One saxophone colossus opens the 30th Chicago Jazz Festival on Thursday. A second closes the nation's largest free jazzfest on Sunday.

Post-bop genius Sonny Rollins and free-jazz pioneer Ornette Coleman are unlikely bookends. Yet each near-octogenarian still blasts a horn that could raze Jericho.

Both also share a mutual respect unique to veteran reed-blowers from the same era.

The chatty Rollins recalls that jazz's odd couple practiced together in the 1950s and teamed up for "Our Men in Jazz" (1962). But he honed his magnanimous, larger-than-life horn on dance tunes where the intense Coleman swung to a private drummer, sometimes two. Coleman "is a real thinker," Rollins said. "Maybe you don't have to dance to his music. Maybe you can just listen to it and appreciate it on a different level."

Coleman remembers Rollins befriending him --and jamming with him -- in New York. The specifics don't rate hair- or note-splitting. "I think (Rollins' sound) existed before mine," he admits in a separate call. His fellow saxman "is one of the finest, creative expressionists of sound."

Read on for each giant's vision of jazz.

Story #1

Ornette Coleman still baffles, dazzles

Every revolution requires a ringleader.

Some rebels are spectacularly miscast.

Like free-jazz great Ornette Coleman, closing the Chicago Jazz Festival next Sunday at Petrillo Music Shell.

The mild-mannered icon will take the stage at 8:30 p.m., shut his eyes, and blow his alto saxophone to abstract smithereens. It will be easy to pick out casual-jazz fans. They'll be the ones with open mouths and ringing ears.

For the slight, natty maverick, 78, jazz is a dialogue in color and motion. Sounds transpose into red pinwheels, orange fireballs and blue lightning bolts that laugh and cry.

"There are so many reasons to say something. You can't describe it. Music can help: You describe an emotion without being in the form of a word," Coleman says in a phone chat.

The Jackson Pollock of jazz knows the score. While mainstream America is catching up, confusion has remained the standard for the last half-century.

The New York-based innovator was pleased when "Sound Grammar" (2006), his first new album in a decade, won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for music. But validation was never an issue.

"Well, I don't think I was waiting," he says gently. "I was working."

His vision: forging jazz as a universal language "that humans beings share in relation to specific things (like); race, religion and gender," he explains.

Reluctant revolutionary

Coleman -- as quiet as a librarian and tenacious as a bulldog -- propelled jazz past bebop in the late 1950s like Pollock flung paint.

To his mind, jazz is beyond the if-it-ain't-got--that-swing, it-don't- mean-a-thing conceit. It is a philosophy of life rooted in collaboration and equality. He dubbed his idea "harmolodics," a communion of musicians transcending conventional harmonies.

And he shocked purists by tapping kindred spirits Charlie Haden (double bass), Don Cherry (trumpet) and Billy Higgins (drums) for a series of polytonal LPs that represent the cornerstone of avant-garde jazz.

"Tomorrow is the Question!" and "The Shape of Jazz to Come" (1959) rattled critics and yielded minor standards like "Lonely Woman" and "Congeniality." But the double-quartet album "Free Jazz" (1960) -- featuring a spattery Pollock work on the cover -- rocked the beat generation.

Coleman's search for stark feeling led him to see melody as a point of departure, with players riffing off each other and firing notes like paintballs. Each instrument was allowed a different voice and color of timbre, an arrangement that led to a free-falling kaleidoscope of sound.

The horns keened, Haden's bass hummed, the drums chattered.

The big cats hissed and the critics yowled.

Miles Davis announced Coleman was "screwed up inside" and Charles Mingus decided he "couldn't play it straight."

Coleman, the ever-quiet eye of the storm, took the uproar in stride.

"I think everyone is entitled to express their opinion and in relation to what they experience for themselves," he says. "Life is not a person. It's a quality that everything has. An ant to a human being is alive. Life is external, an essence of form."

Still a musical puzzle

Decades later, Coleman is still distilling this essence via offbeat compositions and collaborators. His resume includes sessions with Yoko Ono (on the "Plastic Ono Band" album in 1970), Jerry Garcia (drafted for "Virgin Beauty" in 1988) and Lou Reed ("The Raven," 2003). His current quartet features drummer-son Denardo Coleman and bassists Greg Cohen and Tony Falanga.

As for his approach to harmony, which still riles jazz purists, it remains so revolutionary that even Coleman has labored in vain on the definitive book to Explain All.

He listens tolerantly as a reporter suggests free jazz could be described as a conversation where instruments, like voices, chime in, interrupt, agree, negate, and meander into new melody-subjects. "Oh, that's good," he whispers. "That's perfect and it's true."

