Free Jazz: A Subjective History

Of the many musical sub-species that have emerged and diverged from Jazz's evolutionary track, none has
inspired such controversy as Free Jazz. Free Jazz represented a final break with the music's roots as a popular
art form, casting it in an alternative role as an experimental art music, along the lines of the European
"classical" avant-garde. The Free players were the first jazz musicians (early-beboppers and Duke Ellington
notwithstanding) to focus almost exclusively on a furtherance of the music's creative possibilities, at the
expense of being understood by a lay audience. Their emphasis on jazz's primarily expressive properties--and
consequent de-emphasis of its harmonic and rhythmic customs-challenged listeners and disturbed mainstream
players, who saw in Free Jazz an art form dominated by a totally unfamiliar set of musical values.
Free Jazz was originally erected on a foundation of late '40s and early '50s bebop. The first Free Jazz
recordings were made by the pianist Lennie Tristano for Capitol in 1949. Tristano was one of jazz's legion of
unjustly-neglected geniuses; his heady, harmonically sophisticated and melodically intricate post-bop extended
the innovations of Charlie Parker. Tristano and his circle, which included most prominently the tenor
saxophonist Warne Marsh and altoist Lee Konitz, paid great heed to the use of counterpoint in jazz composition
and improvisation--a throwback, in a sense, to the earlybazz collectivism of New Orleans. A concern with jazz's
contrapuntal properties distinguishes Tristano's first attempts at free-form improvisation. Those initial two
Free Jazz sides--titled appropriately, Intuition, and Digression--were an outgrowth of experiments Tristano
had conducted in private and, occasionally, in his nightclub sets. The free music recorded by Tristano's
ensemble (Konitz, Marsh, guitarist Billy Bauer and bassist Arnold Fishkin) had no preordained themes or
harmonies, no distinct formal structure or tonality. While tentative and somewhat unsatisfying to modern ears
(due in part to a certain rhythmic stasis characteristic in general of Tristano), these tracks were without
precedent in recorded jazz. Unfortunately, the music went unissued by Capitol for several years; it's uncertain
just how influential Tristano was to the first wave of Free players. His music more directly affected the "cool
school" of the 1950s. Certainly, freedom was "in the air", though it would be some time before it would spark a
revolution.
That had to wait almost another decade. The years directly following Tristano's discoveries yielded intimations
of the coming "New Thing", but it wasn't until 1958, when a young Texas-born and California-based alto
saxophonist Ornette Coleman recorded his first album, "Something Else!", that the Free Jazz movement, as we
know it, began. Coleman reached his first level of musical maturity in his home town of Fort Worth, playing
alto in a style derived from Charlie Parker. In the early '50s, Coleman moved to Los Angeles and worked at a
non-musical day job, studying music theory books and developing his own ideas of how jazz could be played.
After suffering through repeated rejections by members of the local jazz elite, Coleman was befriended by the
established bassist Red Mitchell, whose influence reportedly gained Coleman his first recording session for the
Contemporary label. "Something Else!", the resulting LP, was a qualified success; the music was representative
of his work mostly to the extent that it highlighted his compositions and the rapport he shared with Don
Cherry. Coleman's next album, "Tomorrow is the Question", was more fully-realized, the band stripped of the
piano that had cluttered up the first session. On 1959's "The Shape of Jazz to Come", his first album for the
Atlantic label, Coleman brought together for the first time in the studio several of the musicians with whom he
was to make his most enduring statements--Cherry, bassist Charlie Haden and drummer Billy Higgins. In the
decade of the '60s, with this quartet and other groups featuring such soon-to-be Free Jazz icons as drummers
Charles Moffett and Ed Blackwell, tenor saxophonist Dewey Redman, and bassists Scott LaFaro, Jimmy
Garrison, and David Izenzon, Coleman would make a series of albums for Atlantic and Blue Note that
permanently altered the face of jazz. These included such seminal documents as "Change of the Century", "At
the Golden Circle, Volumes 1 and 2", and "Free Jazz"--the album that was to lend its name to the movement it
epitomized.
