In 1959, four major jazz albums were made that changed music forever. Miles Davis, Kinda Blue. Dave Brubeck's Time Out.
Charles Mingus, Mingus Aham. And Ornette Coleman's The Shape of Jazz to Come. 1959 was a very important...
jazz year for me and my own development and the evolution of jazz up until now and beyond. It was a year that saw the biggest selling jazz album and single. of all time. Time out was going where I envisioned jazz should go.
I said, boy, this is this is fine. This is going to work. Jazz was pushed to new heights of innovation, beauty and groove.
You know, the things would swing. Yeah, he'd lift you right out of your seat. It was the end of the Eisenhower era, 2.5 children and the white picket fence.
In 1959, Chaz is reaching white America in a big way. and ridiculous music music jazz musicians didn't really like join the civil rights movement the civil rights movement actually joined them music music and with ornette coleman's the shape of jazz to come 1959 saw the birth of a whole new free jazz movement when you talk about somebody speaking through their instrument actually hear it as a human, that's Ornette. He changed everything.
1959 was a phenomenon. It was on another level. That's all you can say. Miles, where are you going to work now? Right here.
Okay, because if you move back, we don't get you. When I play, I'm going to raise my horn a little bit. Okay, just you four guys in this, right, Miles?
Five. Ready? Miles Davis Kind of Blue is the biggest selling jazz album ever made made shifting over 5 million copies it regularly tops best jazz album polls as well as featuring high in lists of the greatest albums of any category kind of blue continues to convert more people to jazz than any other recording all this 50 years after it was released yeah let's see a little bit of it right When they walked into the studio, they did not see this as their ultimate statement.
They did not see this as the birth of a classic. It was a session that was scheduled for that day. After Cannonball, you play again, and then we'll come in and end it.
They go over by the piano, and he's giving them instructions about the tunes we're going to play. So there wasn't a whole lot of music. I didn't have any music at all. You know, just a piece of manuscript paper.
with some chord scribble on it. Mine just make this sound like it's floating. Here we go. No title. Start again, please.
Sorry, we gotta watch it because the noise is all the way through this. This is so quiet. First time I did it, the engineer said, the drums are making like a surface noise.
So, Miles hollered back at him and says, that's part of it. That goes with it. What? All right.
Amazingly, Miles and his band spent a total of just seven hours recording Kind of Blue. All but one of the tracks are first takes. Anytime they completed a tune, that's what they were going to stick with. You know, it really is propelled by the idea that first thought is best thought.
Try it again, Irvin. We would be hard-pressed to find any album opener that can compare to the opening of So What. This misty, unclear idea of where's the music going, where are we?
The intro for So What, which totally improvised, had no time reference, no beat yet. And it's the piano and the bass sort of having this little conversation and out of this musical cloud comes the riff. The grand riff, the one that says, so what?
Bum ba doo ba doo ba doo bum. And then just when the energy is sort of like getting the point where it needs to be kicked up a notch. Jimmy Cobb comes in with this incredible cymbal crash. When we got to the place where the solos were supposed to start, I hit the cymbal and I thought I had overplayed it for the room.
I thought I had hit it too hard. But bang, it hits. You know, you can't plan on stuff like that happening. Miles'solo kicks off. So simple.
Almost like a whispered confession by someone very intimate to you. When Miles did Kind of Blue, it opened up a whole new direction in jazz. A more introspective, a new way of thinking about the creation of jazz and the creation of jazz compositions.
Part of Kind of Blue's enormous influence on music is the legacy of the band members. Many of them went on to become leaders in their own right, like saxophone virtuoso John Coltrane. But Kind of Blue is defined by Miles'incredibly hip trumpet sound. He had this sound that was kind of like a haunting kind of voice. It was really individual, very unique, very special.
The way he plays sometimes it makes you feel life so deeply that you can almost cry, you know. It didn't really sound like a trumpet anymore. Miles'trumpet technique on Kind of Blue was something he'd painstakingly developed since he first hit the scene in the late 1940s.
Back then, the music had been changing. In the 1940s, if you were a player, if you were an instrumentalist who was really starting to, you know, try and make the move, bebop was the music. Bebop was a fast and frenetic style of jazz. It reflected jazz musicians desire to be accepted as virtuoso artists, masters of their instruments.
