Free Jazz
 

your thoughts?

As a whole? Hell yeah.

It takes on Capital J jazz.

you mean ornette coleman beats wynton marsalis?

sure.

(and yet: http://www.artsjournal.com/jazzbeyon...ul_wynton.html )

any preferences? likes? dislikes? views on past/present/future?

i'm sorta polling SYG on the matter...

Isn't it just musicians getting together and messing around/improvising? It doesn't do much for me... I like things that are a little more thought out and structured.

true Free Jazz, where actual accomplished Jazz musicians are exploring a free form composition method, is amazing and I love it.

the kinda free jazz that is just a band with three high school band horn players making ludicrous noises at random? not like so much.

You get what you pay for.

haaa haa ha

It's an incredibly broad term, for me. I know it sort of has its roots in your Dolphys and Colemans, but does it also include your Brotzmanns and Kirks? I'd definitely say that I've very rarely seen anyone under 45 do it well, and generally it's better done by people in their 60s and 70s.

yep

you gots to MASTER the rules before you can break them with interesting results.

It's better not done at all. Most music would be composed this way if anything of worth actually came out of it.

Do you mean in the context of free jazz or in general? I think free jazz (and free improv) definitely require a great deal of dexterity to produce good stuff; I think they require a great deal of affection and taste as well. I don't know how many of you have heard Ayler's Music is the healing force... but it's utterly dogshit; the man made 2 of my favourite jazz albums (Spirits/ Bells) but completely lost it on that one (for me).

More generally, there's loads of examples of not necessarily tutored musicians making amazing music. Nihilist Spasm Band, the Shaggs, the A Band (fnar) or whoever.

TO ZE BUNKERS EVERYVUN! ZUMVUN HAST BROKEN ZE RULEZ! VE MUST BURN ZE HERETICSH!

Fuckwit.

99.9% of music is not made this way for a reason.

Am I going to have to pull out a Boxxy gif?

yes, it's a broad term for everyone i think, and the question of where to set the limits on it is not an easy one.

while free jazz originated in the 50s-- would you consider it a contemporary form, or a relic of sorts?

It's a glib Cage-ism, but once a musical door is opened, it generally stays open. I don't think it has anything like the urgency it had as a nascent form; I don't think it's even approaching any sense of still being 'avant-garde' (whatever that loaded term means to you). I certainly don't think it's a relic as I saw a bunch of guys under 30 doing free jazz just last week. It definitely has a continued life in music theory and practise. Personally, I can't play it for shit, because it's still very close to head music (in the jazz sense).

It's a bit of a bland statement, but do you think that Tallis stops being important just because he's been dead 100s of years? In that immanent moment of watching Spem in Allum, it's still incredibly exciting. Free Jazz isn't so utterly divorced from structure as to be that holy grail 'total improv'.

Oh, also - I think it's incredibly dangerous to suggest that music always has to be 'contemporary'. Sometimes things take a lot longer than we expect to sink in. Schnittke's getting a smidge of recognition at the moment, but he's by no means where the lesser composer (to my mind) Shostakovich is in the public perception, and they've both been dead a long time.

I think (as many said) free jazz can be BEAUTFUL. But, I remember downloading a live coltrane album (live in Japan maybe?) that just too much for me. One of the songs was an hour long. I listened to it just to see if I could.
I remember somebody once said to me "what's this?" i said "free jazz" and they said "is that called that because it's free (as in no money)?"
Good jazz musicians don't sit waiting for time to wail, the most improtant thing is to listen to the other musicians

nice points, thanks.

the reason i asked about the "relic" bit was because i wanted to get a sense of how other people who are more musically inclined than me perceive this genre. i just spent the day listening to albert ayler and it's as current to me as anything going on elsewhere.

as for tallis, etc-- the thing with classical music is that it has a lively tradition of performance-- the music remains contemporary because its performance remains very much alive-- it hasn't become culturally irrelevant. it's not just a numbers thing, but i'm thinking in terms of social participation, not individual pleasure.

