Ornette Coleman's Improvization on the Decolonial Horizon

Abstract

The purpose of this chapter is to reflect on how Ornette Coleman's element of improvisation can appear as unorthodox noise and messy in his music. Reflecting on Coleman is important because he suspended the classical Western music composition methodology and offered a decolonial horizon as a site of new art methodology. Coleman's musical method of no method is guided by writing the life to come through his improvisation, which is a testament to the black refusal of the Western aesthetics style and standard. This chapter explores how his harmolodics theory enables improvisation to be deployed as a decolonial horizon of Black lived experience and of life beyond Westernised modernity in its totality. Decolonisation through his use of the white plastic horn that inscribes refusal of the written classical score. Suspension of the Western episteme and its inscriptions of modernity as the father of all knowledge is a preoccupation of decolonial thinkers. Coleman is also so preoccupied.