For a decade, Ornette Coleman was booed off bandstands, abandoned mid-solo by rhythm sections, and forced to haul boxes and run a department store elevator in Los Angeles. This deep dive explores how that wilderness period, from Fort Worth to New Orleans to LA between 1948 and 1958, led him to a philosophy he called harmolodics, in which melody is never subservient to chord progressions, and to a band with no piano or guitar, played on a cheap plastic Grafton alto saxophone that sounded like a straining human voice.

The episode examines his use of microtones, the art-gallery painting that inspired “Lonely Woman,” and how Charlie Haden and Billy Higgins hold that track together in two different tempos through emotional listening rather than chords. It follows John Lewis and Percy Heath of the Modern Jazz Quartet securing him an Atlantic Records deal and a deliberately provocative stint at the Lenox School of Jazz, the June 1959 moment he told producer Nesuhi Ertegun he wanted to quit music for religion, the May 1959 Hollywood sessions with Don Cherry, the title fight between “Focus on Sanity” and The Shape of Jazz to Come, and the Five Spot residency that stretched from two weeks to two and a half months and split Charles Mingus and Miles Davis.

• Bebop harmony as a highway system, and why Coleman drove into the desert
• Why a C note should sound different in grief than in joy
• Removing the net and the lines: what free jazz asks of the listener
• How a rejection-hardened ego can produce vertigo when the establishment finally arrives
• Grammy Hall of Fame in 2015 and National Recording Registry in 2012 as vindication