"I listened to him all kinds of ways. I listened to him high and I listened to him cold sober. I even played with him. I think he's jiving, baby." That's what trumpeter Roy Eldridge said of Ornette Coleman in the March 1961 issue of Esquire.

"He's got bad intonation, bad technique. He's trying new things, but he hasn't mastered his instrument yet," groused big band trumpeter Maynard Ferguson, as if anyone in the avant garde would have cared what he thought.

Even many the former revolutionists themselves -- the kings of bebop -- jumped ship when the "new thing" came along. "I don't know what he's playing, but it's not jazz," said Dizzy Gillespie in Time magazine in 1960.

The brilliant Thelonious Monk -- who was himself vilified by his elders in the '40s -- said, "Man, that cat is nuts!" Which could be a compliment or a curse, I guess. Miles Davis similarly questioned Coleman's sanity without actually passing judgment on his skills.

What's funny about the hoopla is that going back to listen to Coleman's two years of musical mayhem at Atlantic Records, from May 1959 to March 1961 -- as catalogued on six jaw-dropping CDs in the "Beauty is a Rare Thing" box set -- is that it doesn't sound so revolutionary anymore. (I finally replaced my vinyl copies of the Atlantic LPs with the box, which is what got me thinking about this in the first place).

Compare it, for example, to how Monk was challenging melodic mores with Coltrane and Coleman Hawkins a couple years earlier and it sounds fairly tame -- if, of course, you make an exception for the appropriately titled, "Free Jazz," the session at which Coleman assembled an awesome group that included Eric Dolphy and Freddie Hubbard and discarded nearly all the rules and said, "ok, and a 1 and a 2 and do whatever the hell you choose, but stop after 17 minutes (or 37 on take two)."

For the record, Coleman recorded a pair of discs on the West Coast in 1958 before heading out east and landing at Atlantic.

But some folks got Ornette Coleman. John Coltrane was intrigued and so were Mingus, John Lewis, Shelly Manne, Charlie Haden, Jackie McLean and Gil Evans. And, damn, if it isn't still the swingest beatnik music around! Makes me wanna go buy a beret.

What the quotes above (included in the box set's booklet) illustrate best is the way in which music is cyclical and that today's young go-getter is tomorrow's conservative grouch.

Louis Armstrong was the fiery Hot Five trumpeter in the '20s but was vehemently anti-bebop when jazz caught fire in Harlem in the early '40s. Only Coleman Hawkins and a few others were unafraid and signed on to work with the new cats.

By the time, Coltrane and Coleman arrived on the scene, the bop crowd decided they couldn't play. In fact, many were outraged when Miles Davis hired Trane for his quartet. In the end, they turned the music upside down again and relit a flame under jazz that has long since dimmed and has arguably never burned nearly as brightly since.

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