Long after the last note, the crowd was still in the hall. Ornette Coleman's final gig, at the Meltdown festival he curated and played at, was carried off with typically wayward flair. His 50-year career has been stuffed with controversies, breakthroughs and accolades, but the 79-year-old sax improviser and composer seemed to sense something special was happening as he moved gingerly along the front of the stage, shaking the outstretched hands of people surging toward him.
But then the music Coleman and his guests have been playing at Meltdown has been a revelation: vivid, witty, open and passionate. Coleman and his core band (his son Denardo on drums, Al MacDowell and Tony Falanga on electric and acoustic basses respectively) played Friday and Sunday, after ecstatic opening sets by the polyrhythmic dances of Morocco's Bachir Attar and the Master Musicians of Jajouka. Guitarist Bill Frisell joined Friday's show not as a soloist but as a Coleman collaborator, and quickly became enmeshed in the churning rhythms. Sometimes the sound harmonised, sometimes it veered apart as Coleman blew that great particle collider he calls a saxophone. Patti Smith arrived to fire some edgy spontaneous poetry over Denardo's tramping, elemental drumming and his father's wailing instrument.
On both nights, Falanga elegantly unfurled Bach's Cello Suite No 1 as Coleman, playing viola, brought to it a clamour of dissonant improv. The Rite of Spring opening, meanwhile, respectfully mirrored by Coleman's haunting sax line (and by Baaba Maal's soaring voice on Sunday), swelled into the band's own personal rite as a funk pulse grew.
Coleman's classic Turnaround, a mix of mournful blues figures and spine-tingling long-note cries, preceded Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist Flea, who guested to make the group even more thunderously funky, particularly on the leader's trance-melody classic, Dancing in Your Head. But the encore trumped even that. Bassist Charlie Haden joined Coleman and Denardo's hushed cymbal pulse to play the saxophonist's yearning Lonely Woman, one of the most beautiful of all jazz ballads, first as a lament, then as a piece of absorbingly graceful, though sometimes tentative, swing. The ensuing crowd eruption wasn't just for an extraordinary show - it was for 50 years of Coleman as well.
• This article was amended on 23 June and 1 July 2009, to clarify that the Moroccan group playing at the festival was Bachir Attar and the Master Musicians of Jajouka - as distinct from another troupe, the Master Musicians of Joujouka.