the reason i started this thread was to help me organize my thoughts around this bizarre idea of starting a free jazz blog. i won't be writing it, but i do wonder about investing energy into a relevant project that can reach some sort of audience.

i was at a poetry reading recently & two things happened 1) i wanted to kill most of the poets, 2) i wanted to kill poetry. poets reading to poets is an exercise in mutual handjobs, and it makes poetry (bad poetry anyway) totally irrelevant.

this is all part of a long story that is too long to tell, but yeah, i guess my question is is free jazz relevant to the development of new music today? and the answer is OF COURSE!

how good was the quality of the recording though? mp3s of a crappy recording can really hurt you.

ive spent most of the day listening to albert ayler records and loving it.

ps- that picture was awesome

You don't have to put much effort into it. Just do what the free jazz musicians do and make it up as you go.

I can tell liking free jazz is boosting some people's musical egos around here. You're simply so advanced that only you and an elite crowd can fully appreciate the genre (*cough, cough*). So post a few songs that represent "the best" of free jazz.

that coltrane live in japan album is not his best stuff by any means

So post some stuff that is top shelf free jazz already!

OK then, if it will stop you hugely trolling the tread, try these:

John Coltrane

William Parker

Peter Brotzmann

All pretty great. Saying recommend some 'top shelf free jazz' is like saying 'top shelf indie rock' though. There's as much distance between great stuff at different ends of the music as there is between say Pavement and Big Black, probably more so.

Oh, definitely. I've heard quite a bit more sense then. And now, I'm inspired by his music. My faves: A Love Supreme, Blue Train, My Favorite Things, Interstellar Space, Giant Steps, and everything he did with Miles

This.

John Zorn <3

Love it.
Its a sonic explosion of the minds, moods, and personalities of the players that, when done right, is some damn compelling music.

I agree that that recording is pretty out, but it's amazing to think how far he had come since the first recording of My Favorite things.

In my opinion music in its purest form is free. Free expression, free of any restrictions or rules. When jazz players are free they're on another wavelength all together. The things that come out of free improvisation go beyond words. In one song you can experience polar opposites in harmony and mood, and to think that it's completely improvised blows my mind.

Check out Miles Davis "Isle of Wright" Concert recording. The lineup is incredible.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBTM6blPbUQ

Some of what I consider the best music ever is free, and I think every one should play free as often as possible. The possibilities are endless and
its fun as hell anyways.

That concert is sick my friend! I recently filled my computer up with at least 10 gigs of just jazz and blues. Very necessary. I'm still getting around to listening to all of it!

I can dig it...
sort of becomes jam band sounding after a bit though.

Maybe I'm too picky.. but that bass player rides the same variation for like 11 minutes... But, he's the backbone. and that's good. In the same way Kim is the backbone behind Thurston's and Lee's craziness.

Free jazz doesn't have to sound chaotic and excessively noisy, taken the musicians actually have some level of skill + know-how. Instant composition for the sake of instant composition is often boring, which is something I would not have agreed with two or three years ago.

Noisy freak out jazz featuring musicians w/ next to zero know-how are a dime a dozen, and seldom/if ever actually worth listening to.

I know it's a cliche album to name drop...but Miles' "Kind of Blue" was completely improvised, and it IS chaotic, in a totally beautiful way. If one didn't know any better they might assume all of this material was carefully written/rehearsed before recording.

SYR 3 works as well. At face value it is simply chaos for the sake of chaos, but with careful listening mood + under-lying themes can be pulled from it, even if completely up for interpretation. This album is "free jazz" to me, even if it might not be found in the jazz section of yr local record shop.

"Jazz played freely", and "jazz played by people that don't know what the fuck they are doing" are two totally different things. With the rise of noise-based genres, I feel far too many people hide behind that first sentence in the quotation marks. It was interesting for a minute....sometimes people get lucky and something good will come out of it, even if this is not often the case.

Art Ensemble of Chicago - Les Stances a Sophie
Charlie Haden - Liberation Music Orchestra
Jimmy Giuffre - Free Fall
3 random favourites.

