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 i ...