Much of what Coleman did had ample precedent: his music swung in a relatively conventional sense; he used a
traditional instrumentation (bard saxophonist Gerry Mulligan was only the most prominent of Coleman's
predecessors to have recently dispensed with the piano); his lines--both improvised and composed--clearly
reflected the rhythmic contours of bebop. It was Coleman's manipulation of jazz's basic elements that was
unusual. First and most obvious was the manner in which he dealt with tonality. Coleman's tunes were,
essentially, very creative and quirky bebop "heads", melodically conceived, with simple harmonic
underpinnings of secondary importance. Early Coleman tunes like "Chronology" or "Bird Food" were straight
4/4 swingers taken at a fast tempo, with tonal (or modal) harmonies implied in both the melody and the bass.
The structures of these compositions were fairly ordinary; the way they were played was not. Coleman played
bebop alto like a Rhythm & Blues shouter. His solos were vocalized to an extent unheard of in the self-
possessed world of modern jazz. Drummer Shelly Manne said that when Coleman played, "he sounds like a
person crying...or a person laughing." Coleman's phrases were chromatic in the extreme. The utter
simplification of his harmonic accompaniment allowed him maximum freedom in his improvisations.
Liberated from the need to "make the changes", Coleman's creative choices were unencumbered by the
exigencies of functional harmony's consonant/dissonant relationship. His improvisational strategies were built,
not on the composition's prescribed harmonies, but on its melody and the contingencies of performance. After
the head was stated, his forms grew organically out of the interaction between the musicians. This shift in
improvisational emphasis, from an adherence to a predetermined structure to the spontaneous interchange of
ideas among the players, was the most revolutionary aspect of Coleman's music. Following Coleman's
innovations, a growing number of musicians turned to Free Jazz, excited by the seemingly unlimited
possibilities of this new music. While Coleman worked in the foreground of the public consciousness, most of
these other players practiced their art in relative obscurity. Pianist Cecil Taylor studied classical music at the
New England Conservatory in the early '50s, before devoting himself to jazz later in the decade. Initially
influenced by straight-ahead pianists like Horace Silver and Thelonious Monk, Taylor eventually developed a
concept that did away with tempo and functional harmony. Possessed of perhaps the most astounding
technique of any jazz pianist ever, Taylor's mature music was a highly-energized tempest of freely improvised
atonality. He continued to be a catalytic presence into the late '90s. Many of the players who passed through the
early Taylor ensembles--soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy, drummer Sunny Murray, alto saxophonist Jimmy
Lyons, and tenor saxophonist Archie Shepp--became forces on the scene. In 1964, Shepp's collaborator, the
trumpeter Bill Dixon, organized a series of Free Jazz concerts at a New York cafe called "The October
Revolution in Jazz", which presented many of the artists who would determine the direction of Free Jazz in the
'60s and '70s--players like the trombonist Roswell Rudd, drummer Milford Graves, pianist/band-leader Sun
Ra. The event went far in establishing Free Jazz as a movement, and led later that year to the founding of The
Jazz Composers Guild, an ephemeral yet influential performance collective that counted Taylor, the pianist
Paul They, and composer Carla They among its members.
While these early Free players worked mostly underground, the music's second major figure carried out his
experiments in full view of the jazz public. Unlike Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane came up through the ranks
of the jazz mainstream, spending time in the bands of Dizzy Gillespie, Earl Bostic, and, most notably, Miles
Davis, as a member of the latter's first great quintet. By the time Ornette had first attracted the jazz public's
attention in the late '50s, Coltrane was already well-known as one of the most far-sighted hard-bop tenor
saxophonists. Up to that point, Coltrane's greatest contribution had been his expansion of the jazz vocabulary;
with each successive recording, one can hear him chafing at the bounds of tradition through the use of ever-
more sophisticated harmonic, rhythmic, and melodic techniques in his improvisations. Where Coleman
bypassed the theoretical implications of common jazz practice-largely by inventing his own system--Coltrane
delved deeper into jazz's conventional harmony and rhythm than anyone before him. In the same year (1959)
that Coleman defined his art by reducing jazz's tonal base to its bare essence, Coltrane increased the complexity
of jazz harmony many times over with the recording of his epochal "Giant Steps". That album's and title cut
remains the quintessence of jazz harmonic intricacy.
