Coleman’s radicality forced Coltrane and Rollins to rethink their music

Evidence

Free jazz was modern art, and Coleman was understood as the supreme modernist as well as the ultimate primitive of the new era. Coleman’s music was so new that the two preeminent young reedmen, John Coltrane and Sonny Rollins, were compelled to rethink their approach. In 1959, Coltrane, who, like Coleman, broke in as an R&B sideman before making his name playing with established virtuosi Thelonious Monk and Miles Davis, came frequently to hear Coleman. Rollins took a two-year hiatus and then returned for an epochal gig at the Village Gate with Don Cherry and Ed Blackwell as his sidemen. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 329