Bebop's greatest exponent was Charlie Parker. Miles Davis is a very precocious musical youngster. What he really wants to learn is bebop. And where he's going to learn it is on 52nd Street and up in Minton's up in Harlem, playing with the bebop leader of that time, Charlie Parker. Music Aged only 18, Miles became a member of Charlie Parker's band.
Music As Miles traded solos with his hero, he was learning about bebop. from the source. Miles is not going to be a side band for long. Miles, like many of the other musicians of that day, were trying to deal with the language of bebop.
Where do we take bebop? Miles said, the music has become cluttered. Part of his genius as a musician was that he edited what he heard Charlie Parker play. So if Charlie, for instance, used ten notes to make a certain kind of a statement, Miles Davis might figure out how to do it. how to use three.
Miles used what they call the harmonic bomb. You hit this note that nobody expects to hit, and it has a great, great effect. of power than just running up to the note another kind of a way.
There's a connection, a connective between these four artists, Charles Mingus, Dave Brubeck, Miles Davis and Ornette Coleman in that they're all dealing with bebop and the continuation of bebop. Where do we take this language, what do we do with it? Another direction jazz took in 1959 was the rhythmic experimentation of pianist Dave Brubeck's Time Out. A highly unusual record, each track is in a different tempo and time signature. The single Take Five is in 5-4 time and built around a drum solo.
Yet it rose up the pop charts, becoming the best-selling Jazz 45 ever released. Brubeck had spent years building the lineup of his quartet that would go on to record Time Out. I put together gradually this dream group. Some bass players and some drummers didn't want to play in different time signatures, didn't want to follow where I went. But Take Five drummer Joe Morello was originally unhappy coming into a band dominated by Brubeck and saxophonist Paul Desmond.
On a marquee, on any kind of a sign, it was... It was Dave Ruback, featuring Paul Desmond, and the other guys were nothing. You could have been zilch, you know?
I said, Joe, I'll feature you. So the first night he joined, I gave him a drum solo. I did the drum solo and the place went wild and people just stood up and clapped and all this nonsense. Paul Desmond, in the middle of the end of the solo, he just walks off the stand and runs in the dressing room. And Paul said, either he goes or I go and I said Paul he's not going which was a shock you know he was a star in the group that day that was Paul well he felt that way anyway He didn't talk to me for about five months, you know.
Okay, now we've got to work on the ending. Did I play too many things for you? I sat in the crossfire between these two wonderful players, keeping everything going and giving in or not giving in. quartet just started making real headway by the time they signed the Columbia records in the mid-50s the Dave Brubeck quartet were one of America's top jazz bands his music was easily accessible to the average person it was not too complicated and group was quite appealing because here you had four all-American young boys to watch as well as to listen to.
Dave was quite easy to sell to middle America because he looked like middle America. He talked like middle America. He was Nice guy that you're glad your daughter is going out with.
As Brubeck's success widened, parts of the jazz community accused him of being not only a sellout, but effectively a racist who diluted black music for mass consumption. Jazz came out of black America. I mean later of course white America catches up and it always does. But there definitely was a resentment amongst black musicians regarding Dave Brubeck. In the 50s, people who actually got successful from Cool Jazz were primarily white musicians.
He had broken into another audience that nobody really had. That's when people started getting mad at him. The thing about Dave is kind of strange for a guy who's light years away from a racist, right? Who's light years away from a commercial guy.
Who doesn't make recordings with any intention of pandering to the public, right? But the public likes him. Brubeck himself was more concerned with fine-tuning the rhythm section of his quartet and tackling his ideas about where jazz should be headed. And then Eugene Wright joined us, and finally I had this dream group.
But the addition of bassist Eugene Wright didn't pass unnoticed when they toured universities in the southern states of America. We were playing in a university and they said, you can't go on stage with an African American. And I said, well, then we're not going on stage. And then the students were. stamping on the floor up above the dressing room.
And the louder and wilder it got, the more concerned the president of the college was getting. So he told me, you can go on, but you have to put your bass player way in the back where they won't be too noticeable. When we walked on stage, the audience just went wild.
They were so happy. The second tune, I told Eugene, your microphone's broke. Come out here and play. your solo and use my speaker's mic in front of the band. Gene didn't know how I was plotting all this.
He came out and we tore that place up. Oh, it was so wonderful. Yeah.
