Established jazz musicians violently resented Ornette Coleman’s arrival

Evidence

Not all musicians were so approving. “When I arrived in New York,” Coleman recalled, “all I got was a wall of hostility”—much of it from established jazz musicians. “I think he’s jiving, baby,” veteran trumpeter Roy Eldridge asserted. “He’s putting everybody on.” More temperate, the revered saxophonist Coleman Hawkins suggested that Coleman only needed “seasoning—a lot of seasoning.” The pianist Red Garland, a fellow Texan and sometime Miles Davis sideman, called Coleman a faker while Davis suggested that Coleman was “all screwed up inside.” The drummer Max Roach was so incensed that after Coleman finished a set, he followed him into the Five Spot kitchen and socked him in the jaw. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 90