The Reawakening Of Big Bands

Carla Bley Big Band

Since the forties, big bands were increasingly the domain of white musicians.In the course of the sixties, Don Ellis outdistanced the metric preoccupations of jazz-rock. Carla Bley, with her compositions evoking the worlds of Charles Ives, Eric Satie and Kurt Weill, introduced a dimension of parody.

Don Ellis Big Band

Don Ellis

As for Gil Evans and George Russell, their invariably avant-garde writing led them to the dismantling of the structures of the big band, frequently shrinking the wind section, shifting the weight to the rhythm section, and adopting a freedom inherited from free jazz. Aura (1989) was the first record Miles Davis brought out with a large group since he recorded Quiet Night with Gill Evans in 1962.

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Miles Plugs In His Trumpet

By now fed up with the elitism of free jazz and with rock (which, he said, diverted and weakened rhythm and blues), Miles Davis turned his full attention to popular black music, and particularly to the funk of Sly and the Family Stone. Sly Stone practised a violent and direct aesthetic inherited from James Brown.

Sly & The Family Stone

In 1968 Miles met Jimi Hendrix, the hero of rock guitar. Hendrix knew how to funnel the force of blues to the universe of pop. Hearing him, Miles Davis understood that the guitar, on the margin until then, was destined to be in the forefront of the evolution of jazz. Indeed, at that point keyboards, bass and even wind instruments were following in the guitar's footsteps, becoming electrified. The volume increased, and new types of sound appeared. After 1969, when Miles recorded In a Silent Way with John McLaughlin, a young British guitarist, electronics were a standard part of his world.

Miles Davis, electrified

Limiting his written work to a few suggestive measures, hooking his trumpet up to a wa-wa pedal, Miles set off true electronic revels on the records that followed. On them, there was new combination of electric guitar, bass guitar, various keyboards, percussion instruments from the world over, and the binary hammering inherited from Tony Williams.

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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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Freedom: The Power Of Improvisation and The Road to Change

Nat King Cole

Erroll Garner

Real, imaginary or borrowed, personal folklore became one of the major concerns of the improvisers in the sixties around the world. The unbridled expression of free jazz served as an instrument for the cultural recovery of threatened identities. In Western urban societies, the inhabitant of which were deprived of deep roots, improvisation allowed for exploitation of the many musical messages transmitted by the media from the four corners of the world and from every era.

Herbie Nichols

Sonny Rollins

But free jazz, of course, was not the only agent of this kind of evolution. Other roads, arising from different forms of music and different cultural pressures, also opened up in the sixties.

Paul Gonsalves

Martial Solal

The Road to Change

In looking to the past, jazz critics, historians and theoreticians have often neglected those musicians who, coming from swing, formed separate groups on the fringes of the bop evolution (Nat King Cole, Erroll Garner) or groups even more modern than the moderns themselves (Herbie Nichols, Paul Gonsalves). Other have suffered the same neglect for having advanced at their own pace, removed from the free jazz movement (Martial Solal, Sonny Rollins), or for having simply stopped in the clearing they had found in order to explore it in relentless detail (Oscar Peterson, George Shearing).

Oscar Peterson

George Shearing & Quartet

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European Jazz Develops Differently Than The American Model

Though an American form, jazz, of course, does have practitioners outside the United States. France, especially, has embraced jazz since its earliest days; it can  be said that it all began there with Django Reinhardt in the thirties. Ending France's isolation during World War II, the American troops arrived in 1944, and the first bebop records were not long in following. For more than fifteen years there was no safe haven outside of bebop or New Orleans orthodoxy. Such rare exceptions as Martial Solal or Andre Hodeir only proved the rule.

Django Reinhardt

With the explosion of free jazz, however, everything suddenly became possible. In Europe it became fashionable to reject the criteria of' 'old-fashioned jazz' at the same time that 'bourgeois' art was being decried.

Mike Westbrook

Throughout Europe, those rare big bands that were still active abandoned formal dress for blue jeans and left their platforms to mix with each other in an informal alignment that sometimes moved into a fanfare to the audience.

