One of the great evenings was opening night of the Ornette Coleman quintet at the Five Spot. The place was absolutely jammed. You couldn't move. In the audience that first night were Thelonious Monk, Leonard Bernstein, and a whole raft of jazz musicians who came out to hear this young soprano saxophonist from Texas with a reputation for making music in a way that had never been done before, free-form jazz music. It was so democratic in the way they went about it, it seemed as if there was no structure to what they were doing. Adding to the mystique was that Ornette played his music on a plastic white saxophone that looked like a toy. With him were Don Cherry, whose little trumpet also looked like a toy, Buster Williams on drums, and Charlie Haden, a bass player who eventually became as famous as anyone in the jazz world. << less