A term applied to the avant-garde jazz of the 1960s, particularly the work of Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor and Albert Ayler, and the late work of John Coltrane. The name derives from the title of Coleman’s album Free Jazz (1960), an extended, free-form group improvisation for two pianoless jazz quartets, which exercised enormous influence on the jazz vanguard both in the USA and elsewhere. Another term for this music was ‘the New Thing’.
Free jazz is a collective term applied to a very wide range of highly personal, individual styles. It is probably best defined by its negative characteristics: the absence of tonality and predetermined chord sequences; the abandonment of the jazz chorus structure for loose designs with predefined clues and signposts; an avoidance of ‘cool’ instrumental timbres in favour of more voice-like sounds; and often the suspension of jazz pulse for a free rubato. New timbres were sought either by distorting the sound of traditional jazz instruments (e.g. the ‘shrieking’ saxophone styles of John Gilmore and Pharoah Sanders) or by adopting or inventing unusual instruments (Roland Kirk and the Art Ensemble of Chicago); electronic instruments or manipulation, on the other hand, were generally avoided. Free-jazz drummers explored ‘multi-directional’ rhythms implying various metres at once, and interacted with other musicians by supplying percussion colour or textures rather than a uniform pulse. The shape of the performance was often determined by the performers’ powers of endurance, the piece coming to an end when energy sagged.
Melody became much more varied and fragmented as long, sustained notes alternated with rapid flurries or timbral effects; many players concentrated on producing textures rather than melody, while others created internal ‘dialogues’ or call-and-response patterns in different registers. Special emphasis was placed on collective improvisation, although at any given time one performer usually functioned as soloist. Some groups revealed a pronounced theatrical element, whether the naive exoticism of Sun Ra’s Arkestra or the sophisticated parodistic skits of the Art Ensemble of Chicago.
By casting aside most features of the bop style, free-jazz players harked back in many respects to simpler forms of jazz and earlier music in which elements derived from African music predominated. This in turn permitted an unusual influx of ethnic musics into jazz, examples being the ‘world music’ of Don Cherry, the West African ‘talking drums’ approach cultivated by Ed Blackwell and the pygmy yodelling techniques adopted by the singer Leon Thomas. Several free-jazz musicians such as Roswell Rudd and Steve Lacy bypassed bop entirely, entering the avant garde directly from dixieland jazz; others such as the tenor saxophonist Albert Ayler emerged from the gospel and folk traditions. The style was loosely linked to the Black Power movement in the USA, partly because of the radical political outlook of some of its practitioners and advocates (e.g. Archie Shepp and LeRoi Jones) and partly owing to the explosive, expressionistic nature of the music itself.
Although highly regarded by the critics, free jazz was not commercially viable in the USA and many of its important players resided at least temporarily in Europe. There an indigenous school of free jazz developed, particularly in West Germany, where it was linked with the aleatory art music of the time (e.g. in the works of Bernd Alois Zimmermann). In the early 1970s, as jazz-rock became a more popular genre, the free-jazz movement seemed spent, but it underwent a resurgence later in the decade. Older groups, such as Old and New Dreams (consisting of former sidemen of Coleman) were able to re-form, while others, including Sun Ra’s Arkestra and the Art Ensemble of Chicago, reached a wider public than before. Specialist labels were established to enable free-jazz musicians to record. New players added fresh dimensions to the style: for example, Anthony Braxton and Anthony Davis obliterated the boundaries between free jazz and contemporary European art music; the World Saxophone Quartet created a successful blend of free jazz and the swing style; and the Ganelin Trio introduced a wild theatricality, as well as elements of its native Russian musical traditions, into the genre. Musicians not directly associated with free jazz, such as Pat Metheny (who performed and recorded with Coleman in 1985–6), made use of its stylistic devices; others experimented with new hybrids, an example being the ‘free funk’ of James ‘Blood’ Ulmer.
Whereas in the 1960s the terms avant-garde jazz and free jazz were synonymous, in the 1970s and 1980s many musicians preferred the label ‘avant-garde’, since the word ‘free’ was misleading: in many instances their music was highly organized. As free jazz became more familiar and was absorbed into the standard repertory, however, the term avant-garde ceased to describe the genre accurately; moreover, the use of an alternative term obscured the many streams linking the free-jazz musicians of the 1980s with the pioneers Coleman, Taylor, Ayler and Coltrane. By then free jazz was firmly established not only as a completed phase of jazz history but also as a continuing and developing style with a great many avenues still open for creative exploration.
See also Jazz, §VI, 1, 3.
L. Jones: Black Music (New York, 1967/R)
B. McRae: The Jazz Cataclysm (London, 1967/R)
F. Kofsky: Black Nationalism and the Revolution in Music (New York, 1970; rev. and enlarged as Black Nationalism and the Revolution in Music: Social Change and Stylistic Development in the Art of John Coltrane and Others, 1954–1967, diss., U. of Pittsburgh, 1973)
P. Rivelli and R. Levin, eds.: Black Giants (New York, 1970/R1980 as Giants of Black Music) [collection of previously pubd articles]
P. Carles and J.-L. Comolli: Free Jazz, Black Power (Paris, 1971)
E. Jost: Free Jazz (Graz, 1974)
J. Viera: Der Free Jazz: Formen und Modelle (Vienna, 1974)
H. Kumpf: Postserielle Musik und Free Jazz: Wechselwirkungen und Parallelen (Herrenburg, 1975, rev. 2/1981)
D.J. Noll: Zur Improvisation im deutschen Free Jazz: Untersuchungen zur Ästhetik frei improvisierter Klangflächen (Hamburg, 1977)
V. Wilmer: As Serious as your Life: the Story of the New Jazz (London, 1977)
B. Noglik: Jazzwerkstatt international (Berlin, 1981)
J. Litweiler: The Freedom Principle: Jazz after 1958 (New York, 1984)
J. Gray: Fire Music: a Bibliography of the New Jazz, 1959–1990 (New York, 1991)
D.G. Such: Avant-garde Jazz Musicians: Performing ‘Out There’ (Iowa City, 1993)
J. BRADFORD ROBINSON