Willem Breuker

The roles inside the band were also called into question, and some small groups went so far as to do without a rhythm section altogether, others reduced themselves to a duo. If such changes were a response to the economic difficulties free jazz - which was not very marketable - encountered, they were also one way of exploring special affinities on a more intimate dramatic scale. With such musicians as Mike Westbrook and Willem Breuker, these 'stagings' sometimes took on true dramatic form.

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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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Free Jazz: A Second Breath

Ever since Ornette Coleman's double quartet, many experiment attempted to organize the newfound freedom of jazz or cause the power of collective improvisation -at the core of large groups- to explode.
While Alan Silva worked on density of resonant layers by superimposing individual sounds, Sun Ra linked up with tradition of exoticism and fantastic, associated with the big bands of the thirties.

Sun Ra

Moreover, numerous musicians came together in associations to produce and distribute their own music, which was said to be hard to sell. One of these, the Chicago-based Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), contributed to restarting the dynamism of free jazz just when the movement had begun to falter. Created in 1965 in Chicago by pianist Muhal Richard Abrams, the AACM pulled together a variety of figures who would be prominent in free jazz in seventies.

Muhal Richard Abrams

Lee Konitz (front), with Bud Powell, Miles Davis and Art Blakey
(photo: M.Fleiss)

Paul Desmond

While the Art Ensemble of Chicago played on light and shade and on dramatic organization of time, Anthony Braxton, an AACM member, referred directly to Eric Dolphy but also to such white musicians as Lee Konitz and Paul Desmond and to 20th- century classical composers as well. Particularly popular in Europe during the sixties, Braxton revealed the talents of many musicians, such as the trombone virtuoso George Lewis and the pianist Anthony Davis.

Anthony Braxton

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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 Tenor Saxophone, Mouthpiece Of The Black Community In Revolt

John Coltrane exerted an unequaled fascination on the young generation. His predominant instrument, the tenor saxophone, was particularly meaningful to them. In the fifties, 'the howling' saxophones  of rhythm and blues had reinforced the virile image of the tenor; this image allowed for the most direct expression,from the low, violent-tempered register to the exasperation expressed by the shrill.

Archie Shepp

 
During the period of free jazz, three other instrumentalist in particular used it for the requirements of their respective projects. Pharoah Sanders continued the work of John Coltrane, with whom he had been associated for some time. He developed an extremely mystical and incantatory approach and borrowed exotic musical forms and instrument from many non-Western musical sources. Archie Shepp turned himself into a historian of African-American music through his emotional re-readings of John Coltrane, Duke Ellington and Charlie Parker, and soul, blues and gospel music. Albert Ayler dared to scream. Mixing the most naive melodies for children with densely resonant fabrics, he placed conventional language beyond expression, favoring the immediacy of feeling.

Albert Ayler

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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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The West Coast And World Weariness (2)

Despite the indelible impression made by the Miles Davis nonet, West Coast music may have seemed true to the image conveyed by California beaches: sunny and carefree. But the apparent easiness hid a fundamentally disciplined innovative spirit.

Shorty Rogers

Among the names in California jazz, the trumpet player Shorty Rogers was prominent. Combining the colours of Miles Davis with the spontaneous and 'swinging' writing of Count Basie's middle years, Shorty Rogers also borrowed from the sophisticated structure of classical music.

Dave Brubeck

These borrowings were legal currency on the West Coast. Dave Brubeck's quartet popularized a number of processes foreign to jazz in this manner and encountered widespread success - so much so that even today he remains suspect in the eyes of purists.

Jimmy Giuffre

The experiments of the saxophone and clarinet player Jimmy Giuffre during the fifties, however, were far more radical. With an unusual ensemble - clarinet, trumpet and drums - he anticipated the liberties taken by 'free jazz' in the sixties. His taste for the intimate atmosphere of chamber music made him the precursor of the options that bloomed in the seventies.

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