Randolph Denard Ornette Coleman was born March 9, 1930, in Fort Worth, Texas. His father died when Coleman was seven, and the family got by on his mother's work as a seamstress; she saved enough to buy him his first alto saxophone at fourteen. At I.M. Terrell High School he played in the band alongside Dewey Redman and Charles Moffett, and briefly with saxophonist King Curtis, before he was dismissed from the band program for improvising during a John Philip Sousa march. Under the local saxophonist Red Connors he taught himself to read music, and by sixteen he had left school to help support his mother, forming the R&B group the Jam Jivers with Prince Lasha and Moffett. Touring life followed: stints with Silas Green's traveling minstrel show and blues bandleader Pee Wee Crayton took him through the South and eventually to Los Angeles, and it was on the road, playing with bluesman Clarence Samuels, that he met New Orleans drummer Ed Blackwell. In Baton Rouge his freer, self-taught style provoked a beating so severe that his horn was destroyed; he switched permanently to alto and, unable to afford a metal instrument, bought the white plastic Grafton saxophone similar to the one Charlie Parker had used, which became his sonic signature for the next decade.

Coleman settled in Los Angeles in 1953, sharing a house in Watts with Blackwell while working day jobs, since club owners and fellow musicians largely dismissed his playing as untrained. There he met three teenagers who would define his sound for the rest of the decade: drummer Billy Higgins, bassist Charlie Haden, and trumpeter Don Cherry. He also met and fell in love with poet Jayne Cortez; they married in 1954, had a son, Denardo, in 1956, and divorced in 1964, though they stayed close. In 1958, Lester Koenig's Contemporary label signed Coleman, and he recorded his debut, Something Else!!!!, with Higgins, Cherry, bassist Don Payne, and pianist Walter Norris. It unsettled critics and some of his own sidemen, who could not accept his approach to tonality and phrasing. The 1959 follow-up, Tomorrow Is the Question!, dropped the piano and paired Cherry with drummer Shelly Manne and bassists Percy Heath and Red Mitchell; it drew a more sympathetic hearing, with John Coltrane and Cecil Taylor among its early champions.

Coleman signed with Atlantic Records in April 1959 and that May recorded The Shape of Jazz to Come with Higgins, Haden, and Cherry, an album carrying "Lonely Woman" and "Peace," two of his most enduring compositions. Its release that November coincided with the start of a residency at Manhattan's Five Spot Café, arranged by pianist John Lewis, that was meant to last two weeks and stretched to ten under the weight of controversy: Leonard Bernstein, Sonny Rollins, and Coltrane championed the music, while Miles Davis said Coleman was "all screwed up inside" and Dizzy Gillespie claimed not to recognize it as jazz at all; Charles Mingus admitted he didn't understand it but was moved by it regardless. Change of the Century followed in 1960, and on December 21 of that year Coleman assembled a "double quartet" for Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation, adding bassist Scott LaFaro, trumpeter Freddie Hubbard, and bass clarinetist Eric Dolphy to his working group for a single-take, 37-minute improvisation that gave the emerging movement its name, a term Coleman himself never fully embraced. This Is Our Music, Ornette!, and Ornette on Tenor rounded out the Atlantic run before the label dropped him in 1962; the label's complete recordings of his were later assembled as the 1993 box set Beauty Is a Rare Thing.

Discouraged by the music business and convinced racism played a role in his treatment, Coleman largely withdrew from performing for two years, during which he taught himself violin and trumpet and kept refining a theory he called harmolodics, an approach that let ensemble members improvise simultaneously around shared melodic and rhythmic material rather than take turns soloing over fixed chords. He returned with a trio featuring bassist David Izenzon and Moffett, recording the film score Chappaqua Suite in 1965 with tenor saxophonist Pharoah Sanders added to the group, and signed with Blue Note that fall. A December 1965 engagement at Stockholm's Gyllene Cirkeln club was recorded and issued in 1966 as the two-volume At the "Golden Circle" Stockholm. His first Blue Note studio date, The Empty Foxhole, controversially featured his ten-year-old son Denardo on drums, a choice critics mocked but Coleman defended as the right melodic counterpart to where his music was heading; Denardo went on to become his father's regular drummer, music director, and manager. New York Is Now! and Love Call, both cut in 1968 with Elvin Jones and Jimmy Garrison from Coltrane's rhythm section and tenor saxophonist Dewey Redman, closed out the Blue Note years.

Coleman signed with Columbia in 1971, and sessions that April with Haden, Redman, Cherry, and others produced Science Fiction, his most acclaimed album since leaving Atlantic. In 1972 he recorded Skies of America with the London Symphony Orchestra, his first large-scale orchestral application of harmolodics. The following years brought his most sustained stylistic shift: in 1975 he formed the electric band that became Prime Time, and 1977's Dancing in Your Head, featuring guitarists Bern Nix and Charles Ellerbee, bassist Jamaaladeen Tacuma, and drummer Ronald Shannon Jackson alongside Denardo, fused vanguard harmolodic composition with funk grooves in a style that came to be called free funk; guitarist James Blood Ulmer, whom Coleman mentored and later recorded with, absorbed the same vocabulary. Body Meta (1978) and Of Human Feelings (1982, one of the first digitally recorded jazz albums) extended the Prime Time sound.

Coleman's later career brought wider recognition without ever going mainstream. In 1985 he recorded the co-billed Song X with guitarist Pat Metheny, Haden, Denardo, and drummer Jack DeJohnette, and 1988's Virgin Beauty included three tracks with Grateful Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia as a guest. He received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1994 and, the year before, had already been named an NEA Jazz Master (1984, alongside Miles Davis and Max Roach). He founded the Harmolodic label with a distribution deal through Verve, releasing Tone Dialing (1995) and the paired Sound Museum: Hidden Man and Sound Museum: Three Women (1996) with pianist Geri Allen, bassist Charnett Moffett, and Denardo. In 1991 he composed and recorded the score for David Cronenberg's film Naked Lunch with composer Howard Shore and the London Symphony Orchestra, and in 1996 he recorded a duo concert with pianist Joachim Kühn, issued as Colors: Live from Leipzig. His final studio album, Sound Grammar (2006), recorded live two years earlier in Ludwigshafen, Germany, won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Music, making Coleman only the second jazz musician, after Wynton Marsalis, to receive it. Ornette Coleman died of cardiac arrest in Manhattan on June 11, 2015, at eighty-five; his funeral included performances by Pharoah Sanders and Cecil Taylor.

Coleman's harmolodic theory, developed over the two years he spent largely off the bandstand in the early 1960s, rejected the idea that a jazz group needed a single soloist supported by chordal accompanists; instead every player improvised simultaneously around shared melodic and rhythmic material, with pitch, harmony, and rhythm treated as equally negotiable. His keening, vocalized alto tone, first heard on the plastic Grafton horn he adopted after his own metal saxophone was destroyed, carried the vocabulary of Texas blues and gospel shouting straight into a music that had otherwise abandoned fixed chord changes. Critical reaction split sharply for years: trumpeter Roy Eldridge called his music fraudulent, while Coltrane and Leonard Bernstein championed it from the start, and 1961's Free Jazz directly inspired both Coltrane's Ascension and Peter Brötzmann's Machine Gun, cementing Coleman's status as free jazz's principal founder even though he coined the term only as an album title and remained uneasy with it. His 1970s turn to electric harmolodic funk with Prime Time proved just as influential on a younger generation of guitar-based improvisers, James Blood Ulmer chief among them, and by the time of his 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Sound Grammar the same playing once dismissed as untrained was being taught in conservatories as a foundational twentieth-century American music.