I'm altering my order a bit to highlight connections. Ed Blackwell is like the alter-ego to Billy Higgins. Both played with Ornette around the same time, and I can't get myself top prefer one or the other. Blackwell is perhaps more "avant" than Higgins. He is from New Orleans and you can here influences from him in Jeff Watts. Neither of them has that classic jazz "swing" feeling. Blackwell has more of an African polyrhythmic feel to his playing, and a higher pitched cymbal sound. I saw him with "Old and New Dreams" in the late 1970s, with Charlie Haden and Dewey Redman.

I don't know much of Blackwell's work post Ornette.