo. In a 2008 interview, Denardo Coleman explained that his father’s philosophy suffuses his art, is part of his bands’ rehearsals and comes to fruition in performance.

“I think it’s beyond just scale, key, all that,” he said. “Everything he’s talking about is what he always talks about, with us, as well. So we’re bringing everything — the performance is everything.”

It was Ornette Coleman’s life to express feeling freely and directly, in music, and also to ask the big, confounding questions.

“Does music have life?” he asked. His many fans and followers answer in the affirmative.

Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

In the 11 days that I’d been in the small, bustling, crumbling city of Matanzas, I’d already seen several ceremonial possessions. During my last night in town, I witnessed my fifth Santería ceremony, where batá drummers accompany liturgical song and dance. It was the most dramatic one yet.

There had already been several brief possessions at this last toque for Yemayá, the deity associated with the ocean. Suddenly, a man in his early 20s was mounted. He began to spin in place quickly, like a 33 rpm Sufi dervish played at 45 rpm. He placed his wrists on his hips and pushed his elbows back like a duck. His eyes were wild as he let out loud, periodic cackles, directed primarily at the sacred drums as the rhythms increased in intensity to a frantic but deeply grooving pace. The laughter, I was told afterward, symbolized enjoyment, not menace.

When I left an hour later, I saw the young man who had been escorted out of the building long before. He was still cackling, eyes wide, deeply in trance.

In January, I took a two-week study trip to Cuba, supported by a research grant from SUNY Maritime, where I’m a humanities professor. I spent 11 days in Matanzas and three in Havana, studying Afro-Cuban folkloric music every day and attending traditional ceremonies or secular rumbas most nights. I don’t speak much Spanish, so I was lucky to get some amazing contacts (including a translator and guide, Antonio Pérez) from two Americans with extensive experience in Cuba. One of those Americans, Los-Angeles-based drummer Chuck Silverman, has led research trips to Cuba for 25 years — he fielded literally dozens of my phone calls and generously offered counsel. I could not have done what I did without him.

Matanzas is about two hours east of Havana. Cuba’s 11th most populous city, it has the feel of a big town. I stayed at three different casas particulares (privately owned bed and breakfasts) within walking distance of the neighborhood where I took most of my lessons and attended most ceremonies. Havana, by contrast, is unmistakably a big, sprawling city — full of traffic and bustle. I have been to other world capitals in less than working order — Cairo and Dakar come to mind — but Havana is its own version of heartbreaking. There’s 500 years of history there (it was founded in 1515), crumbling under the weight of island isolation.

My story is not really about Havana or Matanzas, per se. It’s about a North American jazz drummer and composer on an information- and inspiration-gathering trip to a place that felt much farther away than it actually is. I went to gather rhythms, songs and forms to write a new book of music for a new ensemble; I wasn’t looking to become a drummer for Afro-Cuban ceremonies or rumbas. I was after a more personal, poetic assimilation of musical materials from Africa and its diaspora. Cuba was the perfect place to find what I was looking for.

AfroCuba is not a literal place. The term comes from Cuban scholar Fernando Ortiz, and perfectly encapsulates the country’s inescapable African-ness. Below are five things I learned in AfroCuba.

Harris Eisenstadt is a drummer and composer living in Brooklyn, N.Y. The new ensemble inspired by his trip to Cuba, Aberikula, presents its first performance on March 30.

Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Jones has been on the New York City scene for nearly two decades; Balance is her second album as a bandleader. Her labelmates, however, are newer to the area. Drummer Shirazette Tinnin recently moved east after years in Chicago; her new album is called Humility: Purity of My Soul. Born in 1986, saxophonist and vocalist Camille Thurman is a native of the city, but only decided to pursue music full-time after earning a college degree in Geological and Environmental Sciences; her new album is called Origins. Both Tinnin and Thurman are putting out their debut recordings.

Hot Tone Music is not a collective — each artist brought her own individual concepts and performing career to the table. But having pulled together Kickstarter campaigns and cutting package deals with publicists, recording engineers, photographers and graphic artists, Hot Tone Music is a collectively operated enterprise. “In a sense, this release is sort of a celebration that if you can come together as a community, you can get it done, and everybody wins,” Mimi Jones told me over the phone.

Pictured together, the three bandleaders also cut a striking profile: All three are black female instrumentalists, curiously among the least visible intersections of today’s jazz community. Wondering if this was a conscious decision — and about the modernity heard on all three records — I gave Jones a call to talk about her fledgling label and her music. We discussed the origins of Hot Tone, her first big break and the lingering issues around “Women in Jazz.”

Patrick Jarenwattananon: In your own words, why did you decide to start this label?