After "Giant Steps", Coltrane seemed to recognize the need for a greater contextual simplicity. Always an
emotional player, Coltrane looked for ways in which he might obtain greater freedom to express his personal
spirituality. In 1960, inspired by his experiences with Miles Davis, Coltrane began an extended exploration of
modal jazz. The wealth of melodic choices given a soloist within such a system (a system somewhat like that
which Ornette Coleman had simultaneously, yet independently, developed) appealed to Coltrane, and he began
using it to his own ends. Over the next several years he recorded a series of modally-inclined albums that
culminated in the late-1964 recording of his studio masterwork, "A Love Supreme", a heartfelt offering to God
which featured the saxophonist's great quartet with pianist McCoy Tyner, bassist Jimmy Garrison, and
drummer Elvin Jones.
It was at this point that Coltrane began to embrace Free Jazz in earnest. The year 1965 saw Coltrane recording
a series of albums that became progressively more free in content, beginning with "John Coltrane Quartet
Plays...", and including "Transition", "Kulu se Mama", "Om", "Meditations", and "Ascension"--Coltrane's large-
group parallel to Ornette Coleman's "Free Jazz". Until his tragically premature death in 1967 at the age of 40,
Coltrane continued to work in the realm of Free Jazz, experimenting with a variety of instrumentations and
structures for improvisation.
It's interesting that, over the years, Coltrane's saxophone playing did not change nearly so drastically as did the
background provided by his accompanists. Though he did alternately expand and contract his phrasing a bit in
his later work, Coltrane's manner of improvising remained essentially the same; his searing intensity and
extraordinary facility never waned. What changed was his musical surroundings. A literal sense of swing was
ever-present in Coltrane's early-'60s music; Elvin Jones played with a great deal of rhythmic flexibility, but was
always grounded by a sense of pulse. Jones' successor, Rashied Ali, loosened time to a significant degree. While
he still "swung", Ali's tempt fluctuated by design. His concept was altogether more coloristic; he would often
drive the ensemble with waves of free rhythm. By 1966, Coltrane had replaced the explicit muscularity of
pianist McCoy Tyner with the more ambiguous textures of his wife Alice Coltrane. Also added to the mix was
the tenor saxophonist Pharoah Sanders, whose screaming multiphonic attack ignored the horn's basic tenets of
sound production. This later music was raw and asymmetrical: intelligent, to be sure, but almost totally at the
service of emotion and physicality. In his last years Coltrane transcended jazz, looking to create a more
universal music by incorporating non-Western devices and instruments; no musician did more to expand the
definition of jazz than he.
Coleman and Coltrane were of monolithic importance in the development of Free Jazz, but that's not to say
that there weren't others who, in those formative times, made major contributions. Los Angeles born multi-
reedist Eric Dolphy's first high profile gig came as a member of drummer Chico Hamilton's band in 1958. The
next year he moved to New York and became a member of Charles Mingus' piano-less quartet, where he formed
a front line with the trumpeter Ted Curson. His fleet and harmonically unpredictable style on flute, bass
clarinet, and alto sax was, in it's way, as radical as Coleman's, only Dolphy worked--in the beginning, at least--
within jazz's customary frameworks. Dolphy was briefly a member of Coltrane's classic band, before striking
out on his own, recording a series of modal/free albums of an increasingly high quality that peaked with the
remarkable "Out to Lunch" in February 1964. Dolphy's untimely death four months later robbed the music of a
dogged visionary.
Tenor saxophonist Albert Ayler fomented a revolution of sorts by virtue of his near-total indifference to the
jazz that came before him. Ayler was born in Cleveland, where he was taught the basics of music by his
saxophone-playing father. Some of his earliest performances took place in church; aspects of the African-
American sanctified worship service characterized Ayler's mature style, with its ecstatic and cathartic whoops
and screams. Reputedly, the young Ayler was conversant with bebop, though there is no convincing recorded
evidence to support this thesis. Indeed, Ayler's music avoided the values of modern jazz; his art was, instead, a
personal type of abstract expressionism made possible by the new aesthetic. His group concept was extremely
free--Ayler used simple, hymn-like melodic materials played out-of-time and developed collectively. His
saxophone technique was derived from the instrument's capacity for speed and tonal flexibility. Ayler's high-
energy approach influenced Free Jazz saxophonists of his own time, and the generations to follow; John
Coltrane took note of and was influenced by Ayler, who played at the former's funeral in 1967. Ayler himself
died in 1970 at the age of 34--like so many of the greatest jazz musicians, well before his time.
