A Power Intact

Did jazz die in the eighties? Maybe it died years earlier, with Ornette Coleman, Gill Evans, Charlie Parker, or even, simply, the minute it left New Orleans. All this is surely debatable. But the only fact that matters is this: the explosion of black American music at the beginning of the century has turned the history of music upside down.

Randy Brecker

 The immense musical river that set off from New Orleans has spawned numerous tributaries and today has arrived at its delta. Some of its large streams have got lost. In this decompartmentalized, cosmopolitan and multicoloured space, the standard-bearers of jazz have disappeared. They have left room for a permissiveness and a wild variety of individual styles, all carried by the impulse that was called swing in the thirties, which, in diversifying, has lost  none of its power.

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Jazz In Joint Ownership

The different forms of improvised music - still conveniently collected under the label of jazz - were not, of course, the exclusive property of black musicians at this time. Numerous white musicians also appropriated the heritage of jazz: David Liebman and Richard Beirach, more than anyone else, continued to deepen the heritage of John Coltrane and Bill Evans; Keith Jarrett gave new life to old standards and to the traditional rhythm section in the vein of Bill Evans; Pat Metheny fed his super productions, tinged with pop, Brazilian and country music, with inspirations from Ornette Coleman and Wes Montgomery.

David Liebman

Black producers, from Quincy Jones to Marcus Miller, have had an undeniable impact in the last decade. But another force since the sixties has been the white jazz musicians who have changed the direction of the sound as well, thanks to personalities such as Michael Brecker, David Sanborn and the guitarist Larry Carlton. These name are always mentioned in this context.

Richard Beirach

Studio work has allowed jazz-rock to become open to a variety of other influences. Jazz has profited commercially from such borrowings.

Marcus Miller; as Bass Player...

... and as Producer

The popularity of Latin music represented a dual appeal; it fulfilled a public demand for upbeat music - evocative of sun and health- as well as responding to a youthful audience concerned with making the most of the positive aspects of its racial diversity.

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'A Barroom Piano Player'

This is how Bill Evans was appraised when free jazz exploded. Later, the critics realized that circumspectly and without being the leader of any particular current, he had led as profound a revolution as John Coltrane or Ornette Coleman. Without ever systematizing the contributions of modal jazz (which he helped found), he drew deep inspiration from it. His work as a composer surely borrowed from his charms of the old standards, of which he was very fond; but he lightened their often limited harmonic frames and broadened the field of melodic possibilities.

  

Bill Evans

More significantly, due to the quality of his touch, he inaugurated a new approach to the jazz piano, which, until that point, had primarily been used as a percussion instrument. Bill Evans was not a barroom piano player; he was a concert pianist. His trio (piano, double bass, drums), which he used as a chamber orchestra, broke new ground.

  

Scott LaFaro, Bill Evans, Paul Motian

From 1960 to 1961, Scott LaFaro (bass) and Paul Motian (drums) freed themselves from their role as mere accompanists and became soloist on an equal footing with the piano; the three participated in a triangular conversation. Collective and interactive, improvisation became more than ever a question of mutual listening and finding one's own place while treating the others' with respect. The revolution led by John Coltrane with sound and fury was conducted by Bill Evans' trios with a delicacy that evoked the intimacy of Claude Debussy.

(L-R) Steve Swallow, Walter Perkins, Art Farmer, Jim Hall

  

Thus, along with such contemporaries as Jim Hall, who shared his concerns, Bill Evans left his mark on generations of musicians: on pianist, of course (Keith Jarret, Paul Bley and Chick Corea), but also on drummers (Jack DeJohnette), bass players (Gary Peacock), and saxophone players, trumpet players and bandleaders.

Gary Peacock, Keith Jarret, Jack DeJohnette (2012)

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On The Fringes Of The Free

In its rush to explain history, jazz criticism has often been mistaken in presenting the explosion  of free jazz and the supremacy of improvisation over writing as the sole significant developments of the sixties. 

Horace Silver

After this decade the history of jazz no longer moved in one direction; many tendencies showed themselves on the fringes of free jazz. Besides Charles Mingus and Eric Dolphy, other, influenced by Horace Silver, John Coltrane, Miles Davis and Ornette Coleman (some recording under the Blue Note and Candid labels), declared themselves outside of any identifiable group. Musical Language advanced, feeding both the autonomy of the improviser and the emancipation of rhythm. The players of 'the new thing', involved in a political struggle, embraced their cultural heritage, but, in contrast, a large number of their contemporaries demanded the freedom to control, master and assimilate what they wanted from the cultural environment at large, from classical music to free jazz.

