Creativity Quote by Ornette Coleman

Ornette Coleman is sneaking a manifesto into a modest biographical aside. In jazz culture, “composer” can sound like the polite, institutional word - the one that belongs to people with scores, conservatories, and a seat at the serious-music table. Coleman grabs it anyway, not as résumé-padding but as a reframing of what his work actually was. He didn’t just “blow” over changes; he built worlds.

The intent is defensive and expansive at once. Defensive because Coleman spent years being told his playing was wrong: too raw, too unmoored from harmony, too suspiciously free. Saying “I think of myself as a composer” is a way to move the argument off the narrow terrain of technique and into architecture. You may not like the materials, he implies, but you can’t deny there’s a design.

The subtext is also about control. Improvisation is often marketed as pure spontaneity, a kind of mystical happening. Coleman insists on authorship. Even when the music is made in the moment, it’s shaped by a composer’s mind: motif, pacing, tension, release, the way a melody can act like a plot.

Context matters: Coleman’s harmolodic approach collapsed the hierarchy between melody and harmony and treated ensemble players less like accompaniment and more like co-writers inside a plan. In that light, “originally” reads less like a discarded dream than a quiet correction. He didn’t abandon composition for jazz. He used jazz to smuggle composition back into the present tense.