1960s
"I think one day that music will be a lot freer.
The creation of music is just as natural as the air we breathe."
- Ornette Coleman
Towards the end of the 50s, Miles Davis collaborated with John Coltrane on tenor saxophone and Bill Evans on piano for Kind of Blue - a series of reflective ruminations over scalar modes rather than chords - creating ripples of moods unlike the breathless quality of bop. He followed this classic with a partnership with Gil Evans and an orchestra on Porgy and Bess, Sketches of Spain and others where his trumpet was a solo voice over shimmering ensemble textures.
Coltrane went even further, exploring modes with such intensity that his music was described as 'sheets of sound'.
George Russel and Charles Mingus were also making new ensemble music that used modal playing, impressionistic sound effects, blues, gospel and free improvising.
Adventurous musicians like these knew by the end of the fifties, that to take a large modern ensemble back to the organizational notions which predated the military discipline of swing, the secret lay somewhere in simplifying the underlying structure of jazz.
But no one thought of going as far as Ornette Coleman.
As a young man, Coleman played Texas blues, honky tonk and church music. Yet, within a few years, he moved from being a rhythm and blues saxophonist to an enfant terrible who split jazz right down the middle. With his albums Something Else! and Tomorrow is the Question, Coleman became the first prophet of the 60s movement known as free jazz.
Ornette Coleman was quickly heralded by prestigious academic and establishment figures such as composer/conductors Gunther Schuller and Leonard Bernstein,and by Modern Jazz Quartet maestro John Lewis as a new force in 20th century music.
But he was just as quickly rejected by many critics and jazz fans at the time as being deaf to lyricism and downright aggressive with his audiences.
What unsettled listeners was his decision to do away with chords after his first album in 1959. Instead, he pursued a reflexive, one-touch, small-group jazz in which the melody line with its key and harmony shifts, rhythm and intensity all evolved organically...one performer picking up the ideas of another.
Free jazz in America coincided with the rise of the civil rights movement. It was a period in which many African-American jazz musicians equated the purpose of their work with James Baldwin and Malcolm X. A declaration of independence and rejection of the values of a largely white-run entertainment business. Archie Shepp, a writer and polemicist as well as a saxophone player frequently said as much.
Not to say that all the committed jazzmen who felt this way were free musicians. Max Roach made We Insist! - Freedom Now Suite. Sonny Rollins made The Freedom Suite. Ornette Coleman had Jackson Pollock's abstract painting White Light on the cover of his 1960 Free Jazz.
Although jazz musicians of the 60s were working at loosening up jazz improvisation from the relentless system of bop, they weren't necessarily doing it by indifference to European music. Cecil Taylor - the Art Tatum of the avant-garde scene - intimately meshed jazz and contemporary classical devices at such a whirlwind pace that the links were disguised. The influences on multi-reed player/composer Anthony Braxton were not only Coltrane and Coleman but also modern gurus like John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen.
Even though the movement of free music spread throughout the world - the West Indies, Scandinavia,Germany, Eastern Europe, Italy - with musicians taking ideas from Coleman, Coltrane and others and uniting them with roots from their own countries - free music never won a big public.
Being difficult music, in some hands it was an artistic dead-end. Its freedom legitimizing the dependence on faked 'emotion' by a handful of repeated figures, as pervasively as had happened in bebop.
But, through its boldness, free jazz swung open doors which have never completely closed since. It has familiarized audiences, even those who were once reluctant, with a wealth of new sounds.
The free movement has massively extended the depth and scope of contemporary jazz.