The hyper-dense free improvisation of late-Coltrane and Ayler was the music's dominant strain in the late '60;
at the same time, however, another group of players had begun working along very different lines. The
musicians of the Coleman/Coltrane axis lived and worked mostly in New York City; this new movement was
located in Chicago, and its priorities were considerably different.
The Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) was an outgrowth of the Chicago
pianist/composer Muhal Richard Abrams' Experimental Band, an early '60s ensemble dedicated to finding new
methods of jazz composition and performance. Members of the AACM included the saxophonists Anthony
Braxton, Joseph Jarman, and Roscoe Mitchell, violinist Leroy Jenkins, drummer Steve McCall, and trumpeter
Lester Bowie. Music of the various AACM players was characterized in the main by a concern for the use of
textural contrast and compositional structure. Their early albums, such as Mitchell's "Sound" and Jarman's
"Song For" defined a new, restrained concept that placed a premium on the use of unadorned space in the
process of free improvisation. The Chicagoans' preoccupation with structure and silence was a logical reaction
to the no-holds-barred energy music preferred by the New York musicians.
By the end of the '70s, the AACM sensibility had gained ascendance. Members and associates like Braxton,
saxophonist Henry Threadgill, and drummer Jack DeJohnette led important bands; Mitchell, Jarman, Bowie,
bassist Malachi Favors, and drummer Don Moye formed the Art Ensemble of Chicago, the decade's preeminent
Free Jazz group. In St. Louis, an AACM-like organization, the Black Artists Group (BAG), produced
saxophonists Oliver Lake, Julius Hemphill, and Hamiet Bluiett--three-fourths of the World Saxophone Quartet,
which in the '80s would become perhaps the most commercially-successful of all Free Jazz ensembles.
The '70s and '80s saw a greater awareness of Free Jazz in Europe; in England, the saxophonist Evan Parker
developed an extraordinary method of improvisation that relied upon the technique known as circular-
breathing. Parker was able to play the most complex lines without pause and at the most incredible speed. Also
British, the guitarist Derek Bailey pioneered the use of alternative tunings and unusual effects; he also wrote a
notable text on various aspects of musical improvisation. In the Soviet Union, the trio of pianist Vyacheslav
Ganelin, percussionist Vladimir Tarasov, and saxophonist Vladimir Checkasin played a vital form of Free Jazz
that combined elements of their own national musical tradition with the American high-energy aesthetic. In
Norway, the saxophonist Jan Garbarek played a Iyrical, folkish music reminiscent of Coltrane at his most
tuneful. The German tenor saxophonist Peter Brotzman was a force of nature, playing a music reminiscent of
Ayler, yet informed by the European art music continuum. In the '70s and '80s, Free Jazz truly became an
international music, its many European practitioners by and large as accomplished and as critically acclaimed
as their American counterparts.
The '80s and '90s were a period of both consolidation and fragmentation for Free Jazz. Innovation, where it
existed, occurred in smaller increments. The older generation of musicians continued producing. Anthony
Braxton continued his melding of jazz and contemporary classical music; Cecil Taylor refined his prodigious
pianistic technique; Don Cherry, Charlie Haden, Dewey Redman and Ed Blackwell formed the quartet "Old and
New Dreams", in tribute to their old boss, Ornette Coleman. As for Ornette, he reasserted his influence by
adapting his concept of free polyphony (which he came to call "harmolodics") to funk music. Sun Ra, the mystic
keyboardist/composer/philosopher, reached his greatest level of prominence. He led his long-lived "Arkestra"
until his death in 1993; his group's highly theatrical performance style and the leader's eccentric personality
drew attention away from a rather erratic and not always successful stylistic melange. Younger musicians
appeared, the most influential of whom was probably the tenor saxophonist David Murray. Murray came on the
scene in the mid-'70s; he initially played tenor in a Free Expressionist style similar to that of Albert Ayler,
except Murray displayed a greater interest in the whole of jazz's development. As the fourth member of the
World Saxophone Quartet, Murray became that group's most volatile soloist and composer. With his own
groups, Murray showed a consisent growth, bringing the opposing realms of masinstream and Free Jazz ever
closer. By the late '90s, he had arguably become jazz's most conceptually well-rounded musician.