The classic lineup of the Dave Brubeck Quartet that would go on to record Time Out was now in place. bass player and composer Charles Mingus saw the question of how to take jazz forward in a different way. Mingus had risen through the ranks, playing in the bands of jazz legends like Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and Charlie Parker. But for the notoriously opinionated and hot-tempered Mingus, jazz wasn't a calendar history of styles so much as an ever-present now.
piano plays Charles Mingers had a very strong sense that there was no past, there was no present, there was no future. All of the time was alive at the same moment. He was a great, great thinker about music.
He didn't buy anything. About that, you know, a style lasted from 1920 to 1930. Man, he was sitting by that. His thing was that if it was good then, it's good now.
He wanted the freedom to play in, to write in, to encourage his musicians to know how to improvise in every style. In 1959, Mingus recorded and released Mingus Ah Um. It was one of four albums he made that year, not unusual.
unusual in this prolific artist's long career, but Mingus Ah Um was a tightly focused masterwork. The title of the album sounds like a stutter before Wally's getting himself together to make his grand statement. Ah, um?
You know, what's that about? What's really, really devastating about Ah, Um? is the consistency.
Tune by tune by tune. I mean, it's Mingus at his best. Mingus was digging deep into that roots thing with that incredible opening track.
Better get it in your soul. It's like a gospel choir. It's like a Pentecostal performance on a Wednesday night prayer meeting. But the incredible magic of it is not just the influences.
It's how Mingus works it all together and makes it into its own new thing. Thank you ladies and gentlemen. Remember no applause and keep it down.
Your drinks, don't rattle your ice in your glasses and don't ring the cash register. You got it covered? Alright. He had these enormous hands and that made it possible for him to do certain things technically that just other bass players couldn't do.
In fact, he was one of the greatest bassists in the ass. Well, he was one of the greatest players of the bass period. I can hear him now.
He was powerful. Powerful. You shut up when he played.
Charlie Mingus was a big man with a big talent and a big temper and people bugged him in the audience for some reason. Someone did, he got very angry, took his bass, and he smashed it through the light up there and broke it. The light's still there, the Mingus light, that's what it's become. He ripped the front door off once, and some little gal this big dragged it home, as I recall.
I don't know what happened to him. They say a lot of musicians never played better in their life than when they played with Mingus because he was so demanding and he used everything. He used anger, he used insults, he used flattery, whatever he could use.
He would fire musicians and hire them back, you know, 20 minutes later. Nothing was out of bounds. He wanted you to understand his play, his music, and be yourself in it.
So often on a nightclub stand he would stop and say to somebody, you're just, you're not playing yourself, you're playing notes. I knew that Mingus was playing in this little club on West 4th Street. And I went into the club.
It was an argument on the bandstand. They weren't even playing. And I heard Mingus like yelling at somebody. And it turned out to be the piano player. Mingus put his arm inside the piano and he grabbed the strings and pulled them out with one fist.
I said, man, it's time for me to get out of here. I never seen anything like that in my life. Well, I'm gonna shoot it. A gun. People are always telling me stories I don't want to hear about moments of Charles's volatility or things that took place, and in take place they did.
And Charles created scenes. He was called Jez's angry man, and he had plenty to be angry about. He had a lot to confront in those days for a man of his sensitivity and his sensibility and his talent and unrecognized in many places merely because he had the wrong skin color. He wasn't dark enough and he wasn't light enough. He said, well, he called himself a mongrel or a mutt.
Like many jazz artists, Mingus was an extraordinary player and improviser. But with Mingus Ah Am, he began to assume his position as one of jazz's greatest composers. I love self-portrait in three colors.
A little through composed piece without any solos, just a little gem. Beautiful, this multifaceted composition. Through his music, trying to express who he was. And he said the reason it was difficult is because he was changing all the time. But through his music you hear every, you hear the fear, you hear the spirituality, the tenderness, the passion, everything that he was comes out in his music.
In 1959, Ornette Coleman made his spectacular musical statement in one quantum leap with the audaciously titled, The Shape of Jazz to Come. But before he formed his quartet, Coleman, based in Los Angeles, had trouble finding anyone who was interested in his wildly unorthodox music. I went over to this club by MacArthur Park on Wilshire called The Hague, and Jerry Mulligan was playing there. They started their first set, and after they began to play, a guy came in and asked if he could sit in.
He got up on this bandstand and proceeded in. to take out his horn and the horn was white it was plastic you know I'd never seen a plastic horn before you know this guy started to play it was like you know the heavens opened up for me because I saw and I heard something that I'd been feeling you To me, they were playing as if the music was written. You know, when it was improvised, it would sound like, oh, they have already learned that, you know. So I said, oh, I don't want to play like that. I want to play directly from something that inspired me.
