Perhaps the most telling measure of Coleman's impact was his influence on his detractors, notably Miles Davis, whose great mid-'60s quintet featured the Ornette-inspired virtuosity of pianist Herbie Hancock and drummer Tony Williams. Mingus, who'd developed a novel approach to collective improvisation in his jazz workshops, would also come around, recording his own version of free jazz with Duke Ellington and Max Roach on the 1962 trio session Money Jungle, and sublimely collaborating with multireedist Eric Dolphy, who teamed up with Coleman on the 1960 landmark Free Jazz. (Free Jazz's original cover was famously adorned with a reproduction of Jackson Pollock's 1954 drip painting White Light.) Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane both plucked members of Ornette's Atlantic ensemble of those anni mirabili for memorable recordings; Coltrane's The Avant-Garde is a classic, and every note on every track of Rollins's On the Outside (also known as Our Man in Jazz) is a revelation. It's astonishing to hear how the era's most powerful improvisers took Coleman's audacious conceptions and ran with them with a broader vocabulary than he was ever technically capable of developing himself.

Yet just as Pollock's work still provokes sneers from abstraction's adversaries (my kid could do that!), so Coleman's innovations still draw resentment from older luminaries. I saw the great swing-era alto player Benny Carter at 90 squeak a wrong note in a club date, only to announce, "That was my Ornette Coleman impression." Was Coleman an idiot or an idiot savant? Gunther Schuller and Martin Williams thought that there was a structure to his music; you just had to learn to hear it. But were they imposing order on a chaos that defied definition? Coleman's playing didn't really change no matter what he played. He was already fully formed. The theorists were just gilding a fascinating but inscrutable lily.

By the time Coleman came up with a theory, "harmolodics," to explain what it all meant--something about harmony and rhythm being the same (and to justify his bloated, though intermittently brilliant 1972 symphony Skies of America)--it already seemed redundant. Coleman's best work was behind him, and he had disappeared from the scene a decade earlier, having vowed never to play clubs again, only to perform and record for extravagant fees, which he didn't receive often enough despite memorable recorded dates in Stockholm, lofts and infrequent studio appearances. He took sabbaticals from the American scene for long stretches, but like Nina Simone and Jerry Lewis, he was greeted in Paris with amour fou.

Ornette has been appearing and disappearing steadily now for the past forty-four years, setting up shop in his Prince Street loft for a spell in the '70s (performing for friends and neighbors and letting the tape roll), only to be evicted; jetting off to record with the Master Musicians of Joujouka and a New York Times music critic, Robert Palmer, on clarinet; hanging out with William Burroughs and Brion Gysin in Morocco; forming the fusion band Prime Time (where the harmolodics act was more droning, repetitive and often dull); performing with body-piercing artists, with Lou Reed, on the Naked Lunch soundtrack and with Kurt Masur and the New York Philharmonic. He had such a monastic devotion to his art, he once asked a doctor to castrate him (he was talked into getting circumcised instead). He let his son Denardo play drums with him from the age of 10--the result can be heard on the 1966 album The Empty Foxhole--causing listeners to yearn for the days when his drummers included masters like Higgins, Ed Blackwell and, briefly, the titanic Elvin Jones. Since the 1997 release of Colors, a duet with the German pianist Joachim Kühn, Coleman watchers have had to subsist on live performances, reviews, anecdotes and hope. Coleman would reunite with Haden, Cherry and Higgins once in a while before Cherry's death in 1995 and Higgins's in 2001, and his final appearance with Higgins, at an outdoor concert in lower Manhattan's Battery Park in 2000, was vintage Coleman. He spent most of that set playing uninspired ragas with a confused-looking tabla player. Finally, he brought out Haden and Higgins, played some blistering harmolodics (or call them what you will), summoning the shock of the new one more time. Then the park was shut down by Rudy Giuliani, the last call of last calls and an infuriating curfew.

Coleman may have called an album and a composition Free Jazz, but the term was in many ways a misnomer. Far from ignoring chords and meter, Coleman's music forces listeners to rethink how they hear them. The notion of complete freedom from formal constraint is even less convincing when applied to Coleman standards like "Peace" and "Lonely Woman." (Free Jazz, with its double quartet and layered cacophony, is sloppier but still weirdly ordered.) Coleman and his early collaborators were not merely playing whatever aleatory utterances happened to suit them. Those tunes have melodies (or "heads") and solos to go around, but the musicians were restless, wanting to inject spontaneity and maybe a little shock into what had become a postbop routine. "Lonely Woman" is a standard with chord changes and a melody line, but playing it in strict 4/4 time (as Branford Marsalis has, in an intriguing, intensely brooding interpretation on Random Abstract) won't really get to what Ornette was driving at; pianist Geri Allen's "Lonely Woman," like the Modern Jazz Quartet cover of 1962, made the melody clear without diluting its unsettled glory (eventually inspiring Coleman to break his forty-year recording ban on pianists to hire her for his band). Coleman once remarked that he wished he could have an entire ensemble play like an off-tempo Robert Johnson, all scattered emotions and wailing without having to keep time, as if there were nothing more outside than being the King of the Delta Blues.