Mimi Jones: Basically, in the last few years, I had been approaching a few different labels and getting denied. For a musician, that’s kind of hard, because we look for opportunities to present our art, and we look to use our art as our livelihood. So it’s really important. It’s not just like, ‘Wow, I got signed!’ It’s a big deal, and so a lot of effort goes into that.

I just got tired of that, and I thought, ‘It’s gonna be half a century until I get signed!’ So I just realized, you have all the resources that you need to do it, you just need the energy, and need to ask for help and get up and do it.

One of the most salient features is that the three artists that you’ve chosen to present all at once: Not only are they all women, but they’re kind of a demographic minority within the [contemporary] jazz community, being black female instrumentalists, largely. Was that conscious?

Um, I feel like it was a dual consciousness? The way it came about was that they were just my friends. And I have friends of all nationalities, but those two had reached out for my help. Shirazette had just graduated from [Northern Illinois University] and moved to New York with her Master’s degree. She wanted to do more jazz, and she wondered how she could get on the scene and become more popular. The same with Camille: She had just graduated from [SUNY-Binghamton] with a geology degree or something, and she decided she wanted to pursue music, and she was asking, ‘How do you do this?’

And for a long time I would just have them over for dinner — musicians never turn down food — so we would sit around and talk about what they needed. And when it got to the part that, ‘You need a record — that’s your passport. No one wants to know anything [about you] unless you have something to show for it that looks good and sounds good.’ And because I had just done it myself, I felt like, ‘I could just tell you everything you need to do, and I could come in the studio and help you.’ … I actually asked them, ‘Would you like to be on this label?’ And they were like, ‘We would love to do it.’

So that’s how it happened. It wasn’t like, ‘OK, I’m gonna pick two black women instrumentalists.’ And actually, there were some guys who were involved, as well, but their CDs weren’t done in time.

But on the flip side, part of the label is based on my story. You may have someone who is a star — not to toot my own horn! — but they go unnoticed because either the timing, maybe it was a bad day, maybe no one showed up to their show and other people looked at that and said, ‘No, that’s not as important.’ The media is so strong today: If you don’t have people screaming and Twittering and a ticker-tape parade behind you, people don’t really take the time. People are all busy; they’re all trying to get the same nut, so what’s the big deal about you? So it’s important to me that we take the time to realize that there are so many amazing, bad-ass musicians that — they’re quiet. They deserve a chance, but maybe they weren’t loud enough when the bus for the record label came by. They didn’t see them, and they splashed water on them, and they didn’t even notice them.

Camille is a perfect example of that. I only found out her vocal gift just because we were playing for AIDS patients — we had this gig down in lower Manhattan. I asked her to do a duo with me — you know, bass, and I sing, and she was playing saxophone. This one day, I was like, ‘Camille, do you think you could sing a background line for me?’ And I hummed it to her, and she looked at me like, ‘I don’t know…’ When it was time to do the show, she did it, and I was like, ‘I don’t even know this kid. Who is this?’ She got a standing ovation. The reason I tell you they were sick patients is because they got out of their wheelchairs and stood up for her. I was like, ‘Camille, c’mon, really? You’re walking around with that gift, and no one knows? And you have no money, and you can’t even get a Metrocard? C’mon now!’

Not to harp on this point, but do you feel that the people you’ve chosen to present here suffer from any structural things that prevent them from being seen “when the record label bus comes calling,” as you’ve said?

I don’t know that it would in the future. I just know that at the moment that they came to me, they hadn’t had the support they needed. Whether you’re a woman or a man, there should be more places.

Women definitely fit in the category of being overlooked. You know, I participate in it, I’m not going to say I’m not a hypocrite; when March comes and it’s ‘Women in Jazz’ month, I take the ‘Women in Jazz’ gigs. I do that because, in a sense, I have to. We’re still in a position that just because you sound good, it’s not enough. That doesn’t guarantee that you’re going to get that gig. Nine times out of 10, you’re not going to get it. You have to have something that absolutely stands out, ridiculous — you can’t be an average player and feel like you’re going to get it before a guy gets it. I see it every day.

I don’t mean to throw guys under the bus, but they’re my friends, so I’ll ask them: ‘Whatchu made for that gig?’ And they’ll tell me, and it’s substantially different than a woman who would try to get the same gig. … It’s not, ‘Just because you’re a woman, you deserve this.’ That’s totally not what I want to promote. You definitely have to hold your own, and you have to be the best person for the job. But beyond that, there needs to be more opportunities that we don’t have to have ‘Women in Jazz’ month. But we’re not there yet.

I want to go back to your history a little bit. I know you went to LaGuardia [New York City’s arts magnet high school], Manhattan School of Music. There’s this great story that you were actually on tour during your [college] graduation?

