And the Pulitzer goes to....

As far as I know, Ornette Coleman is the only jazz musician to be awarded one while still alive.

Depends on your definition of ‘jazz musician’: before Marsalis, Gunther Schuller, in 1994, received the award.

My understanding is that there was actually a rule change necessary in the Pulitzer's wording in order to allow jazz musicians to win at all.

AP report: “…The real push to diversify came in 2004. …The board revised its guidelines to encourage more entrants from fields such as Broadway, jazz and movie scores.”
Also Greg Sandow’s contemporaneous op-ed on the 2004 rule changes: “The music Pulitzers are supposed to reflect distinguished creative achievement in music, but… what they show us, instead, is how fixedly classical music stares at its own navel. And… how the mainstream contemporary classical music world stares at its navel even more.”
I feel ambivalent about the Pulitzer in general, whether or not Coleman (after Marsalis) was recognized. (But I’ll gladly eat my hat with humble pie when Ayler or Alice Coltrane or, for that matter, Napalm Death get the award.)

S, tig

"As far as I know, Ornette Coleman is the only jazz musician to be awarded one while still alive. My understanding is that there was actually a rule change necessary in the Pulitzer's wording in order to allow jazz musicians to win at all."

Wynton won a decade ago for "Blood on the Fields":
http://www.pulitzer.org/year/1997/music/

The rule change is described here:
In 1996, after years of internal debate, the Pulitzer Prize board announced a change in the criteria for the music prize "so as to attract the best of a wider range of American music." The result was that the following year Wynton Marsalis became the first jazz artist to win the Pulitzer Prize. However, his victory was controversial because according to the Pulitzer guidelines, his winning work, a three hour long oratorio about slavery, "Blood on the Fields," should not have been eligible. Although a winning work was supposed to have had its first performance during that year, Marsalis' piece premiered on April 1, 1994 and its recording, released on Columbia Records, was dated 1995. Yet, the piece won the 1997 prize. Marsalis' management had submitted a "revised version" of "Blood on the Fields" which was "premiered" at Yale University after the composer made seven small changes. When asked what would make a revised work eligible, the chairman of that year's music jury, Robert Ward, said: "Not a cut here and there...or a slight revision," but rather something that changed "the whole conception of the piece." After being read the list of revisions made to to piece, Ward acknowledged that the minor changes should not have qualified it as an eligible work, but he said that "the list you had here was not available to us, and we did not discuss it."