Hi. Ornette Coleman went home last week, and I've been thinking about him a bit. When I first seriously started checking out jazz records, it was Ornette and Charles Mingus and Duke Ellington. I think there's some real beauty in his sounds.

I played "Una Muy Bonita" to get myself warmed up.


Then I played "The Golden Number", a duet with Charlie Haden, because it is elegaic and stunning. This song absolutely kills me and has one of the records I turn to late at night sometimes, when I need to eff the ineffable, I have wept with this song playing on numerous occasions.


It's true that Ornette's sessions could be a bit maddening and you really had to be in the right mood to listen to alot of his music, but he was earnest in trying to access some seriously esoteric places and should be considered on the short-list of Ontological Heavy Lifters.


The man came up with the description "Free Jazz" and pioneered an art form that is only difficult because the work of revealing hidden beauty in the universe is difficult. It can be a lonely, bewildering thing.


And that is the value of true difficult art: when it is beautiful, it is an utterly unique beauty, fragile, fleeting, discovered almost by accident -- like the fact of human life in the universe. And when you find that sublime moment you feel lucky and euphoric. This experience of music through Ornette Coleman has made me a better human being and given my life meaning.