For the San Francisco Jazz Festival, Ornette Coleman brought his violin, his trumpet, his electric turquoise suit - and a slate of new songs written for the occasion. The adoring crowd greeted him with a standing ovation and then coaxed him out for a curtain call after the lights came on at Davies Symphony Hall. In between, we hung on every note.

Coleman and the SF Jazz Fest have made history before. The last time Ornette appeared at the festival, in 1994, he and his funky band Prime Time debuted the music that later became the album Tone Dialing. In addition to the band, he had a slew of video artists and contortionists, and some on-stage body piercing. (The description I saw called it "notorious," but sounds like fun to me.)

Thursday, in only his second live appearance of 2002, Coleman again debuted new music, but this time with a trio. Ornette's group included his son and longtime drummer Denardo Coleman and upright bassist Charnett Moffett (whose father Charles played drums with Coleman in the 1960s).

The musicians were loose but the music was tight. Although the material was new, it came fully to life. Unlike some of Ornette's sidemen over the years, this rhythm section more than held its own. Some songs moved along at a headlong pace - with the rhythm section moving at a speed usually measured in BPMs - but the trio never sounded frantic or rushed. Moffett and Denardo Coleman were clearly having fun - laughing and grinning and gesturing back and forth during the set. I've never seen Moffett before, but he's a virtuoso. And he's got a dozen ways to make the bass come to life: he plucked it, played it with a bow, slapped the sides, and even tapped it with the end of the bow so that it sounded almost like a drummer hitting wood blocks. At times, he turned on a wa-wa effect and sounded like Jimi Hendrix's long lost little brother. He had the crowd eating out of his hand.

For his part, Ornette is sharper at 72 than most of us will ever be. After walking slowly on stage and fumbling with his stool (what, they couldn't afford to get him a stable one?), smiling slightly (almost humbly) and saying something softly to the crowd (your guess is as good as mine) Coleman played a two-hour set with no intermission, no chitchat, and hardly any pauses between songs. The music was soulful, atonal, avant-garde and catchy, sometimes all at once. Coleman describes his style as harmolodic, and if I were a better writer, perhaps I could describe what it sounds like. But I can't put it in writing, and frankly, I've never understood anyone else's description of harmolodics either. In any event, starting in the late 1950s, Ornette Coleman crafted a unique method of mixing tone, harmony and rhythm that remains distinctly his own. While they're often tuneful, his songs don't really have a melody in the traditional sense - not a hummable My Favorite Things kind of melody anyway. The new songs sound like classic Ornette Coleman - similar in emphasis to his vintage small group jazz performances rather than his later excursions into world music, symphony pieces and funk.