Fort Worth jazzman Ornette Coleman remains an enigma, even as he nears 80

"There is no great genius without some touch of madness."

-- Seneca

NEW YORK CITY -- Ornette Coleman does not do small talk.

The conversation can begin with a simple, straightforward question, but the answer will dart in an unexpected direction, running wild, roaming over unpredictable terrain: love, sex, God, life, ideas.

It's fascinating, maddening and a tremendous insight into the way this critically acclaimed artist -- groundbreaking saxophonist, avant-garde composer, free jazz innovator -- approaches his work and his perspective on life. Every utterance has weight, a meaning tucked inside its oblique delivery.

"The human race has a quality to it that no other form of life has, and it's not something they bought, it's something they're born with," Coleman says, perched on a black leather sofa in his Garment District loft. "That's pretty heavy."

Indeed, precious little about the Fort Worth native is conventional.

The vivid, outsize abstract art on the walls of his Manhattan loft, a warm, open space with blond wood floors, contributes to the vibe of a mystical nerve center. Assistants appear and disappear; a VCR rests beneath the TV (the better for Coleman to watch his tapes of The Piano or Pulp Fiction); and a formidable, recently acquired pool table -- Coleman loves a good game of billiards, I'm told -- sits near the windows.

Consider his unlikely ascension from a dirt-poor childhood, Cowtown halls of worship, high schools and juke joints to playing alongside some of the most famous figures -- John Coltrane, Pat Metheny or Lou Reed -- on some of the biggest stages in the world.

Or his mixture of quiet politeness and bold gestures: Our conversation, although occasionally peppered with off-color references, was the very portrait of guarded restraint and restless intellectual curiosity. However, upon my leaving his home, Coleman, apropos of nothing, took my hand and, in a startlingly familiar gesture, kissed it as a farewell.

Even the way Coleman makes music defies tradition, utilizing a philosophy -- harmolodics, a phrase he coined in the early '70s -- that has left a mass of skeptical music critics and perplexed jazz aficionados in its wake, struggling to understand what this soft-spoken composer has done with melodies, notes and tempo.

That he has only just begun to receive rare, prestigious honors -- a Pulitzer, a Grammy, the Miles Davis Award -- from the artistic establishment speaks to just how far ahead of the curve he was and continues to be.

As bassist Tony Falanga puts it, "The bad thing is that people are trying to do what he did in the '50s now -- that's old to him. We're starting to do tunes from that period, but we don't do it the way he did with the group."

Fleeing into the future

In other words, although Coleman's past may be prologue, he has no interest in going home again.

During "that period" -- 1959 and the years immediately following -- although few would admit it, the sax player from Tarrant County was not-so-subtly rewiring the genre of jazz.

"He took out a plastic horn and started to play, and the whole room lit up for me," said bassist and Coleman collaborator Charlie Haden in a 2004 National Public Radio interview. "It was like the heavens opened up for me."

Coleman exploded onto the scene that year with the appropriately titled The Shape of Jazz to Come, his first effort for Atlantic Records. Part of the vanguard that pushed the art form in dizzying new directions, Coleman, a largely self-taught musician, continues to strive for sounds seemingly no one else can hear -- and even fewer truly understand.

Although he is not given to waxing reminiscent or reveling in past glories (his lifetime achievement Grammy sits unassumingly in a rehearsal space/office), Coleman does seem to be in a reflective state of mind in early February, during my visit.

"I think every human being has a moment of something no one understands but themselves," Coleman says. "I'm not a spirit or anything different than anyone else."

He is indeed not a spirit. And this year marks a milestone: the man born Randolph Denard Ornette Coleman will turn 80 on March 9. The fourth child of Randolph and Rosa Coleman, he grew up poor in a Texas town riven by racial segregation.

In 1943, he heard the sound of a saxophone for the first time, setting him on a path that would take him around the world and even return him to the city of his birth, some 40 years later, to premiere a reworked composition with the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra. In between were all manner of discoveries and digressions, explorations and exclamations. It is not an exaggeration to suggest Coleman is one of the very few people who have truly made a lasting mark on an art form.

He has not performed in Fort Worth since the 1983 grand opening of the now shuttered but still missed jazz club Caravan of Dreams, a span of nearly 30 years. Coleman, seconded by his associates, says he would love to return and perform in his hometown, but as of this writing, there is nothing scheduled.

