Ornette Coleman
San Francisco
Ornette Coleman at the Fillmore West.
Coleman is the hardest booking in this entire chronicle to explain in one line. He had effectively invented free jazz with *The Shape of Jazz to Come* in 1959 and *Free Jazz* in 1961, playing a plastic alto saxophone and abandoning fixed chord changes in a way that split the jazz world into camps for a decade. By 1968 he was among the most respected and least commercial musicians in America.
And Bill Graham put him in a rock ballroom. Nothing about the Fillmore's audience predicted an appetite for Coleman; Graham booked him anyway, in the same spirit that produced Count Basie, Charles Lloyd, Miles Davis and Rahsaan Roland Kirk on his stages. It is the strongest evidence there is against reading the Fillmore as simply a rock venue.
Verification Notes
ANTAGONIST-CHECKED. VERIFIED: 1968-08-05=Monday; a one-night Ornette Coleman jazz special at the Fillmore West (COAU Fill West + Wolfgang's FMW680805-A + antiquarian listings 'Fillmore West, August 5, 1968'). Catalogued AOR-2.80 in the 'Unusual Fillmore Shows' chapter of The Art of Rock; lettering over a page of Coleman's own score. DESIGNER 'Dore' is THIN (single catalog summary) -> kept but FLAGGED for human confirmation, not asserted as fact. Secondary. AOR-2.80, Fillmore West, 5 August 1968. Ornette Coleman — one of Graham's jazz bookings into the rock room.
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