Free jazz

The free jazz (or New Thing ) is a style of music which develops in the Années 1950 and 60, taken along by the pioneers Charles Mingus, Ornette Coleman, Eric Dolphy and Albert Ayler. John Coltrane is one of the musicians who, in his last works, carries out some of the best pieces of free jazz. Like all the other forms of Jazz, the free jazz is always practiced.

History

The first phonographic trace of a free form of improvisation is the recording of two albums of Lennie Tristano for Capitol in 1949, Intuition and Digression . These recordings will not strictly speaking have however a direct influence on the movement free jazz.

The music of Charles Mingus also goes in the direction of the free, particularly with its albums Pithecanthropus Erectus (1956), The Clown , and Tijuana Moods (1957), in which it employs a technique which consisted with fredonner the topics with its musicians, and to let them deform the melody with their own way.

In the middle of the Fifties, the saxophonist Jackie McLean explores a concept which it calls “The Big Room”, where the strict rules of the bebop could be softened, or abandoned, according to the will of the musician.

The birth date of the free is rather regarded as being years 1959/1960, with the albums of Ornette Coleman Something Else! (1959), Tomorrow is the Question (1959), as well as the first two albums of Cecil Taylor ( Jazz Advance and Looking Ahead ). These albums still contain a structure similar to that of the Bebop and Hardbop. The decisive turn was the removal of Ornette Coleman to New York, and its signature at Atlantic Records, where it recorded the albums The Shape off Jazz to Like and Change off the Century which marked an important rupture with its preceding work. There remains still a trace of the structure topic-improvisation-topic, but the grid disappeared, the harmonies are not recognizable any more, and the improvisations consequently are not limited any more by the structure of the harmonic grid. When Ornette Coleman entitles a disc of 1960 Free Jazz: With Collective Improvisation , where a double four-bit byte improvises simultaneously, the name of the disc becomes that of the movement.

Musical personalities like Eric Dolphy, through his solos exhubérants, John Coltrane, Chico Hamilton, or Albert Ayler, which develops a sound of Saxophone sharp tenor skinned with the extremely marked Vibrato, also contribute to the development of the sound of the free jazz.

Other more marginal musicians also took part in the development of the free jazz:

  • the music of Sun Ra can also be categorized as a free jazz, in particular its work of the Sixties, justified by a rather complex esoteric step, and in spite of the fact that Sun Ra repeated that its music was written.
  • the trio of Jimmy Giuffre, with Paul Bley and Steve Swallow, which accepted very little attention during the period when it was in activity (1960-62), but which from now on is recognized like one of the formations more innovating of the free.

The apogee of the free jazz is certainly the years 1960, but musicians like David S. Ware, Matthew Shipp, Peter Brötzmann and Joe Morris continue to play what one calls of the free. Musicians like James Blood Ulmer, Sony Sharrock, Ronald Shannon Jackson developed styles combining of the elements of the free jazz and the jazz fusion.

Definition

Usually, this music is played by small groups of musicians. In the popular spirit, the free jazz is heavy, aggressive and dissonant. Many criticisms think that the abandonment of the elements familiar of the jazz is due to a lack of technique on behalf of the musicians. This point of view became marginal and this music could build a strong tradition. It remains however less popular than other forms of jazz.

The free jazz uses the bases of the Jazz but with a composition less structured than the preceding styles. The improvisation, for example, holds to with it a great place, the free jazz being besides one of principal “the inspirer” of the free kind Improvisation. However, the free jazz is much easier to characterize by the comparison, by its differences of with the other forms of jazz, kinds of practical drawers in which one arranges very different kinds, such as the Ragtime of the beginnings, the swing, the Be-bop, the jazz fusion, or of the more recent styles such as the Ethno-jazz, which by a clear definition.

These other forms of jazz have powerful tempos, on metric rates/rhythms, usually into 4/4, or sometimes into 3/4. The free jazz maintains normally a rate/rhythm basic, but without regular meter, with sudden accelerations and falls, like the marine swell. It often happens that the musicians of the same orchestra exploit different tempos. A general rate/rhythm emerges however from this music, the tempo did not disappear.

This kind of music influenced artists such as Miles Davis, Tim Buckley or Frank Zappa at one time of their musical course.

A movement of claim

The free jazz wanted to be also a major cultural release for the black American, while breaking radically with the diagrams of the Western music (tonal music and rate/rhythm into binary or ternary). Same manner that the bebop was a reaction to the popularity of the swing, the free emerges like countering the growing interest of the white towards the Soul jazz and other musics of the Fifties.

This idea can see in the approaches of the musicians themselves, for example with the disc of Ornette Coleman, This is Our Music (1960). The development of the bebop and the free jazz take directions where the music is intellectualized, less dansable, and less commercial. Whole like the Art Together off Chicago, the head of bridge of the Association for the Advancement off Creative Musicians (AACM), and Sun Ra, makes to black identity an integral part of their personality as a musician, in a way much more visible than the former generations. There did not exist however racial segregation between musicians, the double bass player (white) Charlie Haden was member of the four-bit byte of Ornette Coleman as of its beginnings.

More than any other running of the jazz, the free will be the occasion of social claims of the black musicians. In 1965, archie Shepp said: We all are convinced that the forms of the jazz music must be developed in order to coincide with an artistic context, social, cultural and economic entirely new… .

max Roach says it also clearly: … This is why the will to use our artistic efforts like springboards to express our human, social and political claims is very naturelle..

This claim of their identity passes partly by a return to the sources of the negro music, through the Blues, the preeminence of the percussion, the introduction of the Polyrythmie, the use of instruments in an “Africanizing” way…

Some musicians famous representatives of the free jazz

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