A WEEK OF ORNETTE COLEMAN

A series of recent live music performances at London's Southbank Centre by–or inspired by–Ornette Coleman, a free jazz legend, was equal parts amazing, exhausting and surprising. Never dull.

Coleman, a recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for music and a Lifetime Achievement Grammy, spent the week hosting Meltdown, an annual music festival. I was lucky enough to catch a few of the sold-out performances, all of which followed Coleman's "free" approach to music: they were seemingly unscripted, full of improvisation and uninhibited.

Having never seen Coleman perform live before, two things became clear to me by the end of the week: his playing oozes with the blues, and he doesn't want to alienate his audience, no matter much his avant-garde approach to music might suggest otherwise. His music may seem challenging or inaccessible, but the invitation to participate is always there.

The festival included performances by Yo La Tengo, Moby, Yoko Ono, Flea, Baaba Maal, Bobby McFerrin, Charlie Haden and others. The Roots, a Grammy Award-winning hip-hop group, played a hard-hitting, two-hour-plus set that rarely paused, and ventured more than once into jammy medleys that were exciting to watch but didn't exactly feel new or experimental. And despite a few roaring guitar solos from Vernon Reid, a former member of the band Living Color, his contributions were nearly inaudible for a good portion of the set. Things got interesting in the last half-hour or so when Coleman, along with saxophonists David Murray and Andy Hamilton, hopped in for solos in what was described as an exploratory post-punk jam session. Coleman's bluesy colours shined as much as his blistering improvisation skills.

A few nights later, Mike Patton, a vocalist for Faith No More and Mr Bungle, joined Fred Frith, a British guitarist/improviser/composer, and Shlomo, a beatbox vocal artist, onstage for an hour's worth of precise and noisy beats, bleeps, screams, rattles and feedback. The effect was adventurous if not altogether raw. Having seen Patton produce amazing amounts of energy and noise onstage before, this performance seemed fairly contained. Shlomo's entrance, complete with powerful hip-hop and techno-inspired beats, raised the volume and enthusiasm of the room. (Shlomo later explained in his blog that Coleman's "crazy disconnected" took time for him to digest.) Coleman did not sit in with this group, but that's a quartet I'd love to see.

Near the end of the week, Coleman worked through an hour-plus set of wicked fast bop reflections of his album The Shape of Jazz to Come with Bill Frisell on guitar and the Master Musicians of Jajouka adding unique Moroccan sounds. Punk icon Patti Smith even hopped onstage for a long spoken-word piece that she clearly relished every minute of. Backed by his son, Denardo, on drums, and both an upright and electric bass, Coleman juggled complicated sax solos at breakneck speeds, teetering trumpet spurts and an occasional sentence or two on the violin. There were musical moments that felt incredibly confusing and jarring. Others were tight, solid and powerful.

Part of appreciating Ornette Coleman is accepting the confusing moments, even rooting for them. The joy is in grappling with it all. In a quote printed in the festival booklet, Fred Frith put it like this: "[Trumpeter] Don Cherry would come into the studio with the charts he was re-recording with Ornette… He was like a kid who'd been given the best present ever; totally energised, excited, shouting 'Look at this, look at this!' It told me a lot about the kind of devotion Ornette inspires."