Like other great jazz musicians of the 20th century, the ones who really shook things up, Ornette Coleman began his career by being jeered off the bandstand. Everything about him was disturbingly unorthodox, from his bizarre first name and his eccentric wardrobe of self-designed suits to his elliptical speech and the unfettered way he played his white plastic alto saxophone – and later, when acclaim had started to come his way and things were getting almost too comfortable, the violin and the trumpet.  Related: Jazz great Ornette Coleman dies aged 85  If you were an early admirer, you quickly grew accustomed to enduring a measure of that disparagement yourself in defence of such genius. Once the battle lines had been drawn, the pure and completely original beauty of his music provided a shield against the scorn of those to whom his apparent weirdness represented an affront and a threat.  An early example of the treatment he endured came one night in 1949, after he had attempted to inject some of his new ideas into a solo while playing with a rhythm and blues band in a dancehall in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. He was taken outside and beaten up by a group of half a dozen men who had taken exception to his appearance and his playing.  As late as 1965, while he was making his British debut at the Fairfield Halls in Croydon, a momentary pause in his trio’s music was broken by the cry of a non-believer inviting him to play Cherokee, a technically demanding test piece for modern jazz musicians. It was the equivalent of the enraged cry of “Judas!” hurled at Bob Dylan in Manchester a year later. Coleman’s instant response to the insult was to interpolate a fragment of the tune in a sequence of phrases seething with a dismissive anger he never allowed himself to show in conversation.  Such rejection must have hurt, but – like others before him, such as Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk – he never let it deter him in the mission of moving jazz forward simply through the act of being himself. And eventually the world came to recognise not just the courage but the profound rightness of his achievement.  Coleman was part of the generation that emerged in the 1950s, just as the bebop revolution of Parker and Monk was starting to cool, and is still collectively known, 60 years later, as “the avant garde”. His principal contemporaries were Cecil Taylor and John Coltrane, with whom he shared a lifelong refusal to compromise his approach. Eventually he was granted a place in the pantheon, and on one of his last appearances in London, at the Barbican in 2005, he seemed moved by the sheer warmth of the sustained applause with which a full house greeted every piece.  Related: Ornette Coleman - a life in pictures  To an idiom that, by the 1950s, had evolved from its rudimentary origins into something that set musical challenges requiring the highest degree of sophistication, Coleman restored the naturalness of the human voice. In the admiring words of the drummer Shelly Manne, he sounded “like a person laughing and a person crying”.  Coleman was a sophisticate, too, but it was a sophistication entirely of his own design, operated according to his own rules. Rejecting the tempered scale and the conventional methods of formal transposition, he composed and played using a self-invented technique he called “harmolodics”. Although the result always had that natural human quality characteristic of Coleman, his occasional responses to attempts to get him to explain its principles always ended up with the questioner’s brain in a tangle. But whether in a duet with his long-time bassist Charlie Haden, in front of the London Symphony Orchestra as they recorded his symphonic work The Skies of America, or leading his electrified Prime Time band, his playing seldom failed to make a deep and direct emotional connection.  From hand to hand, the torch of jazz was passed until, at the end of a long line of publicly recognised hero-figures that had begun with Louis Armstrong, it reached Ornette Coleman. He was not where jazz finished, by any means. The music’s evolution continued by different means. But he was the last surviving great soloist whose playing, by itself, marked a major step in the music’s evolution, and defined an entire era.
His music confronted people so directly that he was once beaten up by concertgoers – but Ornette came to be one of jazz’s torch bearers