Jazz and the Ambiguity of Influence, Pt. 11: What Is Free Jazz?
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| Ornette Coleman |
A friend of mine who is a professional singer and teacher of music recently completed her doctoral work in music education. For her thesis, she focused on the potential of collective free improvisation to enrich high school music education. I watched her oral presentation (or "defense") on Zoom and became convinced that engaging with free improv at this early stage of development could help with two important aspects of musical development and expression: 1) to gain confidence and overcome fear; and 2) to improve one's ability to listen and respond to the other players. As a former player myself, one who "rose" to the semi-pro club band level, I can attest that those are essential qualities of music-making, essential in that these are two attributes that can elevate things beyond just reading or replicating notes to actually making art, that is to say, something that moves people. In talking with my friend, we discussed how there is a preconception that free jazz is always wild and noisy. But what it really means, simply, is that you don't proceed with a few things: written notes, chord progressions, or even any agreement on what you want the piece to sound like. Let me qualify that last one. In the most adventurous cases that scenario is true; someone or everyone just starts playing and you go from there. But free improvs can definitely have a preset direction.
This is how it worked for the "father of free jazz," the inimitable Ornette Coleman, whose early quartets worked with melodic "heads" composed by Coleman that served for the jumping off point for the group improvs to follow. Each player would expand on the melody in whatever way they felt like. The key would be to never get too closely in synch. The method is for the players to not follow the same path but rather to follow paths of their own making that run side-by-side, with associations arising across the paths that are more cryptic than normal changes-based improvisations but which can give rise to revelations and relationships and possibilities that truly could not have been anticipated. The other key aspect of freedom for Coleman was to feel free to keep extending lines according to their own logic, no matter where they might lead. THis is unlike the logic of following chord changes, which always have you circling back in a regular sequence. True, this can be done creatively, and with freedom, but Ornette was having none of it. Ultimately, Ornette did have a group aesthetic to be adhered to, though. The sound could never, ever be too sweet. Rather it had always to be astringent. When I wrote my in memoriam tribute to Ornette, I noted that he sounded like onions. I could add black coffee too.
I think the main purpose of free jazz is to provide a method by which, or setting in which one can liberate oneself from habit and the allure of relying on one's favorite riffs and patterns and licks, and also from traditional harmony and strict meter. I think of Krishnamurti who said the only true path for the individual is a path that has not been cleared before. It's a discipline to never fall back on what one already knows. This was the motivating force for the late Wayne Shorter, who, as the decades advanced, seemed to embody T. S. Eliot's dictum that "Old men ought to be explorers / Here and there does not matter / We must be still and still moving / Into another intensity / For a further union, a deeper communion." For his part, Ornette knew he was adding to the jazz idiom, and his early record titles showed it: Something Else!!!! The Shape of Jazz to Come. Tomorrow Is the Question. In regards that last one the soul jazz sax master Lou Donaldson, a skilled jokester, said something like: "Tomorrow's when I'd rather hear it, certainly not now." In Ornette's defense, we should note that his sound was not at all unrelated to the blues sound of his native Texas. It was real that way, just weirder and more raw.
Certainly, too strict adherence to dissonance risks a new orthodoxy. Consonance and beauty, relatively speaking, need to be part of the free lexicon for it to truly be free. Maybe the key is to avoid over-reliance on beauty, lest it be stripped of its powers. This is what struck me when I saw Jason Moran and his trio perform at the Cambridge River Fest, easily 20 years ago now. It was before he was famous, so the next day I went to his website, where his personal email was provided (yes, those were simpler days), and sent him a message to say how much I loved the concert. What I said specifically was that the moments of pure beauty during the performance were made more powerful by the passages of turbulence and struggle that they emerged from. Improvising that is free must be free to be everything.
Part of the everything that Coleman wanted for jazz was an authentically spiritual experience. Maybe he wouldn't have put it that way. But what he surely wanted his music to do was not just something else but something more. To reach people on levels that normally aren't in play. That was the case with me, when listening to Ornette triggered one of the most interesting listening experiences of my life. It was back in 1980, I think. My habit then was to take naps with my headphones on, with the music playing at full volume. So, my selection one day was Ornette's Live at the Golden Circle, a trio date recorded live in Stockholm in 1965. As I entered that liminal space between waking and sleeping the music began to talk to me, literally, in another language. It wasn't music and it wasn't human language like English or French or Chinese or anything like that. But it was direct and unambiguous in a way that, ironically, I can't even explain. But I knew that it was real. It was the language inside the music, or beneath it, or underneath it, and it revealed how music done right is more than entertainment: it is the language of the spirit, a message from the oft-unrecognized reality that pervades our own, even as it remains a mystery.
As we know, the spiritual direction was extended and developed by players such as Coltrane and Albert Ayler and so many others. Free jazz certainly can be playful, and I would add that to the qualities of Ornette's music, but in many instances it manifests an existential seriousness sometimes equalled but never surpassed by other modes of musical expression. Indeed, Val Wilmer's in-depth look at the creators of this music, sometimes called "the new jazz" or just "the music," was called As Serious As Your Life. That this music was so often the domain and pursuit of black artists is something to contemplate. I can't truly do that topic justice here, but let me take a quick stab at it. All these players grew up in the 40s, 50s, and 60s, before positive changes in America's racial atmosphere began to develop. For so many black Americans, and definitely sensitive souls like artists, racism wasn't just immoral or unjust, it was irrational, absurd, and, as Henry Threadgill so often puts it in his recent, tremendous autobiography, Easily Slip Into Another World, it was just plain stupid. Add to that the experience of being sent to Viet Nam, as so many of the musicians were, and you witness a world that simultaneously is violent and doesn't make any sense. So what was needed was not only a howl of suffering and discontent, which the music welcomed, but also a radical clearing of all received wisdom and the tropes of respectable music making. It was a mental and spiritual palate cleanser of the highest order; it represented that path clearing that Krishnamurti spoke of that represents the only true path to truth, and, crucially, to being your own person in an environment that conspires against this fundamental state of dignity.
Free jazz is an immense and crucial stream in the music, and I have only touched on a few of its key characteristics and practitioners here. Before signing off, though, I want to mention the work of Butch Morris, who originated a mode of music-making called conduction. What he does with this is create a hybrid between free improv and intentional composition. I actually saw him perform with a large group at a Cambridge street fair a number of years ago, so I got to see his method in action. Morris developed an elaborate set of hand and arm gestures that he would use to shape free improv in real time. He would point at one player or one section of players, and indicate how they should shift in terms of volume, density of note-making, types of patterns, whether they should be rising or falling, or whether they even should be playing, and so on. What you you end up with is a grand marriage of the determined and the undetermined. Other composers such as the aforementioned Threadgill, would go on to take the kinds of sounds that emerged from free jazz and use them to inform what actually are fully through-composed pieces. And so we return to the ambiguity of influence: How exactly do freedom and composition impact and change the other?
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