Free jazz
For the Ornette Coleman album after which this genre was named see Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation.Free jazz is a movement of
jazz music which was developed in the
1950s and
1960s by artists such as
Ornette Coleman,
Eric Dolphy,
Cecil Taylor,
Albert Ayler,
Joe Harriott,
Archie Shepp,
Bill Dixon and
Paul Bley. Some of the best known examples are the later works of
John Coltrane. Though the music produced by these players varied widely, the common feature was a dissatisfaction with the expressive possibilities of
bebop,
hard bop, and
modal jazz; each in his own way, free jazz musicians attempted to break down or extend the conventions of jazz, often by discarding hitherto invariable features of jazz such as fixed chord changes or tempos.
Though "free jazz" is the generally used term nowadays, many other terms have been used. In the 1960s, the loosely-defined movement was sometimes called "Energy Music" or "The New Thing". Free-jazz players were other said to be playing "outside" or "out" (as opposed to "inside"--conventionally), and the word became a favorite one among musicians and record labels: albums from this period include
Outward Bound,
Out There,
Out to Lunch (all by Dolphy),
Out Front (
Jaki Byard), and
Destination Out (
Jackie McLean).
While free jazz is most often associated with the era of its birth, many musicians â€" including
Ken Vandermark,
William Parker,
John Zorn and
George Lewis (trombonist) â€" have kept the style alive to the present day, continuing its development as a jazz idiom. In Europe the style was further extended by players such as
Derek Bailey,
Peter Brötzmann and
Evan Parker into an idiom that came to be called "
free improvisation."
Ornette Coleman is often regarded as having crystallized the free jazz form in the late 1950s, and many consider his first explorative albums such as
Something Else and
The Shape of Jazz to Come to be the beginning of the movement. Indeed, the style owes its name to Coleman's 1960 recording
Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation. He intended it only as an album title, but the term quickly became synonymous with the current adventurous innovations in jazz, and eventually became the name of a movement and style.
There were earlier precedents, however. Two recordings by
pianist Lennie Tristano are sometimes cited as the earliest free jazz. "Digression" and "Intuition" were both recorded in 1949; neither had prearranged
melody,
harmony or
rhythm. Both songs maintained a sense of harmonic consonance, however, which is undermined in most free jazz.
Much of
Sun Ra's music could be classified as free jazz, especially his work from the 1960s, although Sun Ra said repeatedly that his music was written and boasted that what he wrote sounded more free than what "the freedom boys" played.
Some of
Charles Mingus' work was also important in establishing free jazz. Of particular note are his early Atlantic albums, such as
Pithecanthropus Erectus,
The Clown, and
Tijuana Moods, in which he employed a compositional technique of humming tunes to his players and allowing them to feel their own melodies.
Since the mid-1950s, saxophonist
Jackie McLean had been exploring a concept he called "The Big Room", where the often strict rules of
bebop could be loosened or abandoned at will. Similarly,
Cecil Taylor, the most prominent free jazz pianist, began stretching the bop boundaries as early as 1956.
The trio led by
Jimmy Giuffre with
Paul Bley and
Steve Swallow between 1960 and 1962 received little attention during their original incarnation, but afterwards were regarded as one of the most innovative free jazz ensembles.
Eric Dolphy's work with Charles Mingus, John Coltrane, and
Chico Hamilton, along with his solo work, helped to set the stage for free jazz in the music community.
In Europe, free jazz first flowered through the experiments of expatriate Jamaican alto saxophonist
Joe Harriott. Beginning in the late 1950s, he worked on his own distinctive concept of what he termed
free form rather than
free jazz, which generally involved a more fluid ensemble interaction than the American models.
There is no universally accepted definition of free jazz, and any proposed definition is complicated by many musicians in other styles drawing on free jazz, or free jazz sometimes blending with other genres. Many musicians also tend to reject efforts at classification, regarding them as useless or unduly limiting.
