Section from chapter 1960: The Freedom Principle   [ return to introduction ]

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By Mervyn Cooke • 325 illustrations,
82 in full color • 256 pages • 8-1/2 x 8-1/2"
Cloth • ISBN 0-7892-0399-5 • U.S. $45.00
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Eric Dolphy, a talented multi-instrumentalist who played bass clarinet on Ornette Coleman’s ground-breaking album Free Jazz. [ view larger image ] (The Frank Driggs Collection)
Land of the Free

Whereas modal jazz (• p. 146) had been only a mild departure from the harmonic and melodic basis of earlier jazz styles, a movement that began to flourish in the early 1960s represented what many commentators saw as the final abrogation of conventional musical values in the interests of artistic gimmickry. The social context for the iconoclastic "free jazz" movement is crucially important, for the trend intensified alongside increasingly heated civil rights protests. The new generation of black musicians was angry, and espoused musical freedom as a potent symbol for the liberation of the black community from oppression. In some respects, the social significance of jazz had come full circle, and returned to its very earliest preoccupations.

The leading light of the 1960s avant-garde was Ornette Coleman, a controversial figure who sometimes played a white plastic alto saxophone. Self-taught, he was ridiculed by many and was branded as an exponent of "anti-jazz," a term also applied by critics such as John Tynan and Leonard Feather to the later work of John Coltrane (• p. 160) and the achievements of newcomer Don Cherry (who played a miniscule "pocket" trumpet). Cherry collaborated with Coleman on The Shape of Jazz to Come in 1959, and the new movement was christened with the appearance of their album Free Jazz in the following year. This venture, an astonishingly radical extended improvisation for octet, exerted a palpable influence on Coltrane's Ascension (1965), but was otherwise treated with derision in most quarters.

While Coleman disappeared into a self-imposed retirement in 1962, pianist Cecil Taylor continued to develop his own unique brand of "free" (but in essence often highly disciplined) jazz. His album Unit Structures (1966: illustration, p. 148) was characterized by musical textures of such unorthodox complexity that to all intents and purposes it sounded closer to experimental art music than to jazz.

Avant-garde techniques were simultaneously proving to be little more than a minority interest in the field of classical music, and the failure of the free jazz movement to reach a wide audience is not surprising. Many musicians, alienated (some by design) from the jazz mainstream, organized themselves into collectives in the early 1960s to promote their artistic creeds in an environment where commercial success was not an overriding concern. The best known of these was the Chicago-based Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, founded in 1966, which three years later spawned the influential Art Ensemble of Chicago. This group, like many other free jazz artists, later found a more receptive audience in Europe, where free jazz thrived in the late 1960s and early 1970s.