Released on Atlantic Records in 1959, it was his debut on the label and his first album featuring the working quartet including himself, trumpeter Don Cherry, bassist Charlie Haden, and drummer Billy Higgins.
[8] From 1948 to 1958, Coleman moved among New Orleans, Fort Worth, and Los Angeles, working various jobs and developing his own unique sound that was often met with hostility.
[11] While employed as an elevator operator in Los Angeles, he studied music theory and harmony and developed an idiosyncratic take on country blues and folk forms.
[9] Coleman's big break came in Los Angeles when he caught the attention of bassist Percy Heath and pianist John Lewis of the Modern Jazz Quartet.
[12] These were all pivotal events in Coleman's career, who in June 1959 suggested to Nesuhi Ertegun, who handled Atlantic's jazz recordings, that he was considering abandoning music in order to study religion.
One prominent feature of Coleman's signature sound was that he played a plastic Grafton saxophone, which some feel contributed to the harshness of his timbre.
It was early in his career, in an attempt to further emphasize focus on melody over harmony, that he stopped including a piano as a part of his ensembles.
Coleman continues with this tradition on The Shape of Jazz to Come, dispensing with harmonic accompaniment and focusing solely on improvised melodies and variations on themes and motifs.
Coleman was moved to compose the song when, while on a lunch break from his job in a department store stock room in Los Angeles in the early 1950s, he came across a photograph of a woman in a gallery.
Then Coleman and Cherry, in unison, blow a sorrowful melody, both of them bending notes, wailing, so naked with emotion that it still raises shivers a half century later.
Some musicians and critics praised Coleman for an inventiveness not seen since the emergence of be-bop, including Charles Mingus, who said "It’s like organized disorganization or playing wrong right.
[7] In its ninth edition, The Penguin Guide to Jazz awarded the album a "crown" accolade, in addition to a four star rating.