The battle of the Five Spot : Ornette Coleman and the New York jazz field

The Battle of the Five Spot is an engaging look at a milestone of jazz history. When the Texas-born saxophonist Ornette Coleman brought his quartet to New York?s Five Spot Café in 1959, the music spurred a stormy controversy, and a struggle between old and new styles that has never wholly subsided.

David Lee explores the debate around Coleman?s innovation in terms of its relationships to social change and issues of power within arts communities, referring to such disparate sources as Norman Mailer (a Five Spot regular), composer Leonard Bernstein, and French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. You may never listen to jazz the same way again!