Search Results

This final chapter is also the conclusion of the book. The authors reiterate their central argument, i.e. that ultimately what makes the originality of free jazz is its intrinsically political approach to music. As such, it is a challenge to Western bourgeois values not just in music, but also in the appreciation of music. Free jazz demands that we reconsider the way we evaluate music.

This chapter characterizes the specificity of free jazz by detailing how it differs from previous jazz forms in a series of distinct categories: the treatment of the theme, the way instruments are played, how improvisation factors in the music, the recurrent references to Africa, etc.

This chapter examines the reception of free jazz in France in the years before and after 1968, paying particular attention to the debates that erupted in the jazz press regarding the music's relation to African American political movements. The identification of the genre with the romanticized figure of the black revolutionary subject, itself seen as an embodiment of a broader, transnational figure—the third-world revolutionary—triggered a heated back-and-forth within the jazz community. For certain critics, this identification threatened to undermine the claims made on behalf of jazz's universality, a cornerstone of postwar attempts to valorize the genre in the French cultural sphere. Yet the identification of free jazz with African American political radicalism also posed challenges for the music's proponents. By constructing an image of free jazz that stressed its irremediable alterity, writers and musicians alike were compelled to find alternative ways of relating it to contemporary French concerns.

This chapter describes the state of the jazz scene in the late 1960s, relating the rise of free jazz to the rise of black power politics and culture and other radical developments in the African American community at the time. Music being at the forefront of African American culture, it is necessarily connected to African American politics.

This chapter presents other ideas, sounds, and identities of jazz that contrast to the neoclassical figure that remains ever-so-popular. It takes a look at the striking figures of the budding avant-garde movement in jazz. These figures represent an alternative image, a way for jazz musicians to revolutionize the art and the image of jazz. Jazz musicians that attempt to go against the canon, however, end up creating an image of opposition to the more standard and accepted one. The chapter asks the question of how one goes about creating, or attempting to create an image that differs from the mainstream. The chapter looks at two figures that have possibly put down the foundation for a new face of the jazz image: the free jazz of Ornette Coleman and the avant-garde music of Muhal Richard Abrams.

Chapter 4 examines the shared goals and values of jazz and Islam through the wider lens of Sunni Islam, the Nation of Islam, and the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community, and the militant aesthetic of hard bop and free jazz in the late 1950s and 1960s. The chapter tells the story of jazz artists who played their music in Third World Muslim countries during the Cold War. Black internationalists saw a contemporaneous emergence of black American and African freedom struggles across the black Atlantic world during this period. Malcolm X’s and John Coltrane’s meditations on Islam, jazz, and Pan-Africanism resonated with the spirit of the civil rights and Black Power era in the 1960s.

The avant-garde (or “free jazz”) musicians who came to the forefront of jazz during the late 1950s and early 1960s mounted a revolutionary movement that challenged all the conventions of the idiom, aligning their innovations with the progressive social and political changes of the era. This chapter looks at the leading exponents of the music, including Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, and Albert Ayler. But just when jazz seemed ready to sever completely its relationship with a mainstream audience, a new movement known as fusion (or jazz-rock fusion) attempted to broaden the music’s appeal by drawing on the new sounds of electrified commercial styles. Miles Davis, previously seen as an advocate of bebop, cool jazz, and other jazz movements, emerged as the leader of this new approach, signaled by the release of his hit album Bitches Brew. In the 1970s, a different kind of fusion style emerged, associated with the ECM record label in Germany, which combined jazz with ingredients drawn from classical music, world music, and other sources. This chapter traces the history of these contrasting styles and their major exponents, including Keith Jarrett, Pat Metheny, Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock, and the band Weather Report