Yeah. I got called to play in a band with a Japanese saxophonist named Masa Wada. In the group was this phenomenal drummer who — I didn’t really know who he was at the time, and I was a little afraid because I noticed he’d partake in drugs. I don’t know if he was an ex-drug-addict, or what the thing was. In any case, that was my first trip out of the country, my first big gig. And things weren’t as organized as I would’ve dreamed. So I was in the real world.

Come to find out the drummer turned out to be Denis Charles. He’s played with so many amazing people [Cecil Taylor, Sonny Rollins, Steve Lacy]; he’s a master in his own right. He’s passed now, but he became my best friend. I learned so much about not judging people by their cover. He told me stories about Cannonball Adderley and Miles Davis because he was there. … I was out there for, I think it was a two-month trip. So I learned about Japanese food, I learned about the smell of Japan, learned about being in a country where you don’t see too many of your color. And how amazing the Japanese culture actually is.

Right on. I’m asking because — if I do the math correctly, that was the mid-’90s or so. It seems like the scene has changed a lot since then, where it’s harder to get a gig like that right out of school these days. Did that have any role in why you decided to put this together?

Yes, it does. You’re right on it. I want to create opportunities — where the door is closed, we need to come together to find another opening. … We don’t take no for answers. This whole label, this whole movement, or whatever you want to call it is an example of how we just have to be creative. Who knew that we would get where we are, where NPR is calling me for an interview? I get kind of choked up about it. Somebody might say, ‘It’s not even a Grammy, why you actin’ like that?” But for me it is, because coming from ‘no,’ from nothing… When Camille first started, we paid people to come to see her play. We created a situation for her. They didn’t know that. But now, she gets paid to play.

Of course, I want to talk about your record itself. It’s called Balance, and I hear a very diverse-sounding record. If there is a defining aesthetic, there are a lot of different sounds, a lot of different guests. Is that something you’re going for with this release?

OK, I’m gonna be honest, Patrick. I tried to do a straight-ahead record. I said, ‘I’m gonna have a straight-ahead record, and I’m going to have a core band.’

When I started writing for this album, some other stuff was coming out. I got the straight-ahead stuff to come out, but some other stuff was coming out. And I tried to put that aside, maybe not for this record. And I allowed the natural, organic motion to overtake me, instead of my mental, the logical, ‘I said I’m gonna do a straight-ahead record.’ What I’m realizing is that my sound is actually a combination of sounds. So I don’t hear it just straight-ahead or tradition. I just hear music. I didn’t want to deny what was coming out, and I saw a common thread, and I felt like I was able to weave it together to make sense.

The whole thing about “balance” comes not from a musical sense, but what I was dealing with in my life. My money wasn’t right; I was kind of having a hard time in life about two or three years ago. Hurricane Sandy happened. There were a lot of wars going on — inner wars. It was a rough time. … I wanted to be real about where I was in that moment. If you listen to “Patriot,” I wrote that for the soldiers who were coming home, and still out there, who were dealing with this horrible thing that they’re put into, but it’s their job. They have to be be soldiers on one hand, and brave for their country — they’re patriots. But inside, they don’t feel right about what they’re doing. They actually come back, they need therapy. To kill a whole village, c’mon, some of them have kids, that’s emotional. So the song couldn’t be pretty — the screeching guitar was definitely the sound of crying and a lot of tension.

I decided that I wanted to present the fact that if you don’t experience the bad — in that time, too, I was having health problems where I couldn’t walk, I was going through excruciating pain — you don’t really know when you have it good. … So I wanted this record to present that whole thing. Not to be preachy in any kind of way, but just to express the fact that we need the beauty and the ugly to appreciate both sides.

That’s kind of a far cry from deciding to make a straight-ahead record.

I know! I tried, I swear.

Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Duke and I were on tour together across the country and this night, we were in Denver. … And at seven o’clock in the morning, there was a knock on my door, and I opened the door, and there’s Duke, and he said, ‘You’re on the cover of Time.’ And he handed me Time magazine. It was the worst and the best moment possible, all mixed up, because I didn’t want to have my story come first. I was so hoping that they would do Duke first, because I idolized him. He was so much more important than I was … he deserved to be first.

This scene is reminiscent of the situation that the rapper Macklemore found himself in on Sunday night at the Grammy Awards. After winning the Best Rap Album Grammy, he publicly apologized to fellow nominee Kendrick Lamar, a heavily-tipped favorite for the award who Macklemore had publicly endorsed. Here’s what he sent Lamar as a text message and posted as a screenshot to Instagram:

You got robbed. I wanted you to win. You should have. It’s weird and sucks that I robbed you. I was gonna say that during the speech. Then the music started playing during my speech and I froze. Anyway, you know what it is. Congrats on this year and your music. Appreciate you as an artist and as a friend. Much love

Taken at face value, Macklemore’s backstage contrition, like Brubeck’s, is clearly bittersweet. Surely, both felt vindicated for their hard work, yet conflicted that an artist they felt to be more deserving was passed over. (In fact, the next year Brubeck released an album featuring a tune called “The Duke,” which has since become a jazz standard.) One can further surmise that both Macklemore and Brubeck, conscientious of their whiteness, were troubled that institutions had elevated them above black innovators in an African-American music.