And I said, what are you doing? And I said, I'm improvising. He said, you ain't playing shit. You can't play like that. I said, play like what?
The way you're playing. And all of a sudden, Jerry Mulligan... ask him to stop. So he stopped and got off the bandstand and went to the back door.
So I rushed through the crowd trying to reach him. And by the time I got to the back door, he disappeared down the alley. He was gone.
Blown away by Ornette's playing, Charlie Hayden soon tracked him down. I said, I heard you play the other night, man. You sounded so brilliant. He said, thank He said, not many people tell me that. And I said, man, I just wish that we could play music together sometime.
And he said, well, what about now? And so we went to his apartment. That's how I met him.
And we played and played and played. And we might have stayed in there for three or four days. I don't know.
So that's when the quartet started. They're a bunch of young people. players, players who are just starting to break out and whose minds and approaches are still flexible enough that Ornette can work with them.
I never worried about cards, melodies, the keys. Only sound. And the thing about it, there's only 12 notes.
that's satisfying the whole world. Twelve notes that's satisfying the whole world. I said, oh, man. And then I realized that notes don't have a style. Either you make something out of it or you don't.
Ornette Coleman's The Shape of Jazz to Come didn't initially make the bold impression it has done in the years since 1959. First, I didn't know what to make of it. You know, I didn't know which pocket to put it in, because I hadn't heard anything quite like that. It was a new, far-out approach. The Shape of Jazz to Come is definitely an audacious title. You know, it's putting yourself out there and saying, you know, this is where jazz is going.
Lonely Woman has been a favorite song of mine and Wilner ever since I heard it when it first came out. It is one of the greatest compositions ever. I mean, combined with the way his quartet and Ornette played it, everything music could be.
And not a day goes by where I'm not humming that. It's not your standard jazz thing where this guy solos and this one solos and this one solos. This is a real composition that brings all of them together and they're all such staggeringly great players. Born from oppression, jazz is at its heart political. And throughout his career, Charles Mingus often integrated his political beliefs with his music.
Charles used his bandstand as a soapbox at all times. He spoke out about his beliefs, about racism, about the inequities in society, and the record industry, whatever was on his mind, he expressed. The most timely and influential track on Mingus A'am, Fables of Phobos, was no exception. The track spoke of events that took place after the outlawing of segregation two years earlier in 19... 57. President Eisenhower is signing the civil rights bill.
It was Monday morning, 10 past eight kids going to school all over the country as the president signs. And in little rock at 10 past eight, Arkansas national. National Guardsmen under orders of Governor Faubus challenging the law of the land, preventing nine Negro youngsters from attending the Central High School in Little Rock. There was an attempt to integrate a high school in Little Rock, Arkansas, according to the law, according to the Supreme Court of the United States.
Governor Oralville Faubus, the governor of Arkansas, would not allow integration. Two, four, six, eight, we are one! Mingus was outraged by what he saw happening to people.
And the irony of the Fables of Farbus is that it's kind of a comic tune. It has a theatrical quality. You know, you're expecting this character that's going to be, well, not very fit for public display. And that's certainly the way that he felt about this white supremacist governor of Arkansas.
Then came the Eisenhower-Faubus meeting. Finally, Faubus withdrew the guardsmen, and the Negroes entered the hitherto forbidden white school. A riot started.
Confronted with what he called anarchy, the president ordered United States soldiers into Little... Iraq. The regular army troops, paratroops escorted the Negro children to and from school, gave them full protection from the threatening crowd. Charles wrote some smoking lyrics about this and Columbia Records would not have not let Charles include these political words on the album. Tell me someone who's ridiculous.
And then his drummer would respond, Governor Faubus. And Charles would say, why is he so sick and ridiculous? And Danny would say, two, four, six, eight, brainwash and teach you hate.
No more ludicrous plan. Name me someone who's ridiculous, Danny. Governor Faubus.
Oh, why are they so sick? Oh, why are they so sick? And ridiculous.
The brainwashed should teach you hate. Fables of Faubus, even without the lyric, just the fact that he's using the name Faubus is going to have a very strong message to many of the people who are listening to that album in 1959. Fables of Faubus opened up a lot of the, like, pent-up feelings that we all had as African-American musicians against racism. in America, kind of set the stage for each of our own individual expression of that opposition to racism. Yes, we can!
