Free Jazz: A Brief Reminiscence of Jazz in the 60s

Revised and expanded here, this piece originated as an
"oral essay" for the Cosmoetica Omniversica interview series on
www.sursumcorda.com.

More or less officially unveiled with the first New York appearance of
the Ornette Coleman Quartet at the Five Spot Caf? in the fall of 1959,
free jazz (or new black music, space music, new thing, anti-jazz or
abstract jazz as it would variously be labeled), gave new dimension to
the perennial "where's the melody?" complaint against
jazz.

For most of the uninitiated, what the Coleman group presented on its
opening night was in fact sheer cacophony.

Four musicians (a saxophonist, trumpeter, bassist and drummer) abruptly
began to play-with an apoplectic intensity and at a bone-rattling
volume-four simultaneous solos that had no perceptible shared
references or point of departure. Even unto themselves the solos, to
the extent that they could be isolated as such in the density of sound
that was being produced, were without any fixed melodic or rhythmic
structure. Consisting, by turns, of short, jagged bursts and long
meandering lines unmindful of bar divisions and chorus measures they
were, moreover, laced with squeaks, squeals, bleats and strident honks.
A number ended and another began-or was it the same one again? How were
you to tell? No. No way this madness could possibly have a
method.

But umbilically connected to the emergent black cultural nationalism
movement, the madness did indeed have a method. The avowed objective of
the dramatic innovations that musicians like Ornette, Cecil Taylor-and,
in their footsteps, Sunny Murray, Andrew Cyrille, Archie Shepp, Bill
Dixon, Albert Ayler, Jimmy Lyons, Eric Dolphy and (the later period)
John Coltrane, among hundreds of others-initiated and practiced from
the late '50s into the early '70s, was to restore black music to its
original identity as a medium of spiritual utility. When these men
abandoned an adherence to chord progressions, the 32-bar song form, the
fixed beat and the soloist/accompanist format, and began to employ,
among other things, simultaneous improvisations, fragmented tempos and
voice-like timbres, they were very deliberately replacing, with ancient
black methodologies, those Western concepts and systems that had, by
their lights, worked to subvert and reduce black music in America to
either a pop music or (for many of them no less a corruption of what
black music was supposed to be) an art form.

Alan Silva, a one-time bassist with Cecil Taylor and then the leader of
his own thirteen-piece orchestra, made the point in an interview I did
with him for Rolling Stone.

"I don't want to make music that sounds nice," Silva told me. "I want
to make music that opens the possibility of real spiritual communion
between people. There's a flow coming from every individual, a
continuous flow of energy coming from the subconscious level. The idea
is to tap that energy through the medium of improvised sound. I do
supply the band with notes, motifs and sounds to give it a lift-off
point. I also direct the band, though not in any conventional way-like
I might suddenly say 'CHORD!' But essentially I'm dealing with
improvisation as the prime force,
not the tune. The thing is, if you put thirteen
musicians together and they all play at once, eventually a cohesion, an
order, will be reached, and it will be on a transcendent
plane."

(I commented in the interview that "Silva says his band wants to
commune with the spirit world and you aren't sure that it doesn't. With
thirteen musicians soloing at the same time, at extraordinary decibel
levels, astonishingly rapid speeds and with complete emotional abandon
for more than an hour, the band arrives not only at moments of
excruciating beauty, but at sounds that rising in ecstatic rushes and
waves and becoming almost visible in the mesmerizing intensity, weight
and force of their vibrations, do for sure seem to be flushing weird,
spectral things from the walls, from the ceiling, from your
head.")

Of course not all of these musicians shared Silva's position entirely.
Some saw the music as an intimidating political weapon in the battle
for civil rights and exploited it as such. Others, like Taylor, did and
quite emphatically, regard themselves as artists. For Taylor, a pianist
and composer who took what he needed not just from Ellington and Monk,
but from Stravinsky, Ives and Bartok, it wasn't about jettisoning
Western influences on jazz, but about absorbing them into a
specifically black
esthetic.

