Free Jazz

Free jazz dropped the structural conventions of jazz that had held since the 1920s: it abandoned fixed chord progressions, set meters and predetermined forms in favour of collective improvisation in which each player listens and responds to the others in real time. Standard instrumentation remained jazz-based — saxophones (often multiple, alto and tenor), trumpet, piano, bass, drums, sometimes cello or violin — but the textures are radically different. Saxophonists use overblowing, multiphonics, flutter-tonguing and circular breathing to push horns to the edge of distortion. Drummers play rhythmic gestures rather than steady time. Live performance and minimal editing are the norm; long takes (twenty-plus minutes) are common. The music demands sustained attention from listeners willing to follow group dialogue rather than recognisable tunes.

Ornette Coleman's The Shape of Jazz to Come (1959) and Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation (1961) — a 37-minute double-quartet session that gave the genre its name — set the agenda. Cecil Taylor, Eric Dolphy, John Coltrane's late period (Ascension, 1965), Albert Ayler, Sun Ra, Archie Shepp and Pharoah Sanders extended it through the 1960s. The Chicago-based Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), founded by Muhal Richard Abrams in 1965, generated a parallel ensemble-music tradition; the Art Ensemble of Chicago emerged from it. European free improvisation — Derek Bailey, Evan Parker, Peter Brötzmann — and a Japanese scene around Kaoru Abe, Masayuki Takayanagi and Sabu Toyozumi developed in parallel through the 1970s.

The fundamental question to keep in mind is how the players are listening to each other — free jazz is dialogue, not monologue. Track which player initiates a gesture and which others respond, and watch the way the texture thickens and thins without external signposts. Sudden collective silences ahead of new sections are common. Saxophone overblowing — the deliberate distortion of the reed — is the most easily identified extended technique.

Ornette Coleman's The Shape of Jazz to Come (1959) is the most listener-friendly starting point — it still has tunes and walking bass. Albert Ayler's Spiritual Unity (1965) is the genre at its most exposed and intense. John Coltrane's A Love Supreme (1964) lies on the border between modal and free. For the Japanese strand, Kaoru Abe's Last Date (1979) is the standard reference.

Albert Ayler's body was found in the East River off the South Street Seaport in November 1970; the cause of his death was never officially determined. Kaoru Abe died of an overdose of sleeping pills in 1978 at age 29 — his career as a solo saxophonist had lasted barely a decade but reshaped Japanese improvised music.