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I first saw Ornette Coleman in 1971 when he played the Newport Jazz Festival.  He was there with his old comrades Dewey Redman, Charlie Haden, and Ed Blackwell, wearing a beard and a watermelon red suit. It was his first appearance at George Wein’s famous summer festival by Newport Harbor. In 1960, he’d played an alternative event organized by Charles Mingus called Newport Rebels, but the timing was right for Ornette a decade later, as Wein also booked him that fall on a European tour encompassing 13 countries, and he remained a perennial at his festivals thereafter.

Late that Saturday afternoon, Coleman played trumpet and violin in addition to alto saxophone, and he filled the air with some of the most enchanting and challenging music I’d ever heard. Most of what he played that day later appeared on his Columbia release, Science Fiction. It was fortuitous for everyone eager to see him that he was on the Saturday afternoon bill, for that night, as Dionne Warwick sang, “What the World Needs Now Is Love,” a riot was brewing, and once she was through, it erupted. An unruly mob stormed the gates and overtook the stage, sheet music was set afire, the piano was splintered, and the festival came to a crashing halt.

As Whitney Balleitt reported in The New Yorker, “the anti-Establishment crowd destroyed a festival of anti-Establishment music.” It would be ten years before jazz was welcomed back to Newport.

I saw Ornette several times thereafter, always curious to hear what he was playing, who was in the band, and what he was wearing. Like Miles Davis, Roy Haynes, and Duke Ellington, he was a paragon of sartorial originality.

And while his latest music always intrigued me, and his 2003 appearance at Carnegie Hall floored me, it was the first bursts of his music on record, the 1958-1961 period, that remains the most compelling. Coleman’s themes, often played in unison with trumpeter Don Cherry, could be brusque, discordant, and intense, but they invariably opened up to solos lively with melodic invention and poignant lyricism. And while his rhythm section of Charlie Haden on bass, and Billy Higgins or Ed Blackwell on drums, swung hard, they were also deeply sensitive to the mood and nuance of the music and the twists and turns of Coleman’s and Cherry’s improvisations.

Listening intently to Ornette all over again in the wake of his death reminds me that few saxophonists have achieved such a keening, plaintive, and human sound. And fewer still are the composers who’ve written such memorable pieces as “The Blessing,” “Turnaround,” “Tears Inside,” “Ramblin’,” “Lonely Woman,” “Peace,” “Humpty Dumpty,” “Una Muy Bonita,” and “Congeniality.” The latter is a classic example of how deep his music was in the vernacular. Listen here for how “Congeniality” interpolates the classic blues melody that came to be known as “Red Hot.”

Like Muddy Waters and other bluesmen whose music fell into the cracks or microtones between pitches, Coleman said that one of his most important self-discoveries came “when I realized that you could play sharp or flat in tune.”

Ornette’s innovations in pitch, harmony, and structure, which he later termed harmolodics, instigated the biggest controversy in jazz history. When he arrived in New York in 1959, it was already apparent that jazz would never be the same, and both his admirers and detractors were vociferous with acclaim and denunciation. Gil Evans said, “He swings, and he’s got a good feeling for melody.” John Lewis, who brought him to the attention of Atlantic Records and saw to Ornette and Don Cherry receiving scholarships to the School of Jazz in Lenox, Massachusetts, said he was “an extension of Bird.”

But Charlie Parker’s former colleagues were less impressed. Miles Davis said his music suggested that “psychologically, the man is all screwed up inside.” Max Roach had been put off when Ornette asked if he could sit in with the drummer’s quintet in California in the mid-fifties. Sometime after his opening at the Five Spot in November 1959, Ornette claimed that Max punched him in the mouth. Charles Mingus seemed more puzzled than perturbed. He said the music was “like organized disorganization, or playing wrong right. And it gets to you emotionally.”

The great bebop drummer Shelly Manne, who played on Ornette’s album, Tomorrow Is the Question, in 1959, hinted at the appeal Coleman has had for subsequent generations of musicians more in tune with his dictum to respect one’s feelings in the music: Manne said, “When I worked with Ornette, somehow I became more of a person in my own playing.”

“Lonely Woman,” the haunting, dirge-like ballad introduced on Coleman’s Atlantic debut, The Shape of Jazz to Come, came to mind the moment I heard he’d died last month. I was on vacation at the time and reading Philip Glass’s new memoir, Words Without Music. Ornette is referred to several times in its pages, and is among the jazz players whom Glass describes as alchemists, “taking the energy of New York and transforming it into music.” Ornette’s first harmolodic alchemy involved country blues and bebop, but he told Glass there was one pairing that resisted admixture. “Don’t forget, Philip, the music world and the music business are not the same.”

For a coterie of musicians and fans, however, it’ll remain Ornette’s world for years to come.

For concert footage and additional links on Ornette Coleman, visit New England Public Radio’s jazz blog at NEPR.NET