In small galleries and warehouse lofts, the Boston improvisational scene presents concerts of timbre-and-form-based electro-acoustic music. This vibrant community of musicians is informed by the music of Cage, Feldman, Lachenmann, Eddie Prévost, and others, while coming from backgrounds in classical, jazz, electronica, world, and rock. This chapter focuses on Bhob Rainey and his ensemble, the BSC. A series of interviews with the group provides the basis for exploring their history, how they view their own music, how they listen to it, how they create it, and who inspires them. At the heart of the essay is an analysis of one of the group’s improvisations. In this music, which often lacks pitch and harmonic progression, narrative hinges on the real-time discovery and shaping of unique sounds by performers sensitive to cause and effect. Through a technique called “analytical fantasy,” the intentions behind the player’s musical decisions are surmised, connecting the process of free improvisation to the resulting architectonics (phrases, cadences, and sections). A graphic transcription reveals a counterpoint of sounds supporting an elongated phrase structure and an arching form that does not completely return.

In the late 1970s, the Mexican ensemble Atrás del Cosmos, a pioneering free improvisation collective (1975–1983), held an eight-month residency at El Galeón, a city theater. Jazz and experimental theater were twin touchstones for the ensemble, which adapted ideas borrowed from Alejandro Jodorowsky, a Chilean expatriate known for his radical influence on the city’s 1960s theater scene, including the notion that theatrical performance should shatter social decorum and elicit liberating ways of being-in-the-world. For Atrás del Cosmos, art’s transformative potential also lay in articulating a personal voice in a collective context—a central tenet of jazz and African-American expressive culture. The ensemble’s multivalent genealogy, as well as its collaborations with US-based improvisers—notably trumpeter Don Cherry—bolster arguments for the transnational nature of twentieth-century “American” music. This chapter proposes Vijay Iyer’s notion of “embodied empathy” as a key to understanding the ensemble’s immediate social impact and its lasting historical significance.

How did music – both in terms of its sound, its lyrics, and its associated recording technologies – encourage St. Mark’s affiliated poets to get their tracks on vinyl and ensure their poetry and poetics became ever more oriented towards a punk-inflected performance aesthetic? This chapter answers this question in part by turning to John Giorno. Giorno, a performance poet active in the St. Mark’s scene since the mid-1960s, who was in many ways downtown’s court jester. Star of Andy Warhol’s durational film Sleep, lover to Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, founder of a pirate radio station broadcast from the bell tower of St. Mark’s Church, organizer of L.S.D fueled poetry performance parties at the Poetry Project, Giorno was perhaps the preeminent figure in the downtown scene determined to refigure poetry as populist outlaw happening. This chapter moves further by exploring how Giorno made the move to vinyl and live performance not just because of earlier examples drawn from the broader history of performance poetry, but because he was determined to mark a break from the urbane literariness associated with the first generation New York School poets.

This chapter examines the starkly divided reception of 1960s free jazz, focusing on its most characteristic, commented-on, and instantly recognizable timbre, the screaming saxophone, as exemplified by John Coltrane’s late recordings (1965–67). Approaching this reception history through an analytical lens that synthesizes phenomenology and cognitive neuroscience, it argues that the polarized perceptions were largely driven by the mechanisms of embodied timbre cognition. Some listeners interpreted this timbral effect positively (as a sign of spirituality, as righteous Black rage); others interpreted it negatively (as unredeemable noise, unjustifiable Black rage, gendered hysteria). The chapter closes by suggesting that reception of this timbral quality was bound up in a complex nexus of both innate responses and culturally inscribed modes of hearing.

Ornette Coleman is an American composer, trumpeter, violinist, and saxophonist, and one of the major influences of the free jazz movement during the 1960s. The musician attracted a lot of superb feedback from musicians of other percussions. Gunther Schuller praised Coleman's work from a classical jazz perspective. Composer-pianist John Lewis was one of the first men to offer support for Ornette. Jazz composer George Russell showed great enthusiasm and high praise for him. John Coltrane, who was one of the most influential jazz players, was a fan of Coleman's music and he was Coleman's frequent companion.