Sonny Clark Sextet Blue Note LP

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The Loft Generation

During this time innumerable artists settle in the warehouses and abandoned studios of certain areas of New York City and transformed them into living quarters, spaces for work and centers for distributing their records. In these places, the musicians were able to express themselves and produce their work without having to be concerned about the commercial aspects of the traditional clubs or disturbing their neighbors. Interdependent with the elders of free jazz, they were pre-occupied with the isolation of the free movement and gladly publicized their concern about returning to a rhythmic and melodic legibility. Thus, when they listened to Albert Ayler or David Murray, they made every effort to extract the lyrical dimension of the music.
 

David Murray

The new excitement - which corresponded to a similar feeling in all the arts - facilitated exchanges between the heirs to free jazz and bop. Nevertheless, Ornette Coleman then opened his 'harmolodic' universe in an entirely different direction. His funk quartet made a direct reference to the harshness of popular black music, inherited from James Brown.

James Brown

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Accessories and Paroxysms

One hallmark of free jazz is that it rarely left any instrument out. In fact, its practitioners liked to play instruments other than the ones they specialized in.

Ornette Coleman plays violin during recording session for his album, 1966 (photo: F. Wolff)

Ornette Coleman, for example, decided to begin to play the violin and trumpet - despite a most rudimentary technique. Accidental sounds (squawks,squeaks,gurgles, bumps, bangs and so on) were integrated into the music.
 Drummers such as Sunny Murray decided to put the traditional notion of keeping time aside, choosing to vibrate, murmur and rustle instead.

Drummer Sunny Murray (left), with Gary Peacock, Albert Ayler, Don Cherry
Golden Circle, Stockholm, 1964

© Nils Edstrom/Ayler Records

   Blazing important trails for the future, free jazz was the answer to the concerns of a black community -and, more widely, an entire generation- in crisis. However, when the Beatles burst forth and rock music came to the fore, everything came together in a new way, relegating jazz to the periphery.

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'The New Thing'

Was free jazz really jazz? At first they called it 'the new thing'. This new jazz was 'free' not only in the sense that the first improvisations were free. It also claimed to be free of the very definitions of jazz and even the art of music as formulated by critics (primarily from the white culture).

 Ornette Coleman Double Quartet Free Jazz Record

'It is our music' is indeed what Ornette Coleman's album This Is Our Music stated in protest, echoing the new black thinkers who challenged the right of whites to hold forth on a music that was not their own. The criteria of beauty, purity of sound, virtuosity, logical form and so on - which had defined music up to now - all moved to the background.

Ornette Coleman at the 1967 Monterey Jazz Festival

Going back to the first African-American songs. free jazz even went so far as to renounce rhythmic regularity and swing, practically the definition of jazz. All it retained were the fundamental elements that distinguish black American music - energy, involvement of the body, raw sound and improvisation (in other words, a 'lightness of being', to borrow Milan Kundera's expression, that favors the moment, the immediate, the temporary).
By extension, free jazz, expressed an interest in world music - Arab, Oriental and, of course, African.

Free Jazz, A Mirror Of The Civil Rights Movement

The history of free jazz corresponds to the history of civil rights movement: the rise of demands under Martin Luther King, Jr., and other, more radical, leaders; the explosion of the black ghettos; the struggles led by the Black Panthers; the solidarity with the liberation movements of the Third World; repression, marginalization, exhaustion. In its political involvement, free jazz questioned Western art's ambition to raise itself above the material world. On these grounds, it had its place on university campuses during the uprisings of the late sixties, and it excited new criticism from white people.
These white critics proved to be as intolerant and sectarian as lovers of old jazz styles.

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Ornette Coleman, Herald

At the end of fifties, however, Ornette Coleman's star rose higher than John Coltrane's. This young saxophone player from the West Coast had already rejected the harmonic aspect of Charlie Parker's legacy: he wanted to retain only its essence. 'Let's play the music and not its background,' he declared. To him technique was secondary; in his eyes only the feeling and authenticity of expressions counted.
The lyricism of his melodic playing was startling and, paradoxically, elusive.

Ornette Coleman

  The 'harmolodic theory' he was to develop over the years escaped musicologists' understanding; it came from philosophic - better yet, poetic - rather than from technical concerns. His art was reminiscent of the authenticity of slaves' 'field hollers', which outside observes have never managed to describe in the vocabulary of European musicology.

 The forms he borrowed made frequent reference to blues or structures inherited from musical comedy, but his 'Blues Connotation' in eleven and half bars is more evocative of uncertainties of the early blues players than of the academic twelve bar.

The Shape Of Jazz To Come - Record by Ornette Coleman

 
  Many bop musicians took offense at these ideas, which put their entire mode of thinking into question. However, the support Ornette Coleman received from John Lewis and some West Coast musicians allowed him to record his first discs. They looked like a manifesto: Something Else!, Tomorrow is the Question and The Shape of Jazz to Come. On 21 December 1960 he made a recording with a double quartet.
The new formula marked the beginning of an epoch: the new album was called Free Jazz, relating to the intention of drawing form and musicality from the apparent chaos he presented. To most musicians - and the public - Coleman's music did sound like chaos.

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