"Ornette always was pretty reflective," says James Jordan, Coleman's half brother and manager. "When he was 10 years old, he told his mother he wanted a saxophone. She told him, 'OK, you can have one if you get a little bit of money.' We both shined shoes and pressed clothes ... but he got the instrument."

Leaving and returning

To earn money, Coleman played in various clubs around the rough-and-tumble parts of town, not unlike his fellow Fort Worth contemporaries Dewey Redman, Ronald Shannon Jackson and King Curtis Ousley, and even formed a jazz band of his own, the Jam Jivers.

He left Fort Worth the first time in 1949, first settling in New Orleans and later in Los Angeles. After a brief return home, he ventured out to Los Angeles again, where Charlie Haden first saw him perform. In 1957, the style of music Coleman was creating, "free jazz," characterized by the All Music Guide as "having dispensed with many of the rules as far as pitch, rhythm, and development are concerned," was first captured on tape during a concert in Vancouver.

"With 50 years of hindsight it is evident that a big part of the success of the free jazz movement is the vibrant immediacy of the music and its constant ability to attract young audiences," wrote critic Mark Ruffin last year, upon the occasion of Coleman's performance at Lincoln Center. "It can be argued that more than any other forms of the music, the 'free' jazz Coleman wrought has always attracted audiences from outside the jazz mainstream."

True, and yet: "He was so determined to go in his own direction," Jordan says.

And he did -- working his way through the best and brightest performers to assemble any number of groups, before settling on the quartet currently recording and performing with him: his son, Denardo, on drums, and bassists Tony Falanga and Al MacDowell.

Although Denardo couldn't be reached for comment, Falanga and MacDowell both related tales of learning to function within Coleman's exacting universe, a place without safety nets.

"It's a great experience to work with him, but he is just so natural, and that's what's so amazing about him; it's not schooled or anything, and he's just a natural genius," Falanga says. "There's no other way to put it -- that's Ornette."

More questions than answers

Coleman hasn't released a new album since 2006's acclaimed Sound Grammar (which won Coleman the Pulitzer Prize for music in 2007), but according to Jordan, is working on new music.

But then Coleman is always chasing that next string of notes or burst of sound, awaiting another chance to step onstage and feel the music flow around and through him. It's part of his often-analyzed harmolodics theory.

In 1983, Coleman defined harmolodics for DownBeat magazine: "The use of the physical and the mental of one's own logic made into an expression of sound to bring about the musical sensation of unison executed by a single person or with a group.... Harmony, melody, speed, rhythm, time and phrases all have equal position in the results that come from the placing and spacing of ideas."

"It's really difficult, man," says MacDowell of harmolodics. "It leaves you [at the end of your] performance wondering if you can play, because certainly you don't want the world to think that's how you play."

For all the time I spend with Coleman, he gives no direct answers to any of the questions about his music or his process. Not that every artist must pull back the curtain on demand, but rather, he seems far more comfortable expanding upon any number of ideas, such as the genesis of the word knowledge or the existence of God.

"The concept of life must have something to do with eternity," Coleman says, rubbing his hands together. "You can't destroy it, and you can't create it. It's its own, whatever we call it -- the only thing that I say would make [life] better is if heaven was on earth."

It's a bit like having a conversation with someone who knows far more than they're letting on and wants to see just how far you're willing to go.

"You ask a question, you get an answer and you're re-evaluating everything," says Michaela Deiss, Coleman's girlfriend of more than a decade. "He has an incredible integrity; he only does what he believes in, and he has a lot of faith. He's extremely rare and often, whatever he says is full of wisdom."

Bewitching and puzzling and, yes, wise as well -- Coleman has built a career out of refusing compromise in word or deed, which, in an era when the music industry continues to collapse, is itself a daring choice.

Fort Worth has given the world much musical talent -- Townes van Zandt, Dewey Redman, Stephen Bruton -- but few have had the same impact on a genre as Coleman has. By pushing forward without hesitation and stepping into the void, he has created a body of work that boggles the mind.

Coleman's lifelong defiance of convention, I suspect, is simply his way of making sense out of the chaos swirling around him -- in this life and the next.

"I don't know how long I'll live," he says near the end of our conversation, "but I'd rather die to live than live to die."

Preston Jones is the Star-Telegram pop music critic, 817-390-7713