It was not for nothing that Coleman called a classic (currently out-of-print) Prime Time album Of Human Feelings. Feeling, not theory, has always come first for Coleman, harmolodic explanations notwithstanding. There's a hypnotic pulse to the 1959 "Lonely Woman" that defies explanation. You hear Higgins's high-wire cymbal rides with Charlie Haden strumming against the beat, a disconnected melody to match discombobulated emotions. Coleman said he was inspired to write the song watching a woman fight with a man, but the loneliness is also pure Coleman, a sound that has inspired shock, misunderstanding, even violence, while persuading listeners--sometimes delicately, sometimes forcefully--to hear the world the way he hears it. "He plays all the notes Bird missed," says one of the McClintic Sphere onlookers in Pynchon's V., and nearly half a century later, those notes sound like an indelible vocabulary. What you also hear in Coleman's work--which is more debatable in the free jazz of, say, pianist Cecil Taylor--is swing and the blues, and this has helped his work of this period make its way into the Jazz at Lincoln Center canon, stretching the boundaries of what, for lack of a better term, is called swing. According to this version of jazz history, the Coleman Atlantics represent its ultimate culmination, a blues as deep, in its own way, as Robert Johnson's, and a particular kind of flexibility that is the rhythmic bedrock of Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker--the canon. What was called avant-garde now sounds more like a culmination of a tradition. And whether he played funk, rock, symphonies, ragas or as a Grateful Dead sideman, he sounded like the same Ornette Coleman who drew from this well and came up as himself.

You can hear that tradition--and Coleman's ingenious flight from it--on the Sound Grammar version of "Turnaround," which Coleman first recorded on Tomorrow Is the Question! in February 1959, months before the turmoil on the Bowery. The blues, which would become one of Coleman's most covered and requested compositions, is one of the less adventurous tracks on the album, not least because it is one of only three numbers with the comparatively mainstream bassist Red Mitchell. (The other tracks had the more enabling and endorsing Modern Jazz Quartet bass player Percy Heath.) Despite the odd fact that it is an eleven--as opposed to twelve--bar blues, Coleman's punch line comes, as the title suggests, on the turnaround, when a repeated blues phrase is given a response in a few different keys, veering outside just for a few bars before coming back to where the blues began, suggesting a shape of what was to come.

On Sound Grammar's "Turnaround," Coleman's blues lines are given a polyphonic response, with Greg Cohen plucking with enough open space to let Coleman breathe and Tony Falanga bowing a lyrical counterpart. (By featuring two bassists, Sound Grammar finally makes good on an experiment Coleman started on Free Jazz, when he played with Charlie Haden and Scott LaFaro.) Denardo meets his father's phrase with a thud, and Coleman, not usually known to quote, throws in Stephen Foster's "Beautiful Dreamer" and, maybe unconsciously, the start of Vernon Duke's "I Can't Get Started." It was more of a Sonny Rollins moment in improvisatory allusion, but in a world Coleman made. What would have been a concession in 1959 is a valediction in 2005.

On June 16, 2006, on what happened to be the 102nd anniversary of Bloomsday, Ornette Coleman played Carnegie Hall in the most anticipated performance of the JVC Jazz Festival. On a day that was the setting for James Joyce's Ulysses--a novel that had begun as avant-garde and ended up on the top of the Modern Library list--paying respects to a revolution turned inevitability seemed appropriate. Coleman added a third bassist, Al McDowell on electric, to the ensemble that played on Sound Grammar, muddying the polyphony and the hall's acoustics. But even if McDowell hadn't plugged in, this was not to be a night on par with those triumphs of a few years earlier. Bernstein had crashed the Five Spot back in 1959, but now the musical chairs were reversed. Coleman had been more accustomed to playing concert halls for some time, and the music he played was about as avant-garde as Mozart or King Oliver. A 76-year-old virtuoso played some crowd-pleasing versions of "Lonely Woman" and "Turnaround," pained, heartfelt and defiant, on an alto that somehow sounded as clear as a bell. Even if his tone was more refined, it seemed no less wounded. Outside the hall, it was a new century, one that he would not change. A few months later, 1,085 pages of a new Thomas Pynchon novel would thud into selected mailboxes, opening with a cryptic Thelonious Monk epigraph: "It's always night, or we wouldn't need light." All these years later, a couple of elusive tricksters from the old twentieth century still had some mysteries to illuminate.

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