Free jazz
Free jazz is an avant-garde genre that emerged in the late 1940s and early 1950s as a departure from traditional jazz styles, particularly the more commercially popular Afro-Latin jazz. It prioritizes artistic expression over mainstream appeal, characterized by a lack of structured compositions, synchronized timing, and predetermined melodies. Musicians in this genre embraced improvisation, allowing each performance to be a spontaneous creation, resulting in music that could range from harmonious melodies to chaotic soundscapes. Key figures in the free jazz movement include Ornette Coleman, who is credited with coining the term and significantly influencing the style with his album "Free Jazz," and John Coltrane, known for his experimental approaches to rhythm and arrangement.
Though free jazz has not gained widespread popularity, it has been an influential force in the music world, inspiring subsequent generations of musicians and fostering a spirit of radical experimentation. The genre often faced criticism from traditionalists who believed it alienated audiences, yet its proponents viewed it as a pure form of artistic expression, free from commercial constraints. Overall, free jazz continues to be celebrated as a significant and transformative movement within the broader jazz tradition.
Free jazz
Free jazz is a unique genre that developed as a reaction against the more popular Afro-Latin jazz of the 1940s and 1950s. Free jazz musicians were more concerned with expressing themselves artistically than with creating popular music. They abandoned a number of traditional musical constructions, including planned composition and synchronized timing. Over time, free jazz became an influential artistic movement.
History of Jazz
Jazz developed out of a musical genre called the blues. The blues came about in the late 1800s in the American South, particularly in New Orleans. The genre was heavily influenced by African American field songs, work songs, and religious hymns. The blues incorporated pentatonic scales on guitar, emotional lyrics, and a drum kit. Rock and roll, rhythm and blues, and country music were all heavily influenced by the blues.
The first style of jazz was created in New Orleans. Called second line, it utilized banjos, repetitive melodies, and collective musical improvisations during which the musicians broke away from the planned composition and played whatever moved them at the moment. Jazz improvisations were pioneered by the famous jazz musician Louis Armstrong.
Armstrong was a famous trumpet player who revolutionized the instrument by applying it in new and innovative ways. Armstrong single-handedly used the trumpet to advance the jazz genre, introducing planned breaks in compositions for solos and improvisation, which then returned to the composition's traditional melody.
Swing jazz developed in the 1930s. Unlike many other styles of jazz, swing was played by a traditional big band. It was an optimistic, fast-paced, and upbeat style of music. Many people enjoyed dancing to swing music, and it became incredibly popular in dance halls. Swing developed into bebop in the 1940s. Unlike swing, bebop was played by a small band. However, it retained swing's fast pace and complex compositional structure. Bebop melodies are carefully carried by multiple instruments, each with its own role, rhythm, and tone. At the time of its introduction, bebop was unpopular with the mainstream popular music scene and was considered music for artists, musicians, and intellectuals.
In the late 1940s, music arranger and famous trumpet player Dizzy Gillespie began to collaborate with the Cuban percussionist Chano Pozo. Together, the pair formed a new genre of jazz music called Afro-Cuban jazz. It blended Latin rhythms with jazz string sections, horn players, and soloists. The combination spread quickly, becoming one of the most popular jazz styles of the era.
While many jazz musicians of the 1950s and 1960s moved toward more popular varieties of jazz, such as folk jazz and the later forms of Afro-Cuban jazz, other instrumentalists grew bored with that direction. They wanted to play music similar to bebop jazz without the constraints of writing for mainstream popularity. These musicians worked together to create free jazz.
Characteristics of Free Jazz
Free jazz followed the wildly improvisational style of its predecessor, bebop. It was a movement away from music carefully crafted for harmonies and mainstream success. Free jazz musicians had no rules. They did not aim to create harmonies, coherent melodies, or arrange group chord progressions. Instead, skilled musicians formed free jazz bands and then played whatever they wanted to at the time. Sometimes, these improvisational sessions formed powerful, multi-instrumental melodies. On other occasions, they created loud, screeching, chaotic noises. Either result was pleasing to free jazz musicians.
Many free jazz bands built their reputation on radical musical experimentation. They introduced solos whenever they felt like it, allowed musicians to play in different time structures during the same piece, and sometimes abandoned tempo altogether. Some even experimented with radically different band structures. Free jazz bands sometimes skipped rhythm sections entirely, adopting a lineup filled with multiple string instruments and horn players. Others utilized complex multi-phonic horn techniques, with a single horn playing multiple notes at a time. Some horn players even gave improvisational free jazz performances unaccompanied by other musicians.
Over time, some free jazz bands began to blend their radical experimentation with more traditional musical compositions. They set basic frameworks for compositions, planning times within a piece for choruses and harmonies as well as the genre's characteristic experimentation and improvisation. Other free jazz bands consciously attempted to modify folk and other traditional musical genres to fit the improvisational themes of free jazz, creating interesting musical blends.
Unfortunately, for many free jazz musicians, the genre was never popular with the general public. Free jazz was primarily performed for artistic purposes, and the musicians who participated in the genre cared very little about impressing their listeners. They believed in creating art for the sake of art, not for popularity or financial success.
Some Afro-Cuban, Latin, or fusion jazz musicians resented free jazz. They felt the genre was too occupied with pleasing a small number of people and was alienating the more popular styles of jazz. Many thought that free jazz would negatively affect the reputation of jazz as a whole.
Several famed jazz musicians adopted free jazz as their preferred medium of expression. Ornette Coleman, known throughout the music industry for his skillful work with a saxophone, gave the genre its name with his 1960 recording Free Jazz. The album featured two separate string quartets playing together and backed by horns, improvising the vast majority of their composition. Coleman was one of the first musicians to push for large-scale improvisation to return to mainstream jazz.
John Coltrane, another famed jazz saxophonist, was also a driving force behind the free jazz movement. Coltrane preferred musical arrangements that included a full rhythmic backing section, including piano, drums, and bass. However, he experimented heavily with modified forms of timekeeping and soloing.
Bibliography
"Avant Garde/Free Jazz; Fusion (1959–1990)." Jazz in America, www.jazzinamerica.org/LessonPlan/11/7/149. Accessed 22 Dec. 2024.
"Free Jazz: Overview." AllMusic, www.allmusic.com/style/free-jazz-ma0000002598. Accessed 22 Dec. 2024.
"Free Jazz and Fusion." Jazz in America, www.jazzinamerica.org/LessonPlan/5/7/234. Accessed 22 Dec. 2024.
“History of Free Jazz/Avant-Garde.” Timeline of African American Music, timeline.carnegiehall.org/genres/free-jazz-avant-garde. Accessed 22 Dec. 2024.
Shteamer, Hank. "John Coltrane's 'Interstellar Space' at 50: Legacy of a Free-Jazz Masterpiece." Rolling Stone, 22 Feb. 2017, www.rollingstone.com/music/features/john-coltranes-free-jazz-classic-interstellar-space-at-50-w466815. Accessed 22 Dec. 2024.
"Style Sheets - Bebop." Jazz in America, www.jazzinamerica.org/jazzresources/stylesheets/10. Accessed 22 Dec. 2024.