Ornette Coleman, the musical savant who freed jazz and every other art form that cared to dispense with stifling conventions and stultifying pretense, recorded Ornette at 12 and Crisis at the height of the 1960s' countercultural creative promise and world-wide unrest.

It was an era of citizens claiming hard-won freedoms as civil rights, of youthful energies fueling fast changes and expressive artistic innovations—but also of backlash, assassinations, inequalities, riots and war. The music Coleman and his band of devotees made—available here on CD for the first time after being out-of-print and essentially unavailable for almost four decades—captured then and still reflects that entire spectrum of experience. These two albums present as no one else but Coleman's tight-knit clan could the confluences of melody and noise, harmony and dissonance, flow and accent, individuality and unity that still course through our complex world today.

Ornette employed his alto saxophone, trumpet and violin to conjure happy, sad, bluesy, mad, terrible, beautiful torrents of sound. Without doubt he intended his music to convey meaning, packed as it is with layers of information that are transparent although they often converge inextricably. One is hard-pressed to give words to his messages; these songs and improvisations are not, after all, verbal or literal but rather emotive communications, meant to be delivered and received directly, without process or intermediary, as persons' sounds to peoples' ears.

That was the essence of Ornette's concept, called at various times "free jazz," harmolodics and sound grammar. He delighted in telling a story of asking a grade school class, "What is music?" and a little girl answering, "When you put your feelings in sounds." Yes, Ornette believed, that's it! He longed to enable humans to engage clearly, spontaneously, core to core.

Ornette's own unique, heartfelt and headlong rush of musical declarations, extrapolations, exclamations, queries and quirky asides was abetted in these two albums recorded seven months apart by players steeped in his concept. He'd played with