The aptly titled “Something Else!” really was something else when it first hit the shops in 1958. Ornette Coleman’s debut album sounded unlike anything the jazz world had ever heard before and like any true revolutionary he was simultaneously both heckled as a fraud and lauded as a genius of the future of jazz. Half a century later, and given Coleman’s extraordinary influence in both the jazz and rock world, it is difficult to imagine that Coleman could have had a hard time getting work as a sideman, but his style was so unusual that even fellow jazz musicians thought he was “out of tune”. Only a small group of people understood what he was trying to do at first, and this album, featuring Coleman playing his famous plastic alto sax, Don Cherry on trumpet, Billy Higgins on drums, Walter Norris on piano and Don Payne on bass, a landmark album in jazz, was so far ahead of its time that it still sounds fresh 50 years later!