For the record, he reveres bygone greats who once wrote him off. He's outlived them, but he's immune to irony and it's not in his nature to diss them. His voice becomes near-inaudible when he speaks of Davis -- in present tense -- as one of the greats. The cool-jazz trumpeter "plays like he's in heaven," he sighs.

Story #2

Upbeat Rollins buoyed by love affair with jazz

Does sax legend Theodore "Sonny" Rollins prefer to be addressed as "Sonny" or "Mr. Rollins?"

"You can call me whatever you want," the greatest living tenor saxman booms. "Just don't call me late to dinner." He skips a beat, then guffaws long-distance at his own corniness.

Rollins, famously enigmatic in his youth, radiates joy at age 77 (he turns 78 on Sept. 7). He also exhibits a tireless zest for the irrepressible post-be-bop that could drive the tone-deaf to dance. Retire? Aw, that's for slackers.

"I don't think of retiring as long as my health is good," says the old-school jazzman, kicking off the 30th Chicago Jazz Festival on Thursday (6:30 p.m. at the Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park). "Why should I retire?"

Besides, after six decades and some 60 recordings -- signature works include the bouncy "St. Thomas," the original "Alfie" score and a slew of standards -- Mr. Tenor Madness remains in hot pursuit of "the lost chord." That's his pet name for the perfect solo. "That's jazz heaven," he states. Critics may beg to differ. The Harlem native, who cut his teeth on Fats Waller and Louie Jordan 78s, has been a divine force since the early 1950s.

As a teen, the precocious Rollins horned in on rehearsals with Thelonious Monk. His mentor shaped the whippersnapper into a sideman, and gigs with Miles Davis and Charlie Parker followed. By 1956, the 25-year-old upstart was the toast of the Clifford Brown-Max Roach Quintet.

Rollins then struck out on his own, cranking out landmark recordings like "Saxophone Colossus" (1956) and "The Bridge" (1962), the latter inspired by his first "sabbatical," when he withdrew from the spotlight to focus on his art. His venue of choice: The Williamsburg Bridge, to spare a pregnant neighbor the racket of his solos.

He remained adventurous as decades passed, flirting with Latin music, avant-garde jazz, even rock' n roll (he wailed his sax on the Rolling Stones' "Tattoo You" (1981). Turn-of-millennium fans can groove on his poppy, Grammy-winning CD "This is What I Do" (2000) and his Grammy-winning solo on "Why Was I Born?" off "Without a Song: The 9/11 Concert" (2005).

The Bearded One isn't resting on his laurels. Remember: The lost chord is still out there.

"It's a wonderful search. Who knows if I'll ever completely find anything," says Rollins, with a verbal shrug, calling from his home in upstate New York. "It's the search that counts, not whether you find it."

An armchair psychiatrist might surmise Rollins' passion for his art is fired by loss. Name a trauma, the deeply spiritual saxophonist had endured it and survived it.

It's lonely at the top, when one outlives luminous friends like Monk, Davis, Lester Young and John Coltrane. It's tough, too, to weather changes in musical taste. Try to find a teen who prefers instrumental jazz to hip-hop.

These bittersweet woes evaporated, though, on Sept. 11, 2001. Rollins, who lived six blocks north of Ground Zero, was evacuated -- horn in hand -- from his ash- and fume-filled apartment. He lost almost everything -- a lifetime of mementoes -- in the tragedy.

But the worst was yet to come. His beloved wife died in 2004, the same year her husband received a Grammy for lifetime achievement.

Lucille Rollins served as the jazz vet's confidante, producer, sounding board and muse for 45 years.

He misses his wife daily, "but this is life I have to accept it," said Rollins, whose last collection -- "Sonny, Please" (2006) was a valentine to Lucille (the title is derived from her stock response when he exasperated her). "We all go through this. Everybody has to go through this. I can't feel sorry for myself. I did for a while, after it happened, but then I realized .... this is life ... And we have to keep going."

So he does, with renewed vigor. Though crowding 80, Rollins still practices daily, touring (his ensemble includes nephew-trombonist Clifton Anderson and Chicago jazz guitarist Bobby Broom) at a pace that would exhaust mortals half his age. A new album called "Road Shows," a collection of live tracks, will be released off the Doxy/Universal label this fall. The DVD "Live in Vienne" follows Oct. 28.

He's never alone, either. His horn is his sidekick. They'll always have each other.

Before he goes to sleep at night, especially if he's touring, he sets his cherished Selmer Mark IV "in a safe place, within eyeshot" so he knows "she" is close. "I speak to her, you know, just like a human being," he says. "I say, 'Is this OK, if I lay you down here? Is this comfortable for you?'

"She never answers, of course," he says laughing.

No, his French-made sax does not have a nickname. "That would trivialize our relationship," Rollins teases. "We have our own private love affair. We don't use nicknames."