Parenting & Family Quote by Ornette Coleman

Ornette Coleman is smuggling a manifesto into a child’s babble. The point isn’t that spelling is pointless; it’s that fluency precedes rulebooks. A kid can talk before he can diagram a sentence, and Coleman uses that everyday miracle to defend a way of making music that critics often treated like a literacy problem: if it doesn’t follow the “correct” grammar of harmony, it must be wrong. He flips the charge. The ear, like speech, organizes meaning in real time, not by consulting a textbook.

The subtext is a rebuke to gatekeeping. In jazz, “spelling” stands in for academic theory, sanctioned chord changes, the conservatory idea that legitimacy arrives only after you can name every substitution. Coleman’s harmolodic ethos and the early backlash to his free-jazz records sit behind the example: listeners accused him of not knowing what he was “saying.” He answers that knowing where something fits, how it responds, and how it pushes the conversation forward is knowledge too - embodied, social, immediate.

There’s also a sly humility. The kid “probably doesn’t know the words he’s saying,” which echoes how improvisers borrow phrases, echo other players, mispronounce on purpose, and still land a truth. Coleman frames music as dialogue: meaning comes from interaction, timing, and intention, not compliance. It’s an argument for art as living language - messier than pedagogy, but often more logical to the moment than the rules that claim to explain it.