Ornette Coleman was born in Fort Worth, Texas in 1930. He is an American saxophonist, violinist, trumpeter and composer. From the beginning of Coleman's career, his music and playing were in many ways unorthodox. His raw, highly vocalized sound and penchant for playing "in the cracks" of the scale led many jazz musicians to regard Coleman's playing as out-of-tune.

In 1958, Coleman led his first recording session entitled, Something Else!!!!: The Music of Ornette Coleman. The following year, he released The Shape of Jazz to Come in. It was, according to critic Steve Huey, "a watershed event in the genesis of avant-garde jazz." While the album's compositions were considered at that time harmonically unusual and unstructured, some musicians and critics saw Coleman as an iconoclast while others, including conductor Leonard Bernstein, regarded him as a genius and an innovator. In 1960, Coleman recorded Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation. Coleman intended "Free Jazz" simply to be the album title, but his growing reputation placed him at the forefront of jazz innovation, and free jazz was soon considered a new genre. During the early 60's, Coleman withdrew from the public eye, teaching himself to play the trumpet and the violin, while also turning his attention to composing several string quartets, woodwind quintets, and symphony works, like George Gershwin, Duke Ellington and Charles Mingus. A decade later, Coleman, like Miles Davis before him, took to playing with electrified instruments, using rock and funk rhythms, sometimes called free funk.

In 2007, Ornette Coleman was honored with a Grammy award for lifetime achievement. That same year, His album Sound Grammar received the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for music. In 2009, he received the Miles Davis Award, recognizing his contribution to the evolution of jazz music, and in 2010, Ornette was awarded a honorary doctorate in Music from the University of Michigan.

Today, Coleman continues to push himself into unusual playing situations, often with much younger musicians or musicians from radically different musical cultures, and still performs regularly. His playing has profoundly influenced countless musicians, trying to discover the shape of not just jazz, but all music to come.