For the most part, however, disparities among the younger musicians of
the period amounted to dialects of the same language. All of them
shared the "new black consciousness"-a new pride in being black-and
their reconstruction of jazz, their purging of its Western elements, or
their assertion of black authority over those elements, was, to one
degree or another, intended to revive and reinstate the music's first
purpose.

Silva saw broad extra-musical ramifications in his procedures. He
believed that by rejecting all externally imposed constraints the
inherent goodness in men would surface and enable them to function in
absolute harmony with both nature and each other. "Man," he said to me
once, coming off an especially vigorous set. "In another ten years we
won't even need traffic lights we're gonna be so spiritually tuned to
one another."

And I have to say that I was in agreement.

This was, after all, a period in history when "restrictions" of every
conceivable kind, from binding social and sexual mores to the very law
of gravity, were successfully being challenged. If you were regularly
visiting Timothy Leary's "atomic" level of consciousness, and if you
could call a girl you'd been set up with on a blind date and she might
say, "Let's 'ball' first and then I'll see if I want to have dinner
with you," you could be forgiven your certainty that nothing short of a
revolution in human nature itself was taking
place.

And some of us who regarded Western values as both the cause of all ill
(had they not brought us to the brink of annihilation with the hydrogen
bomb?), and the principle impediment to such a transformation, saw the
new black music as leading the way, as the veritable embodiment of what
Herbert Marcuse called "the revolution of
unrepression."

In so heady a time, earnest un-self-conscious debates about the
relative revolutionary merits of free jazz and rock-the other musical
phenomenon of the period-were not uncommon.

I remember a conversation I had with John Sinclair, the Michigan
activist, poet and author of Guitar
Army

.

John took the position that rock was the true "music of the
revolution."

No, I argued, rock did stand against the technocratic, Faustian western
sensibility. It did, and unabashedly, celebrate the sensual and the
mystical. But in these respects it only caught up to where jazz had
always been. In contrast to what some of the younger black musicians
were up to-the purging of white elements African music had picked up in
America-rock was simply the first hip white popular
music.

Rock, it was my point, never got beyond expressing the sentiment of
revolution while free jazz, by breaking with formal Western
disciplines-by going "outside," as the musicians termed it, of Western
procedures and methods and letting the music find its own natural order
and form-got to an actualization of what true revolution would be.
Rock's lyrics, I said, promoted, in many instances, the idea of a
spiritual revolution, but musically rock remained bound to the very
traditions and conventions that its lyrics railed against and the
audience never got a demonstration or the experience of authentic
spiritual communion. Rock's lyrics were undermined and attenuated in
the very act of their expression by the system used to express them.
The new jazz, on the other hand, achieved freedom not just from the
purely formal structures of western musical systems, but, implicitly,
from the emotional and social ethos in which those structures
originated.

As I say, it was a heady time.

Now, of course, free jazz, in anything resembling a pristine form just
barely exists, and obviously it has ceased to exist altogether as a
revolutionary movement. Like other emblematic movements of the epoch
with which it shared the faith that a new kind of human being would
surface once all structure and authority that wasn't internal in origin
was rejected, free jazz was ultimately ambushed by its
naivet?..

But on purely musical terms free jazz has not been without an ongoing
impact. If it never achieved what Alan Silva expected it to, it did
(however contrary to its original ambition), expand the vocabulary and
the field of options available to mainstream jazz musicians. And while
they function today in what are essentially universes of their own,
Taylor and Coleman are still very much around and continuing to
discover surprise and the marvelous.

Indeed, stripped though they may be of their mystique as harbingers of
an imminent utopia, these extraordinary musicians continue to produce
musical miracles as a matter of course. For an especially vivid
demonstration, try to catch Cecil in one of his live performances-what
he would call "exchanges of energy"-with drummers like Max Roach or
Elvin Jones.

In a bad time in every department of the culture, a time of
rampant-often willful-mediocrity, I could name no better tonic.