A Fort Worth teenager improvised over a Sousa march and got kicked out of his high school band. Decades later he became only the second jazz musician to win the Pulitzer Prize for music. This deep dive follows Ornette Coleman from R&B and bebop gigs in the South, through a 1949 beating in Baton Rouge that destroyed his tenor saxophone and forced him onto alto, to an elevator operator job in Los Angeles where he assembled Don Cherry, Charlie Haden, Billy Higgins, and Ed Blackwell far from New York’s gatekeepers.

The episode explains the cream-colored plastic Grafton saxophone, the 1959 Atlantic album The Shape of Jazz to Come, and the Five Spot residency that split the music world between champions like Leonard Bernstein and Lou Reed and critics like Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie. It then covers the double-quartet album Free Jazz and its five-star and zero-star Down Beat reviews, self-taught trumpet and violin, hiring his 10-year-old son Denardo on The Empty Foxhole, Skies of America with the London Symphony, the electric band Prime Time and the theory of harmolodics, work with the Grateful Dead and the Naked Lunch score, and the 2007 Pulitzer for Sound Grammar.

• How the switch from tenor to alto unlocked a piercing, human-cry tone
• Why Los Angeles isolation was an incubator rather than a low point
• Throwing out the chord-change street map in favor of melody-led improvisation
• Free Jazz explained as a flock of birds turning together rather than random noise
• Harmolodics as a musical democracy where any instrument can lead