Creativity Quote by Ornette Coleman

Coleman is doing a musician's sleight of hand: he pretends to talk about labels as a boring administrative problem, then reveals them as an artistic threat. "It's just someone has labelled us as having a different label" lands like an exasperated shrug, but the repetition is the point. Labels multiply until they stop describing sound and start policing it. The subtext is less "genres are silly" and more "genres are governance."

In context, that's not abstract. Coleman spent his career being filed under "free jazz" and treated as either prophet or vandal, depending on who was doing the filing. The industry needed a category to sell him, critics needed a category to judge him, and both categories came with rules he wasn't interested in following. When he says labels are "the worst thing in the world for artistic expression", he's not romanticizing chaos; he's describing how a tag hardens into expectation. Once you're "free", every structured choice gets read as betrayal. Once you're "jazz", harmonic language becomes a loyalty test. Once you're "avant-garde", emotion can be dismissed as naive.

The cleverness is that Coleman frames difference as something imposed from outside: "someone has labelled us". That "someone" is the gatekeeper - marketers, tastemakers, institutions - deciding who belongs where. His argument is also a defense of musicians as working people: you "do what you do", then other people name it. Coleman is insisting the music should remain a verb, not a noun.