Ornette Coleman closes the Meltdown festival

21 June 2009: Number 49 in our series of the 50 key events in the history of dance musicLong after the last chord, people were still crowding down the aisles of the Royal Festival Hall in London to get close to jazz's greatest surviving revolutionary, as the smiling then 79-year-old picked his way along the stage's edge. The scene resembled supplicants jostling for the healing touch of a saint – except that Coleman's life's work had never been about dogma, even if plenty of other people's dogm...

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