Other musicians who came on the scene in the '80s and '90s are too numerous to list; a few include the
phenomenally dextrous pianist Borah Bergman, the timbrally-prescient saxophonist/trumpeter Joe McPhee,
the powerful Free/Funk drummer Ronald Shannon Jackson, and the texturally inspired pianist Marilyn
Crispell. In 1986, the Knitting Factory, a new night club on New York's Lower East Side, opened, and quickly
became the center of Free Jazz activity in the city. A great many of the most prominent Free players of the late
'90s became inextricably linked to the club, including the influential conceptualist composer/alto saxophonist
John Zorn, the jaggedly lyrical trumpeter Dave Douglas, and the explosively Ayler-esque tenor saxophonist
Charles Gayle. Other players making their mark by the end of the decade included pianists Myra Melford and
Matthew Shipp, guitarist Joe Morris, saxophonists Tim Berne, Thomas Chapin, Ken Vandermark, Joe Maneri,
and David S. Ware, bassist William Parker, trumpeter Herb Robertson, and drummers Joey Baron and Bobby
Previte.
The radical self-consciousness possessed by the Free players has led to the creation of some extraordinarily
original and ultimately influential music. It sprung from the font of modern jazz, yet very quickly became quite
a different thing, something very apart from the populist forms of the music that, even today, define jazz in the
public's perception. Free Jazz is, however, a stubborn and resourceful art form, and while it will not (and
probably should not) supplant the existing mainstream, it will certainly continue to thrive in its own
iconoclastic way.

20 Essential Free Jazz Albums:

Lennie Tristano, Intuition (Capitol)

Ornette Coleman, The Shape of Jazz to Come (Atlantic) Ornette Coleman, Free Jazz (Atlantic) Ornette
Coleman, Dancing in Your Head (A&M) John Coltrane, Ascension (Impulse), John Coltrane, Live in Japan
(Impulse) Cecil Taylor, Jazz Advance (Blue Note) Cecil Taylor, For Olim (A&M) Eric Dolphy, Out to Lunch
(Blue Note) Archie Shepp, Four For Trane (Impulse) Albert Ayler, At Slug's Saloon, Vols. 1 and 2 (ESP) Roscoe
Mitchell, Sound (Delmark) Art Ensemble of Chicago, Full Force (ECM) Anthony Braxton, The Complete
Braxton (Arista) World Saxophone Quartet, W.S.Q. (Black Saint) Ganelin Trio, New Wine (Leo) David Murray,
Children (Black Saint) Borah Bergman and Evan Parker, The Fire Tale (Soul Note) Ronald Shannon Jackson,
Barbeque Dog (Antilles) Dave Douglas, Tiny Bell Trio (Hat Art) 9 Essential Books about Free Jazz Four Lives in
the Bebop Business, by A.B. Spellman (Limelight Editions, 1966) The Freedom Principle: Jazz after 1958, by
John Litweiler (Wm. Morrow, 1984) Outcats, by Francis Davis (Oxford University Press, 1990) Musical
Improvisation: Its Nature and Practice in Music, by Derek Bailey (Prentice Hall, 1980) Forces in Motion: The
Music and Thoughts of Anthony Braxton, by Graham Lock (DaCapo, 1988) Ornette Coleman: A Harmolodic
Life, by John Litweiler (Wm. Morrow, 1992) Chasin' the Trane, by J.C. Thomas (DaCapo, 1975) Free Jazz, by
Ekkehard Jost (DaCapo,1974) As Serious as Your Life: The Story of the New Jazz, by Valerie Wilmer (1977)