Ornette Coleman Birthplace — Fort Worth, Texas

Randolph Denard Ornette Coleman was born on March 9, 1930, in Fort Worth, Texas, and grew up in the city's Black Southside neighbourhood, teaching himself saxophone largely by ear and developing a conception of music — melody freed from conventional chord progressions, improvisation liberated from the tyranny of harmonic resolution — that would become one of the most controversial and influential ideas in jazz history. He moved to Los Angeles in the late 1940s and played rhythm and blues before his radical musical thinking attracted attention, and dismissal, from more conservative musicians who found his approach incomprehensible or fraudulent.

Coleman's arrival in New York in 1959 and his engagement at the Five Spot Café was one of the most seismic events in jazz. His album "The Shape of Jazz to Come" (1959) announced free jazz to the world — a music that abandoned fixed harmonic structures in favour of collective improvisation, melody, and pure feeling. Musicians and critics were violently divided: Leonard Bernstein and Gunther Schuller were enthusiastic; Miles Davis was dismissive. Over time the music's significance became undeniable, and Coleman's influence on every subsequent generation of jazz and avant-garde musicians has been incalculable.

Fort Worth has recognised Coleman as one of its most significant cultural exports, with a historical marker in the area where he grew up. He died on June 11, 2015, in New York City, at the age of 85, having received the Pulitzer Prize for Music, a MacArthur Fellowship, and a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award — belated recognitions of a career that spent decades ahead of institutional understanding.