Big band free jazz

Improvisation has always been an integral aspect of jazz. In the early 60s, it became common for jazz musician to get together in big groups and collectively improvise without any playing in any fixed key. Free jazz is largely attributed to having started with Ornette Coleman in the late 50s.

Ornette Coleman certainly was one of the revolutionaries of jazz. Bebop was a major shock to consumers of jazz after the second world war. Unlike swing - Duke Ellington Woody Herman, Stan Kenton etc. - you actually had to sit down and hear it. Over the years, the structures of bebop became looser and looser. Ornette Coleman arrived in 1959. It sounds nowhere near as shocking now as some of the music of his progenies (say, the ilk of Albert Ayler). Most of his albums have tunes and melodies. They sound like bebop melodies. However, there was no overriding tonal centre. Ornette and his superb sideman Don Cherry would play solos which would have no tonal or harmonic relation to the main melody.

Ornette's most radical album, and the one he is most renowned for, is Free Jazz. (It's odd how some artists are most well-known for their most radical stuff while their more accessible output is overlooked. Think of Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica or Ayler's Spiritual Unity.) Ornette was uncomfortable with the label as he felt that many people overlooked him as a writer of tunes. Nonetheless, the label stuck and it bred a plethora of imitators.

The idea of having a large group of players improvising was ground-breaking yet, at the same time, primitivist. It led to new directions yet it also harked back to a more primeval form of music. It was a type of music that was less rigid. It was also very communal. It was a type of workshop in which a group of players with their own unique style could share their ideas. It was dialogic. An interesting conversation would be established. Unlike the later genre 'free improvisation,' it was still very much within the idiom of jazz. The players very much stick to scales and keys. In many ways, they play what they know. (Derek Bailey called free improvisation a way of 'erasing memory.')



There is a tune to the piece, which becomes increasingly knotted and garbled. The tune is revisted later on. Otherwise, the structure generally is that there is a collective improvisation followed by a solo improv.

The ingenious production technique that this album has is that there are two quartets in each channel. It could be seen as a 'doubling' of the standard Ornette quartet (sax, trumpet, bass, drums). In addition to the classic Ornette quartet (Coleman, Cherry, Haden and Blackwell), they are joined by big names in avan-jazz: Eric Dolphy, Freddie Hubbard and Scott Le Faro. Dolphy is a highly idiosyncratic, creative and versatile player (he played three wind instruments expertly). His interactions with the rest of the ensemble are very sharp. On some occasions his bass clarinet can be heard laughing. It's an expression of joy. Hubbard was a more conventional player and he does not fit in as snugly with the rest of the msusicains. The pairing of Le Faro with Haden is particularly stimulating when they both get to solo together. They play with a bow or pluck the strings intermittently.

I mentioned in the preceding paragraph that in Dolphy's playing there is an 'expression of joy.' Coleman stated in several occasions that his saxophone playing was a way in which he could express his own feelings. Ayler said about free jazz that 'it became less about notes and more about feelings.'

Meanwhile, John Coltrane's playing was becoming freer and freer. An extremely dexterous and talented player, there was a sense that he took tonally-oriented jazz as far as it could go with his masterpiece A Love Supreme. There was always a spiritual dimension to Coltrane's playing. At this point, Coltrane was becoming more and immersed in oriental religions.  Like Ornette, he very much saw the practice of improvisation as a kind of spiritual expression. As a sideman for Davis, he once played a solo which lasted for over half an hour. When pressed by Miles as to why the solo went for so long, Coltrane replied that it took that long to express everything he needed to express. Davis understood where he was coming from and let him off the hook.

Ascencion initially can be a very intimidating album. One may buy a Coltrane record expecting it be lush and melliflous. This is anything but. The occasional tonal centres in Free Jazz are absent here. Once more, there is a peculiar structure. There is a leitmotif which I simply adore: ascending and descending lines. It is a somewhat melodic, but it all soon crumbles down. The structure is the same as Ornette's ensemble: there is a collective improvisation, followed by a solo allocated to each player. Once more, there are big names (Freddie Hubbard is on this album too). The wind instruments are the most abrasive - they squawk, shriek and wail. McCoy Tyner's piano solo is entirely tonal (it's actually hard to differentiate his playing on this from earlier Coltrane records). There is another bass duet, which is once more very stimulatingz. The chaos is resolved with a repetition of the title theme, which I characterised earlier as 'ascending and descending lines.' It is lushly embellished by Elvis Jones' crashing cymbals. Coleman's records at times sounds like a free-bop recording. This is pure, distilled free jazz.

Coltrane's premature death is something many jazz buffs plaintively mourn. What uncharted territory would he have pursued after this? Would he have reached a point of no return with his atonal playing? Had he perhaps transgressed so much, he would simply play ballads? (His record of ballads is great, by the way!) Would he take the exciting path that Don Cherry took and embrace world music? (He did this to an extent with the African polyrhythms in Kulu Se Mama.) Would he have embraced electronic music? I doubt the last possibility. Coltrane's music just does not seem compatible with electronic instruments.  



Another musician who embraced collective free improvisation was Sun Ra. He started out in the vein of swing, but very quickly become implementing exotic rhythms and unusual harmonies into his music. An Ellington-esque tune could swiftly turn into a polyphonic cacophony.

His most renowned collective improvisation is The Magic City. It is a lot stranger than the records discussed above. There are strange synth sounds which are abruptly interrupted by the squeaks and shronks of the ensemble. I obviously hate it when people like Wynton Marsalis pontificate about certain recordings that 'this isn't jazz,' but one would be hard-pressed to call this particular recording jazz. Incidentally, Sun Ra would probably pleased by that judgement. He'd rather call it 'space music.' Like a lot of Sun Ra records, it is an exhilarating practice in willful mayhem.



As you have noticed, I have embeded the YouTube videos of the full recordings. Somewhat sad that it is now quiant to recommend someone a record and to expect that person to save up money and buy it in a record store. If I had to pick a favourite from these three 'big band free jazz collective improvisations,' I'd pick the Coltrane record.