Jazz saxophonist and Pulitzer Prize winner Ornette Coleman dies at 85

American jazz musician and composer Ornette Coleman, whose ground-breaking saxophone playing earned him a Pulitzer Prize in 2007, died Thursday morning in Manhattan at age 85. The cause was cardiac arrest, a representative for the family said.

Coleman’s musical ambitions started at his Texas high school, where he was a member of the school band and then started his own. He took gigs in traveling shows and held odd jobs so he could continue pursuing a career in music as an adult.

He was influential in the Free Jazz movement of the 1960s and inducted into the Downbeat Jazz Hall of Fame, based in Orlando, in 1969. His album Sound Grammar won the Pulitzer Prize for music in 2007.

Coleman’s unorthodox style earned mixed results. According to a Time magazine profile in 1960, “Some of Coleman’s critics feel that he has not only stretched jazz structure but has totally demolished it. Improvisation, to Coleman, means music not limited by standard rhythms, harmonies or even tonality, but based instead on a kind of free association of sounds.”

More resources:

NPR encapsulates Coleman’s body of work in five songs.

Variety describes Coleman’s “liberated approach.”

Fans praise the late musician on his Facebook page.

The Guardian has a photo gallery of the jazz great.