Both also fit into a longstanding narrative in American popular music. White musicians play music of black community origin. Then, buoyed by systemic privilege, they enjoy mainstream success prior to the black artists they were initially inspired by. And they attempt to allay the guilt by deferring to said black trailblazers. (For a more severe reading of Macklemore’s public apology, try Jon Caramanica for The New York Times.)

The parallels continue beyond race-encoded discomfort, though, and I’d venture to say they tell us something deeper about the sort of musician who attracts mainstream attention.

• Both musicians grew up on the West Coast and learned their craft within active musical communities far from established geographic centers. Dave Brubeck was among the biggest names to emerge from the San Francisco Bay Area, where he was known as an experimentalist after he returned from World War II. Macklemore was born and came up in Seattle, where he’s a leading public figure of a burgeoning, multi-ethnic rap scene.
• Both musicians owe their early success to frequent DIY touring and hustle independent of major record labels. Macklemore and producer Ryan Lewis handled much of their business machinery via a small in-house team, including social media, graphic design and music videos which have been viewed tens of millions of times. Their Grammy-winning LP The Heist was produced without a record label budget (though their major play on pop radio was facilitated by a promotional deal with a major label). In Brubeck’s case, his wife Iola cooked up a plan to gig at colleges and universities across California, and eventually across the U.S. It made him immensely popular among younger audiences, and even resulted in several live commercial releases (and a long-standing contract with Columbia Records).
• Both artists experienced some of their biggest hits with self-consciously non-traditional songs. Most casual fans associate Brubeck first and foremost with his recordings “Take Five” and “Blue Rondo a la Turk,” famously employing uncommon meters compared to the default 4/4 swing pattern or 3/4 waltz. (Do note that these tunes were released in 1959, years after Brubeck’s initial brush with fame.) In Macklemore’s case, it’s “Thrift Shop,” about secondhand clothing/conspicuous consumption (and the winner of the Best Rap Song Grammy), and “Same Love,” meditating on homophobia in hip-hop (and performed at the Grammy ceremony).
• Both artists have made it a point to use their artistic platforms to advance social causes. Macklemore’s “Same Love” features an openly gay singer, Mary Lambert, and was explicitly tied to the Washington State referendum to legalize gay marriage. Another song, “White Privilege,” discusses just that. Brubeck repeatedly insisted on performing with integrated bands when he led them, including touring the U.S. South with his “classic quartet” featuring black bassist Eugene Wright, or his World War II Army band in a time of military segregation. He also teamed with Iola Brubeck and Louis Armstrong to create The Real Ambassadors, a jazz musical addressing the Civil Rights Movement and U.S. foreign relations. One song, “They Say I Look Like God,” is a biting satirical commentary on racism. The irony here, of course, is that while both are often credited for progressive politics, they operated within genres deeply rooted in progressive social criticism.

That brings us back to Sunday night’s Grammy Awards, where Macklemore took home four trophies in total, including the overall Best New Artist. It’s interesting here to note that Dave Brubeck was also a musician smiled upon by the Grammys, earning a lifetime achievement award in 1996. And his death in 2012 prompted the organizers of the 2013 telecast to organize a brief tribute on stage; musicians Kenny Garrett, Stanley Clarke and Chick Corea played “Take Five” and “Blue Rondo a la Turk” for a little over a minute. It wasn’t much, but it was certainly the most jazz we’ve seen on the nationally-televised part of the awards for quite some time.

Why might the Grammy Awards, or Time magazine c. 1954, or any other chronicler of mainstream taste reflect kindly upon artists like Brubeck or Macklemore? Their commercial success puts them on the radar, of course. And white privilege is certainly far-reaching here: the lacunae of white Grammy voters or journalists, the double standard applied to black political speech compared to that of whites, the career opportunities denied to artists who happen to be black. With these conditions in place — and, certainly, given catchy songs — Brubeck and Macklemore’s shared outsider qualities translate to alternative appeal. It’s easier for the powers that be to project purposeful intent onto their aesthetic decisions, rather than just weirdness.

Brubeck and Macklemore were no dummies. They knew that their “foils” at the time, Duke Ellington and Kendrick Lamar respectively, were also engaged in ambitious, conceptual, socially critical work that stood out from a formal or lyrical status quo. (For Lamar, it’s his good kid, M.A.A.D. city album; for Ellington, well, it’s most of his work, really.) And perhaps they were embarrassed because they somehow understood the process that made their recognition possible over giants of their field.

Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.