Creativity Quote by Ornette Coleman

Ornette Coleman is poking at a particular kind of respectability theater: the idea that if an artist looks the part, the art somehow becomes more "valid". He’s talking like a musician who’s watched audiences, critics, and gatekeepers demand visual reassurance before they’ll grant permission to hear something as serious. The suit, the polished presentation, the tidy persona - it’s all a stamp that says: don’t worry, this isn’t going to threaten your categories.

The second half lands with Coleman’s blunt, street-level logic. He’s not romanticizing poverty; he’s calling out a rigged aesthetic rule. If a musician shows up looking broke, people read the work as broken too. The phrase “doing something that a bums don’t do” points to an ugly cultural sorting mechanism: some bodies are allowed to be “artists,” others get filed under “bums,” and the costume decides which file you land in. Coleman’s “This don’t make sense” is the punchline and the indictment. It’s not just that the prejudice is unfair - it’s that it’s irrational, a non sequitur masquerading as taste.

In context, that hits especially hard coming from the architect of harmolodics and the lightning rod of free jazz, a style that already sounded like it was refusing to “dress correctly.” Coleman is defending a music built on risk and immediacy against a culture that wants its innovation neatly groomed, labeled, and safely upscale.