Politics & Power Quote by Ornette Coleman

Ornette Coleman is taking aim at a certain kind of cultural paperwork: the belief that art needs permission slips from the crowd, the market, or the academy. When he says light and sound are "beyond democratic", he is not trashing democracy as politics so much as refusing the idea that creativity should be decided by vote, polled into correctness, or flattened into consensus. Light and sound do not negotiate. They hit you. They reorganize your senses before your opinions can show up.

The line lands harder in Coleman's context because his career was built on being treated as a problem to be solved. Free jazz arrived to many listeners as an affront: too raw, too untrained, too unwilling to behave. Calling sound "beyond democratic" is a defense of the artist's right to move first and be understood later, if at all. The subtext is also a critique of gatekeeping disguised as populism. Jazz institutions and critics often frame themselves as serving "the people", but Coleman suggests the deeper source isn't social approval; it's the elemental physics of vibration, the primal fact that sound exists before culture names it.

His pivot to "the creative part of life" is the tell: he is relocating art from entertainment to an existential domain. Creativity isn't a luxury good or a referendum. It's a mode of being, as natural and uncontrollable as sunlight or resonance. In that framing, the audience can be invited, startled, even provoked, but it can't legislate what music is allowed to become.