But then again, those contradictions are a part of the reason that you are a treasure. If you embody something special about jazz--a kind of relentless adventure, a creative spirit--you also embody the complexities of existence. You know that, of course, and you've even encouraged it in yourself: nobody who titles an album Of Human Feeling can help being aware of his own complexity. It does just as much as your raw creativity to make your art compelling.

As I write this, I’m listening to the internet broadcast of WKCR-FM, the campus radio station at Columbia University; they are playing 23 solid hours of your music in an “Ornette Coleman Birthday Broadcast.” At this very moment they are playing “Open to the Public” from the 1968 Love Call album (Blue Note). Odd, that: Love Call is half of a recording session that also yielded the album New York Is Now! The latter is not your best album—it’s a moment when your unique vision seemed particularly played out and uninspired; the music I’m hearing from the former, however, is as exhilarating and powerful and unique as ever.

Yet another contradiction? Well, perhaps it’s just an indication that Blue Note was willing in 1968 to release even the dregs of a recording session. But I like to think of it as emblematic of what your music is really about: possibility. The possibility of music, of the artist, of the beholder.

That’s what we learn from the Harmolodic Theory that you so rejoice in: about the possibilities of all of these things, rolled into one. Ethan Iverson from the Bad Plus explained it the best: Harmolodics is about the potential of every performer to make a composition his own, in the sense of improvising one’s own rhythm, melody, harmony, even arrangement. What I’m not sure he captures is the creative joy, the imagination, that you embody in playing music with that sense of pliability.

But that, of course, is what we celebrate in your work. And in you.

For that reason, Ornette, more than any of the other, equally laudatory things, I celebrate you today. Though your mortality remains on my mind--and doubtlessly, let's face it, yours too--today should really be about your immortality. And it is.

Happy 78th birthday. May the joy you’ve felt, expressed, and imparted on all of us continue. May it be reflected on you. May you, and we, continue to inspire each other to new heights of wonder.

You were right. Beauty is a rare thing. How do you make it seem so common?

See you in a few weeks.

Mike