Saxophonist-composer Ornette Coleman is one of the truly significant innovators in the history of jazz. Coleman's childhood in the black ghetto areas of Fort Worth where trains ran past his house (and through his head) is shown in flashbacks. Coleman performed with rhythm and blues bands throughout the South during the 1940s before |oining with Pee Wee Crayton and even at this stage his be-pop style showed Coleman was a confirmed jazz individualist. With trumpeter Don Cherry he formed a new band in Los Angeles, and in the 1960s moved to New York where he quickly developed a reputation as a legend of jazz.

Shirley Clarke, a pioneer of experimental video-theatre in the USA won the Cannes Film Festival Critics' Award for her first film The Connection (1965). In the 1960s she began filming Ornette Coleman and now, twenty years iater, has finally completed this complex tapestry of a musical journey.