Tone Dialing is an album recorded in 1995 by the American jazz composer and saxophonist Ornette Coleman and his Prime Time ensemble. It was released in September 1995 by Coleman's Harmolodic record label, in partnership with Verve/PolyGram. It was the Harmolodic label's first release, and "the first disc fully devoted to Coleman's music in eight years." Regarding the album title, Coleman, in an interview, commented: "Information comes to people in the form of tone dialing. When you speak of something you speak in the tone of what it means to you. Sending a fax is tone dialing. When someone reads something you wrote, that's tone dialing... These songs were written so that the musicians would be able to express their views about the information they were using." In a separate interview, Coleman stated: "When you hear the guitar, the bass, and everyone else play what is called their tone dialing sounds, they are not so much playing different notes as they are playing their own tones, a form of the notes they have been given in the clef that they read. Basically, what you are doing in harmolodics is relying on the basic information that goes into composing, playing, and improvising on forms... Your information may be limited, but the way you use the information doesn't have to be limited. Your tone will cause you to change any note to the way you hear it. Your relationship to your tone is based on your emotions. If it wasn't, everybody would sound the same. When you play something and you hear you own tone, that's tone dialing. That's you. If you create music just from the concept of your own tone, you will be doing something no one else has discovered." Reception The AllMusic review by Scott Yanow awarded the album 4 stars, stating, "despite the inclusion of one obnoxious rap, this free funk set is well worth picking up by open-minded listeners". In a review for Rolling Stone, David Fricke stated: "Tone Dialing... is a record of high spirits and lively, colliding ideas, like the raucous cross talk of a Mississippi roadhouse combo and the breathless locomotion of an African high-life orchestra. For all of the old free-jazz notions attached to Coleman's music since the late '50s, he and Prime Time now cook with a force akin to that of George Clinton and P-Funk's: jamming in tongues with unity of