Free jazz uses
jazz idioms but generally considerably less
compositional material than in most earlier styles â€"
improvisation is essential, and whereas in earlier styles of jazz the improvised solos were always built according to a template provided by composed material (
chord changes and
melody), in free jazz the performers often range much more widely. Free jazz as a style has grown considerably since its inception, and the ability to improvise freely is a common skill. But, as guitarist
Marc Ribot has remarked, free jazz musicians like
Ornette Coleman and
Albert Ayler, "although they were freeing up certain strictures of bebop, were in fact each developing new structures of composition."[
1]
Typically this kind of music is played by small groups of musicians. In popular perception, free jazz is loud, aggressive, dissonant and in general full of sound and fury. Many
critics, particularly at the music's inception, suspected that the abandonment of familiar elements of jazz pointed to a lack of technique on the part of the
musicians. Most free jazz musicians use overblowing techniques or otherwise elicit unconventional sounds from their instruments. Today such views are more marginal, and the music has built up a tradition and a body of accompanying
critical writing. It remains less commercially
popular than most other forms of jazz.
Beyond this, free jazz is most easily characterised in contrast with what we refer to here as "other forms of jazz", an umbrella which covers
ragtime,
dixieland,
swing,
bebop,
cool jazz,
jazz fusion and other styles.
"Other forms of jazz" use clear regular
meters and strongly-pulsed
rhythms, usually in 4/4 or (less often) 3/4. Free jazz normally retains a general pulsation and often swings but without regular metre, and often with frequent
accelerando and
ritardando, giving an impression of the rhythm moving in
waves. Often players in an
ensemble adopt different
tempi. Despite all of this, it is still very often possible to tap one's foot to a free jazz
performance; rhythm is more freely variable but has not disappeared entirely.
Other forms used
harmonic structures (usually cycles of
diatonic chords). Improvisors played solos using notes based on the notes in the chords. Free jazz almost by definition dispenses with such structures, but also by definition (it is, after all, "jazz" as much as it is "free") it retains much of the language of earlier jazz playing. It is therefore very common to hear
diatonic,
altered dominant and
blues phrases in this music. It is also fairly common for a drone or single chord to underpin a performance (see
modal jazz), but the absence of such rudimentary devices is typical as well.
Finally, other forms use composed melodies as the basis for group performance and improvisation. Free jazz practitioners sometimes use such material, and sometimes do not. In some music which is called "free jazz", other compositional structures are employed, some of them very detailed and complex; the music of
Anthony Braxton furnishes many examples. It would perhaps be best to call this modern or
avant-garde jazz, reserving the term "free jazz" for music with few or no pre-composed elements.
The emergence of free jazz, like previous developments in jazz, was largely tied to the
African-American experience. Just as the development of
bebop was a reaction against popular
swing music, free jazz emerged to counter the growing white interest in finger-popping
soul jazz and other music of the 1950s. This idea can be seen in the approaches of the musicians themselves, as in
Ornette Coleman's
This is Our Music (1960). Both these developments, bebop in 1940 and free jazz in 1960, reveal directions that were more intellectual, less danceable, and less marketable to white audiences. Groups like the
Art Ensemble of Chicago, the flagship group of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (
AACM), and
Sun Ra made Black identity an integral part of their public personae as musicians, more visibly than previous generations of jazz musicians. This is not to say that the music was racially segregated;
white bassist
Charlie Haden was a member of Ornette Coleman's influential quartet from the very beginning, and free jazz's principles were quickly assimilated into musical developments in all corners of global society.
Many free jazz musicians regard the music as signifying in a broadly
religious way, or to have
gnostic or
mystical connotations, as an aide to meditation or self-reflection, as evidenced by
Coltrane's
Om album, or Charles Gayle's
Repent.
Outside of North America, free jazz scenes have become established in Europe and Japan. Alongside the aforementioned
Joe Harriott, saxophonists
Peter Brötzmann,
Evan Parker, trombonist
Conny Bauer, guitarist
Derek Bailey and drummer
Han Bennink were among the most well-known early European free jazz performers. European free jazz can generally be seen as approaching
free improvisation, with an ever more distant relationship to jazz tradition. That being said, specifically Brötzmann has had a significant impact on the free jazz players of the U.S. Japanese guitarist
Masayuki Takayanagi and saxophonist
Kaoru Abe, among others, took free jazz in another direction, approaching the energy levels of
noise. Some international jazz musicians have come to North America and become immersed in free jazz, most notably
Ivo Perelman from
Brazil and
Gato Barbieri of
Argentina (this influence is evident in Barbieri's early work, but fades in his later, more commercially oriented efforts). American musicians like
Don Cherry,
John Coltrane, and
Pharoah Sanders integrated elements of the music of
Africa,
India, and the
Middle East for a sort of
World music-influenced free jazz.
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*
Free improvisation*
The Real Godfathers of Punk by Billy Bob Hargus (July 1996)
