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 Reco ...