Free Jazz

music developed in the 1950s and 1960s and pioneered by artists such as Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Eric Dolphy, Albert Ayler. Some of the best known examples are the later works of John Coltrane.

While free jazz is most often associated with the late 1950's and 1960's, many musicians – including Peter Brotzmann, Cecil Taylor, Ken Vandermark and William Parker – have kept the style alive to the present day.

History

Ornette Coleman is often regarded as, if not establishing free jazz outright, at least crystalizing the form in the late 1950's.

Indeed, the style owes its name to Coleman: Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation was the title of a 1960 recording by Coleman. 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.

In the 1960's, the loosely-defined movement was sometimes called "Energy Music" or "The New Thing"

There were earlier precedents, however. Two songs 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.

Much of Sun Ra's music of the mid-to-late 1950's is also important.

Some of Charles Mingus' work was also important in establishing free jazz.

Definition

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 -- 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.

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. Today such views are more marginal, and the music has built up a tradition and a body of accompanying critical writing. It remains less 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, as in the following paragraphs.

"Other forms of jazz" use clear regular meters and strongly-pulsed rhythms, usually in 4/4 or (less often) 3/4, all swung. 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 also common.

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.

See also: free improvisation, experimental music, noise music