The quality was fine. it just felt directionless.
That picture is the cover to Madlib's Advanced Jazz
DiG! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oR_oPvuI7jo

i dont know if i agree with you. while i am a strong supporter of free music, i am not sure if it is because of its "purity". and definitely not because it is the "purest". one could even argue that a random arrangement of sounds is not "pure" or in other terms "natural" and that certain fixed arrangements of sounds are purer for they form naturally, like overtones, or pentatonic scales which are the most universal scales.
another reason why i dont agree with you is because a lot of "free" music is not completely free in form. many free improvisers have had extensive musical training and i am sure incorporate a variety of well known musical idioms into their playing.
maybe the emotion of the players is purer, which i also dont agree with, but even if that were the case, the listening experience is not necessarily a pure one. i can get an equal cathartic experience by listening to either brotzmann or mozart. both of them are very different and i definitely could not say which more pure. but then again mozart was apparently a hell of an improviser and never wrote drafts to his music, he wrote them all in his head and then in one go wrote them down, so maybe, to some extent, his music was also free?

sorry about the rant.

Kaoru Abe is god.

I really struggled to think of any songs. You won't appreciate this but it's one of the few instances of song within free jazz. I don't want to get all youtube comments about this, but if you don't appreciate forms outside of your own experience, why not shut the fuck up, eh? I don't think anyone in this thread is anything like 'elitist', and there's only really two people who've been in this thread who've got a particularly strong sense of music theory (and I'm sure those who aren't necessarily strong on it aren't that bothered).

Something I was going to ask of !"£$% - I think part of the question might be Free Jazz's legacy - I think you could certainly make a case for, say, bits of DDN being heavily influenced by free jazz; from a more esoteric point of view, it's probably worth thinking about how people like Otomo Yoshihide, Nmperign or NNCK (3 names from a hat) incorporate elements from free jazz. There's a fine line between melodic extemporisation and free jazz though, so I find it a bit of an iffy one.

I wouldn't say this was 'purely' free jazz, for instance - but there are definitely elements of it later on in the piece.

Don't be...rant was nice! And for the most part I agree with ya.

I used to think that the ultimate sense of freedom as a musician came with not learning any formal methods of approaching my instrument. And while I came up with some cool ideas on my own, after a couple years I felt anything but free esp. when it came to jamming with other people or along with my favorite records. As a result, I started studying a bit. I looked at what Hendrix would do, and while I was never, and never will be able to play even remotely like that I came to the conclusion that he was perhaps one of the freest guitar players, ever. Of course he was taking full advantage of that pentatonic scale, but he was also going completely wild with it and making up his own weird chords and noodling with amp feedback/etc...which were anything but conventional at that time (matter of fact, most bands tried desperately to allow as little feedback as possible...now it's a staple in what a lot of bands do). And to get to my point, learning more conventional ways of playing guitar, learning chords and practicing scales DOES NOT mean that one is steering away from freedom, in my mind it means one is embracing it. What this does is allow more colors, more tools, to be added to one's pallet of things they CAN do...thus, allowing room for experimenting down new avenues they may not have previously realized even existed.

I think most that have studied the playing of Lee might agree that he's the most creative force behind the band. Of course, he doesn't write the majority of the songs...but he makes them far more interesting. His noisier albums tend to murder T-Birds, and we're talking about someone that grew up playing more hippy/folky stuff.

At this stage of my life I am weary of guitarists that are still saying they want to do everything in their power to stay away from conventional methods of playing. No one is asking to STICK with convention, but when one makes such a claim I hear it as if they are allowing themselves to NOT be free as a musician, which is the polar opposite of what they are claiming to want to do.

Hendrix was playing along with Albert King + Muddy Waters records before he ever stepped foot on a wah-wah pedal or played around with amp feedback. Thankfully, he embraced both....just look at what he did with all along the watchtower..even Dylan said Jimi's version was the definitive version of the song.