Barack Obama may not know it, but jazz is one of the reasons he was elected president. Charles Mingus and all of these musicians, they helped to... create the atmosphere that led to people respecting a person beyond the distinctions of color.
In the years leading up to Kind of Blue, Miles Davis had begun. to make an impact with his own defiant demands for respect, both as a black man and as an artist. I remember seeing him in Los Angeles at a club. People who turned up were gamblers, pimps, drug dealers, hustling type guys, bragging about who got the most hoes and who got the prettiest hoes and your hoes should be picked up by the dog catcher and wah, you know, just all that kind of stuff.
Now, when Miles Davis came on the bandstand, though, they shut up. They didn't make any noise after he came out there. See, I'd never seen that before.
Because these are not the kind of people you can just shut up. And they knew if they got loud and irritated him, he would turn around and leave. And that would be it. He wouldn't come back. Nobody was going to entreat him, oh, Miles, you won't get paid.
I'm not broke he'd always made his point that when I come in here I have some kind of artistic goals I'm trying to accomplish and they do not include you talking while we're playing Miles struck me as somebody who would sell a lot of records because his cool, almost disdainful demeanor on stage worked absolutely in his favor to become a talked-about artist. Columbia had a very powerful publicity department. They realized what we have to do The thing we have to do is we have to create this image of the distant remote jazz musician who's not available to everybody.
We're going to sell them that. And of course being remote and unavailable just made everyone dig Miles all the more. Miles was not just a musical pioneer, he was a pioneer as far as American culture in general. You know, he was an important black figure who made it within this American system. He's reaching white America in a big way.
Brady Albert said when he was in the Village Vanguard, he noticed this repeatedly, that when Miles Davis would play a ballad and put the harmon mute in the bell of the horn and play in the lower register, he said every woman's legs in the club opened. He said the first time he thought he was hallucinating, that it was not really happening. He said they didn't even know they were doing it. He said they would all just open up.
He was a dude, man, a dude, but beautiful. So sexy, if you really want to know the truth. It's got a very elegant, low-key sound.
You know, women liked him a lot. Look at all the wives he had. While 1959 saw America beginning to find its groove, beneath this shiny surface lay deep fears brought about by the Cold War with Russia.
As part of a program of cultural detente, the American government asked Dave Brubeck to take jazz and its American values to the East. Our government wanted to impress people. that we're right on the border of Russia. About our culture, President Eisenhower wanted us to go along the perimeter of Russia.
And we opened in Poland, then went to Turkey, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Iran, Iraq. We were going to represent our country and we talked about how difficult it is to go and be the voice of freedom when you don't really have freedom yet because the old unwritten laws of segregation. A great thing jazz has done for our country and here we're being sent out to do it for the world.
The tour was to begin in Poland, but this meant... traveling through East Germany. East Berlin was not recognized by the United States, so they assigned Madame Gundelach that for some reason could go through the Brandenburg Gate. The whole scene was like a spy movie.
She told me to get in the trunk of her car. I said, I won't get in the trunk of her car. I'll get in the back seat, and if I get questioned, I'm going to tell them the truth.
But she got through. She brought us to a police station and this man walked into the room and said, you are Mr. Kulu. And I said, no, I'm Mr. Kulu. Brewbeck and he said no you cool then he pulled out a polish paper with a picture of me and the caption said mr. cool and I realized I was mr. cool and that was my name Many of the ideas that we developed for Time Out came from touring in these countries like Blue Rondo a Turk. That's a Turkish folk beat.
That's how you play it. And then it goes into a blues. Four, four, two...
Brubeck returned to the U.S. with a complete vision of the time signature experiments for Time Out. For his album of cool rhythmic innovation, Brubeck decided that drummer Joe Morello was to be given a showcase. I heard Joe playing this beat backstage.
