Current Trends in Right-Wing Music Appreciation: Claiming Ornette Coleman

Handbill for Ornette Coleman engagement at the Jazz Workshop, Boston, October 1970. Source: Boo-Hooray

This note is about an instance of recent scholarship on saxophonist and composer Ornette Coleman that is admittedly of little significance in itself. Authored by guitarist Jason Dreher and saxophonist Josiah Boornazian, both also educators in Salt Lake City, Utah, the article is entitled “Jazz and Politics: Was Ornette Coleman Inspired by the Civil Rights Movement?” It appeared in the second issue of a new academic journal going by the name of IASJ Journal of Applied Jazz Research. The article was published online in January 2025, a week before the second inauguration of Donald Trump as US president.

The Dreher and Boornazian article is a curious piece of jazz scholarship in that it is very much at home in the climate that Trump’s return to power would rapidly create. Using Ornette Coleman as a case study, the article purports to deal with the following points, as summarized by the authors themselves:

Due in part to increasing intellectual and political polarization in the United States in recent decades, there has been a resultant decrease in viewpoint diversity and an increase in instances of groupthink and widespread conceptual bias in the construction of many jazz history narratives. One example of these phenomena is the historiographical narratives linking free jazz and avant-garde jazz with the Civil Rights Movement in twentieth-century America. In the past several decades, the narrative that free jazz and/or avant-garde jazz was predominantly artistically inspired by the Civil Rights Movement has become broadly espoused by a wide variety of both scholarly and mainstream jazz books and articles in spite of the fact that this narrative is poorly supported by the historical record and by the documented statements of many mid-century free jazz and avant-garde jazz practitioners. (emphasis added)

Badly substantiated writing about avant-garde jazz and politics definitely exists. The limits of this corpus are far from a new topic. What is notable about Dreher and Boornazian’s article is not the point it attempts to rehash, but the method used to do it.

First, Ornette Coleman is a singular choice for a case study. Among free jazz’s major figures, Coleman is certainly a musician whose work has been least discussed as political. This is largely due to the fact that he predated the black power era and the “screaming” saxophones of Albert Ayler or Archie Shepp that some simplistically read as mirroring that specific moment. Cues about Coleman’s politics were largely absent from the surface layer of his work. He did not use political titles, was not known to appear at benefits, and although he did discuss racism, he did not have a major reputation for being outspoken about issues other than the status of the artist.

There is therefore a need to establish that Coleman is widely claimed to have been “inspired by the Civil Rights Movement.” To do this, the authors examine what they describe as a “sizeable body of literature,” in effect a little over a dozen sources. Combined, John Gray’s two reference bibliographies on free jazz, Fire Music and Creative Improvised Music, contain more than 400 entries under Coleman’s name. Without dwelling on how the material was selected, Dreher and Boornazian first look at four generic jazz histories. They search for assertions of the problem that preoccupy them (which, they admit, they do not always find), and then verify if authors have substantiated their vaguely relevant generalities with direct Coleman quotes. When they do not, they are caught failing the decided litmus test red-handed.

Dreher and Boornazian then move on to Coleman-specific sources. Strangely, the selection seems even more random here. This might be coincidental, but the first references discussed appear, in the exact same order, in the first results provided by Google’s search engine for academic papers, Google Scholar, when queried for “ornette coleman civil rights movement.” This is definitely not how a representative sample of material would be constituted by scholars of any field.

Addressing the minute points made further on in an article that doesn’t establish a sound basis for discussion would seem counterproductive. The remaining question is “why”? A long and somewhat incongruous development provides the explanation. “Many of the sociopolitical commentators that [...] authors referenced in this article cite were self-described Marxists, neo-Marxists, and/or postmodernists, such as influential jazz writers Baraka and Kofsky,” the Dreher-Boornazian duo writes. “Furthermore, many jazz journalists, historians, and authors who have not self-identified as Marxists or postmodernists were likely directly or indirectly influenced by these ideologies nonetheless.” (emphasis added)

Those amazingly sweeping claims about the influence of Marxism on American thought—certainly a boon for proponents of a now very marginal movement—are notably backed by references to a Milton Friedman television program from 1980 (?) and a book by “seven-time #1 New York Times bestselling author, Fox News star, and radio host Mark R. Levin” (as per his publisher). Some people, somewhere, do see fit to write about Ornette Coleman and free jazz citing Fox News luminaries and concluding thusly:

Finally, it must be said that none of what this article addresses is meant to in any way to [sic] denigrate or pass judgment on the Civil Rights Movement or any individuals in the past who may or may not have been supportive of or involved with the movement. The conclusion and purpose of this study is merely to point out that regardless of what individuals in the past or today may think about the Civil Rights Movement, we ought to avoid presentism and be careful not to graft our political views, motivations, and lenses of polarization onto individuals or events from the past when there is insufficient evidence to do so. […] We can contribute to the depolarization of our society and help reestablish healthy epistemic norms by striving to remain as ideologically neutral as possible when constructing historical narratives, being source critical, engaging in productive and respectful disagreement, supporting viewpoint diversity, and focusing on supporting claims with solid historical evidence and arguments that are as free from logical fallacies and subjective interpretations as possible. (emphasis added)

This courageous contribution to the fight against Karl Marx’s influence on American thought and jazz criticism ends on a soothing note. Finally at peace, knowing that the authors do not, in any way, pass judgment on people who may—or may not—have supported the abolition of legalized racial segregation, the reader can turn to his neighbor and agree to respectfully disagree about more than “Roman” salutes, masked police, and genocide: he can now respectfully disagree about Ornette Coleman. All is well, at last.

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New writing elsewhere:

• “An Annotated Bibliography of The Grackle: Improvised Music in Transition (1976-1979),” Current Research in Jazz 17 (2025).

• Review of Pharoah Sanders, Love Is Here, New York City Jazz Record, January 2026, 49.