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The noise began back in 1959, in the mind and music of Ornette Coleman.

By Weasel Walter

FOR PROOF OF the theory that avant-garde culture can become accepted and assimilated into the mainstream, look no further than the career of 75-year-old Ornette Coleman. The native Texan first turned the music world on its collective ear in 1959, when he arrived in New York City, white plastic alto saxophone in hand, leading a classic quartet featuring Don Cherry, Billy Higgins, and Charlie Haden. This extremely controversial group revealed a then-radical concept that freed the jazz idiom from the straitjacket of preset chord progressions in order to spontaneously create a music incorporating intensely swinging polyrhythms and startling new tonal colors.

In light of contemporary musical obsessions with noise, cacophony, and freedom of form, this elegantly simple premise may seem quaint close to a half-century on, but it's important to remember the roots of revolution when Coleman appears as part of the San Francisco Jazz Festival with drummer Denardo Coleman and contrabassists Tony Falanga and Greg Cohen. The gloriously liberating sonic disorder typified by the initial waves of so-called "free jazz" during the 1960s has spread through divergent streams in contemporary music, and credit is due to Coleman as one of the founding fathers.

Coleman's vision of music (which he terms harmolodic) demanded the freedom to intelligently improvise melody, harmony, and rhythm at will, regardless of conventions of form. In harmolodic music, all instruments are free to operate at equal levels of importance within the ensemble, thereby eliminating the necessity of the well-worn soloist-plus-accompaniment dichotomy and facilitating total group improvisation.

Some saw this approach as an outright threat to the carefully formalized order of music, while others recognized endless possibilities. The harmolodic concept is simple to hear as pure music, but as time has gone on, Coleman has hinted at a rather labyrinthine rhetoric behind the logic. Whether or not the concept will ever be clarified (most likely in a textbook he has been threatening to issue for decades) is inconsequential when facing the man's body of work.

Though the years Coleman's output has never failed to resonate with concrete emotion, and for someone responsible for such a major artistic paradigm shift, that's no small proof that his innovations stem from true progression rather than épater le bourgeois-style shock tactics. Regardless of context, Coleman has always retained his own distinct instrumental voice on the alto saxophone. At the core his vibrantly buoyant melodic phrasing seems irrevocably rooted in the R&B and jazz traditions: His saxophone playing has always evoked a subtly surrealistic take on the sort of fleet, knotty, forward-moving lines issued by Charlie Parker.

Coleman has garnered a solid reputation as an iconoclast. Preceding his late-'50s musical notoriety, he was known as an outlandish fashion plate, causing outrage in the repressed South with his unusually colorful garb. As early as 1962, Coleman began to push his vision beyond the scope of jazz by writing string quartet music that he presented during a self-financed concert at New York City's Town Hall. Around that time, the virtuosic saxophonist suddenly took up trumpet playing and began expressionistically sawing away at the violin.

When his first choice of drummers became scarce in the mid-'60s, Coleman took the unprecedented move of enlisting his 10-year-old son, Denardo, to fill the chair on a run of albums beginning with The Empty Foxhole (Blue Note, 1966). Denardo's technically uninformed but mischievously intuitive bashing created outrage even to those who thought they had finally caught up with the elder Coleman's advances.

In 1967 Forms and Sounds (RCA), an album of verdantly dissonant chamber music, emerged, and the epic suite "Skies of America" was recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra for Columbia in 1972. In 1973 Coleman spent time jamming with the Master Musicians of Morocco on their own turf in an effort to prove that harmolodics went beyond western music. Around 1975 Coleman had the revelation that, as desirable as the orchestral context was, one could make as voluminous a racket with a gaggle of electric guitars. The result of this brainstorm took form in Prime Time, which featured a sextet of drummers, guitarists, and bassists while the maestro darted and parried on various instruments through the melee.

Prime Time's recorded output is fairly slim, but the group managed to issue a bizarre punk-disco album with the distinction of being one of the earliest commercial, direct-to-disc digital recordings, Of Human Feelings (Antilles, 1982), as well as allow Grateful Dead guitar noodler Jerry Garcia to wade through the cheesy, reverb-drenched mire of the Virgin Beauty (Portrait, 1988). Ornette rebounded on record with energetic acoustic trio tracks on the 1992 Naked Lunch soundtrack, as well as the 1994 albums Sound Museum: Hidden Man and Sound Museum: Three Women (which feature different takes of the same material).

Since the 1960s Coleman seems to have decided that if circumstances aren't right, he'd just as soon continue working in private. For the last decade there has been mostly silence as far as legitimate releases go, but sporadic live appearances continue to prove that Coleman is still going strong. His musical concepts now sound downright fresh and vital: Coleman's collaborators execute harmolodics with a resolute energy that encourages extended statements to bound from the leader's horn with a joyful kineticism. It's hard to imagine what all of the uproar was about when Coleman emits one of his trademark fusillades of pure, swinging melodic invention, but we should give thanks that sometimes a musical maverick can manage to rise to the top of the heap and stay on top of the game.

Ornette Coleman Quartet performs Sat/5, 8 p.m., Nob Hill Masonic Center, SF. $25-$60. www.tickets.com.

Weasel Walter leads a free jazz quartet and plays in the Flying Luttenbachers and XBXRX.