[1] The group was composed of tenor saxophone player Dewey Redman (doubling on musette), bassist Charlie Haden, trumpeter Don Cherry and drummer Ed Blackwell.

Dewey Redman attended high school in Fort Worth, Texas, where his classmates and bandmates were Coleman, Charles Moffett, and Prince Lasha.

In the early 1970s, Redman and Haden, along with drummer Paul Motian, joined Keith Jarrett's band, while Cherry and Blackwell toured and recorded together.

A 1986 performance, with Paul Motian substituting for Blackwell, was released by Condition West Recordings in 2017 with the title Old and New Dreams Live in Saalfelden, 1986.

They swung, they were melody makers, and the whole tradition of jazz flowed through their playing exactly as it did from the best of the musicians who had come forward since the bebop movement of the forties.

But Old and New Dreams is also a kind of floating conservatory that keeps the music of the early Coleman quartets - the original 'free jazz' - alive and before the public.

"[13] Francis Davis wrote: "If the myth that Coleman had to be physically present in order for his music to be played properly persisted in some quarters, Old and New Dreams dispelled it once and for all.

The success of Old and New Dreams showed that the music that had once been both hailed and reviled as the wave of the future had taken a firm enough hold in the past to inspire nostalgia.