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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.
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Team Thurston!
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