And I said, well, I have something in 5-4. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. 5'4", that's right up my alley, man. You know? It's just... I said boy this is this is fine this is gonna work timeout was going where I envisioned jazz should go jazz history had been written in 4-4 time and you get Dave Brubeck doing a whole album with the idea of using different time signatures Columbia told me, all these crazy time signatures, that'll never sell. But the disc jockeys started playing this. We had a big hit. The idea that jazz could actually make it onto pop radio in America in the late 50s, that was totally unheard of. I don't know. What really works well with Time Out is that it provides an easy introduction for mainstream America to deal with new musical ideas. Toward the end of 1959, the Ornette Coleman Quartet came to New York for the very first time, with the prophetically titled, The Shape of Jazz to Come. They were all but unknown, but those who were hip to the scene were there to jazze. Check out the band's New York debut at the Five Spot. We couldn't wait. Went down to the Five Spot and had a rehearsal one afternoon, and then we opened up. There were lines around the block. The place was packed with people, so it was quite a deal. The opening night they had everybody, everybody was there. So he was kind of on auditory trial, so to speak. And we couldn't wait to get to work and play because the music was so great and new and fresh. And that's when the shape of jazz to come is dropped on the New York jazz scene. The first night of Ornette's was a soccer of impact and unforgettable. Unforgettable. I don't think I ever heard four musicians who... Who gave me the impression of surrounding me. I was in the middle of it. Bang. We all know the atomic bomb is very dangerous. We must get ready for it. Duck and cover. Attaboy, Tony. Act fast. Coleman spoke the paranoia that existed in the nuclear age. The reaction that many people had just to this idea that the entire world could be blown up.... play music with this urgency this desperate urgency to make something new that's never been before as if you're on the front line and you're risking your life for every note you play well I was there the opening night and I was really unprepared for the hostility I was sitting next to Roy Eldridge and Roy was a warm, generous guy and he was listening to Ornette and he said, he's just jiving, man. That's not music. People were saying it was random, it was chaotic, it was this or that. There were people who became angry at the music and let it be known that they hated it. In New York, everything was under suspicion. And I didn't know about being under suspicion. I just thought about picking up my horn, activating the idea that's going through my nervous system. This guy had extreme nerve. See, the things that Ornette would play, even today you actually cannot believe that he played some of them. Just the sheer audacity of it. In New York, Ornette Coleman playing his white plastic sax was considered pretty out there, too. It looked kind of funny because people said, oh, what happened to the candy that was inside of when you bought it? You got a great sound out of this instrument, man. You wouldn't think it was plastic. We'd be playing and I'd say, oh my God, I hope this horn don't melt, man. This cat's playing. So it was heavy stuff, you know. Something so fabulous. I mean like what would people object to in it? I can't even imagine it. He changed everything. He changed everything. The whole approach, the way of looking at it, the style of it, the sound. He influenced people that don't even know he influenced them, who think they hated the music. You know, it gets into you. You can't help it. Maybe that's what upset them so much. I'm not trying to prove anything to anybody. I want to be as human as I can get. Believe me. There's nothing I'm trying to hide. There's nothing I'm trying to climb above. There's nothing I'm trying to destroy. No one is going to suffer from what the human race does because it's not going to destroy itself. It's going to improve itself. Music is something that, to me, It's nothing but the sound of your emotions. It's your heart. It's your feelings. It's your belief. It's your ability. And most of all, it's your love. And what's so beautiful about it, it's not destructive. It's always something that gets better. 1959 was a really important year in jazz because you had some of the greatest musicians in the world playing a response to what had been played, but was also a response to what could be played. The art was advanced in 1959. Another set of choices were provided for everybody. Miles Davis'Kind of Blue has become jazz. Jazz's best-selling album, hugely influential from its 1959 release right up until today. Kind of Blue definitely changed music. It just kind of opened up the horizon for jazz expression. Miles would go on to influence the course of jazz many more times. Dave Brubeck still continues to follow his own groove. And Time Out remains a high point of jazz innovation. With Time Out, it finally happened the way we all dreamt of it. It stood the test of time, this one. Charles Mingus, a political as well as musical force, is now recognized as being among the 20th century's most important composers. Mingus Aham remains a prime work by this unpredictable genius. He was sharing his emotions about life. The message he always said to his sidemen was, play yourself. And you could extend this to all of us. Play yourself. Be who you are. But the record that has most changed jazz in this last half century is Ornette Coleman's The Shape of Jazz to Come. It came out of nowhere and fired a starting gun on new forms of music. The LP still sounds good. radical. He's divisive even to this day. Being divisive is a defining element almost to Ornette Coleman's music. The legacy of the shape of jazz to come will be to create no boundaries, to play new music as much as you can, not to be satisfied with the status quo. Next week, Arena profiles the meaning of cool. That's next Friday at 10 as our look at jazz 1959 continues. And there's more jazz coming right up with the Dizzy Gillespie Quintet. Next.