Ornette Coleman

At New York's Five Spot Café in late 1959, a Texan alto saxophonist and his group began a residency that divided listeners. Some fellow musicians called him a fraud, but Leonard Bernstein was won over by a sound that abandoned chord changes and fixed rhythm for ensemble interplay steeped in blues phrasing, captured on The Shape of Jazz to Come.

Free Jazz (1960) pushed further, setting two quartets improvising for 37 minutes, one in each stereo channel; its title came to name a genre he never felt comfortable with. He picked up trumpet and violin, recorded with his ten-year-old son Denardo on drums, and composed Skies of America for the London Symphony Orchestra.

From the mid-1970s his electric band Prime Time played a funk-driven style built on his theory of harmolodics. Sound Grammar won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Music, eight years before his death.