This chapter revisits Derek Bailey's well known distinction between 'idiomatic' and 'non-idiomatic' improvisation. In order to nuance this further, the concepts of fixity and unfixity are added to create a broader spectrum of improvisatory possibilities: from fixed idiomatic to unfixed non-idiomatic. This allows a discussion of numerous examples of such forms of improvisation, from Theloniouos Monk, Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman, finishing with a strange discussion of non-idiomatic unfixed improvisation that represents the 'secret' improvisation searched for throughout this book. Jorge Luis Borges is here used as an example.

This chapter examines how new American music became entangled in an ideological search for music that reflected and encouraged social interaction and global concerns during the volatile years of the Vietnam War. It explains that this period witnessed the explosion of multimedia and boundary-crossing festivals that contributed to the breakdown in stylistic purity in new composition. In addition, free jazz, rock music, live electronics, minimalism and world music cultures, intermingled and attracted an untapped audience base.

Chapter 2 sets the compass through a work that seems to have little to say about sampling. 4’33” (four thirty-three) by John Cage is based on no (performed) sounds, no flashy pyrotechnics in its execution, nor reverence for the notion of music as a singular, individual creative act, or performance. The chapter considers Cage’s evocation of “silence” as the sampled material that is at stake in this iconic piece. I consider how silence, and silencing work in the context of censorship and social control given that the timeframe for the inception of 4’33” resonates with post-World War II, mid-twentieth-century United States during the Cold War. Engaging with this work can also tell us something about the role of censorship in public arts life half a century later, in the US shortly after the Al Qaeda attacks on September 11, 2001. As I argue, when regarded as a material of music, and thereby as a source from which to “sample” silence, 4’33”offers both a sonic and “sound-less” baseline for the four case studies to follow. “Silence” as rendered in Cage’s work, its wider connotations and evocation of the sensation of sound-filled stillness also serve as a signal for instances of domination, of how oppression can take place quietly, without fanfare. Considering silence as a geocultural, socio-musicological matter allows us a moment to retune our ears and minds by encountering the broader (in)audible domains through, and from which sampling practices take place.

This chapter describes the career of Hijikata’s principal dancer and rehearsal director Ashikawa Yôko. Ashikawa joined Hijikata’s studio at roughly the same time as his turn to his generative dance methods, and she knew more about them than any other dancer. She undoubtedly even contributed to his methods and likely deserves some choreographic credit for Hijikata’s generative dance methods. After Hijikata died, she was not content to rest on her laurels and continue to rehash his works, but rather struck out on her own and created her own dances. She incorporated free jazz improvisation into her dances and rethought the relationship between the choreographer and society in her dances. Along with her main company, Hakutôbô, she also created a company for foreign dancers, in which she aught some of the most important dancers of butô’s third generation. The chapter contains in-depth descriptions and analysis of dances such as Salome of the Construction Zone (1987) and Gathering and Bundling the Body: Ashikawa Yôko and Japanese People (1988).

This chapter describes the dances and choreography of Tanaka, a dancer who did not originally belong to the world of butô, but come to be associated with it. He eventually studied with Hijikata and adopted the butô label for part of his career. This chapter includes his solo works of the 70’s (as part of the series Subject, Dance State, Hyperdance, Drive, and Emotion), his collaborations with improvisational musicians such as Derek Bailey and Milford Graves, his experiments with farming as dance training at Body Weather Farm, his involvement with Hijikata, the changes he made to Hijikata’s methods as he adjusted to choreographing for his two groups, Maijuku and Tokason, and finally his later solo dances in the Hijikata mode. Dances considered include Subject (1974), Dance State: Tokyo Arts University Performance (Sept. 28, 1975), Hyperdance (1977), Emotion (1982), Extremely Quick Respiratory Bromide (1983), Form of the Sky (1984), Performance to Commemorate the 1501st Solo Dance of Tanaka Min: The Foundation of the Pure Love-Dance School (1984), Moon at Noon (1985), Dislocated Child’s Body (2002), and Passing through the Body and Sloughing It Off (2005).