Mervyn Cooke

Free jazz and the avant-garde

‘Free Jazz’ refers to a historical movement that, despite earlier precedents, first significantly flowered in the late 1950s in the US. Its central focus was a liberation from musical conventions – but from a jazz players perspective, since no liberation is ever complete. Initially known simply as the New Thing, it became Free Jazz after borrowing the title of a seminal 1960 album by saxophonist/composer Ornette Coleman. It subsequently has had international repercussions that seem set to continue well into the twenty-first century. Its impact and relations to other developments remain controversial, and a variety of accounts of it are possible: as a culmination of the drive for individual creativity, a radicalisation of the scope of musical materials of jazz, a collection of statements by salient individuals and groups, or as a movement shaped by extramusical forces of political, cultural, racial and spiritual liberation – to mention only the most obvious. Here these are all taken as valid viewpoints, in need of reconciliation. The seminal role of creative improvisation The nucleus of all jazz is creative improvisational expression (Louis Armstrongs ‘the sound of surprise’), a process that brings into the music the joy of discovery, the magic of communication, and the uniqueness of both the moment and the individual. Yet it also introduces several profound tensions which early on planted the seeds for the ultimate blossoming of free jazz.

The jazz diaspora

As early as 1922, in an article published in the New York Times Book Review and Magazine , journalist Burnet Hershey chronicled his recent journey around the world taking in Europe, Africa, Asia and the Orient, and reported that jazz was everywhere: No sooner had I shaken off the dust of some city and slipped almost out of earshot of its jazz bands than zump-zump-zump, toodle-oodle-doo, right into another I went. Never was there a cessation of this universal potpourri of jazz. Each time I would discover it at a different stage of metamorphosis and sometimes hard to recognize, but unmistakably it was an attempt at jazz. [Cited in Walser 1999, 26] The dominant readings of jazz history have concentrated on chronology: the historical succession from New Orleans jazz to classic jazz, swing, bop and beyond (see, for example, Kernfeld 1988, I, 580–606). While such accounts are not modelled in terms of the diaspora, they are locked into it, since these stages happen also to correspond to diasporic factors. From New Orleans to the classic jazz of Chicago, from Kansas City to the bop hothouse of New York – each stylistic shift is also marked by a geographical shift. In formalist approaches (that is, those centred on musical characteristics), emphasis is on what is seen as ‘progress’ to higher levels of musical aesthetics, a teleology that continues to underpin powerful institutionalised discourses. Parallel to, but often in tension with, formalist accounts are cultural narratives interested less in what the music sounds like than in its social meanings. In these readings, various themes have remained durable, as, for example, a music of cutting-edge modernist or bohemian individualism, yet of authentic folk collectivity. Both reflect a suspicion of mass culture.

The identity of jazz

Among the many historical accounts of jazz, it is above all the discographies that convey most graphically and emphatically just how extensively performed and how diverse jazz has been since it arrived on the public scene in 1916–17. But it is beyond the brief of a discography to do much more than list, and so the nearest thing we have to a record of the sheer scale of jazz diversity and inventiveness is silent on many other questions. Thus, while many discographies take for granted that the diversity they chronicle represents a collective body of music – even if they appear to have built into them particular views of what is and is not ‘jazz’ – they do not see it as their task to identify what, if anything, might connect the music together (and how and why), even less to consider the question of how the achievements they enumerate belong in, reflect and respond to a wider world. And there is no particular reason why they should. But if we seek to go beyond diversity and extent and look for what made jazz distinctive, we need to ask questions such as: how did jazz acquire its identity in the twentieth century, how was that identity constructed, and what role was played in the formation of identity by the ways in which the music was connected to processes and histories both close to and beyond its immediate environment?

1959: the beginning of beyond

The idea for this chapter came from Mervyn Cookes suggestion that we jointly organise a seminar – on jazz in 1959 – at the University of Nottingham. As soon as I began I found the choice of year felicitous both as a decisive cultural moment in establishing an autonomous art-form and as a year for musical landmarks recorded in every style of jazz (from mainstream to avant-garde). Nineteen fifty-nine was the year when jazz, as it is now, began. Jazz before this time is now largely regarded as historic, as music usually identified by regional (e.g., Harlem school, Chicago style) and temporal (early jazz, Swing Era) associations. From 1959 onwards, it more strongly resembles universal current practice, indicating – and without condescension to pre-1959 jazz – that this is the beginning of contemporary jazz. This is easily demonstrated by the still pervasive familiarity of certain of the recordings made in that year. Kind of Blue (Miles Davis), Time Out (Dave Brubeck), Giant Steps (John Coltrane) and Ornette Colemans The Shape of Jazz to Come are albums that can scarcely be unknown or un-owned by jazz aficionados – and the 1960s had not even officially begun. Perhaps they began when John F. Kennedy was elected to the US Presidency and Robert Frost read his poetry at the Inauguration ceremony. In his speech, the young president raised the image of a relay in which ‘the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans’. This was turnover time in American culture and politics, as it was in jazz.

Jazz and dance

Jazz is often presented as a musical art form, which is fine for musical connoisseurship. But any serious inquiry into the nature, history, aesthetics and even future of jazz needs to examine the unique relation between music making and dancing that existed at its origin and was mutually nourishing for decades. The severing of this relation brought about tremendous changes in both the music and the dance. Popular dancing is an extremely important cultural activity, for bodily movement is a kind of repository for social and individual identity. The dancing body engages the cultural inscripting of self and the pursuit of pleasure, and dancing events are key sites in the working and reworking of racial, class and gender boundaries. For this reason Linda Tomko has argued that dancing is ‘a social and cultural process operating in the midst, and not at the margins, of American life – indeed, as American life’ (1999, xiii). Particularly significant are moments of transformation, when conventional forms of popular dancing are no longer sufficiently expressive, leading to experimentation with and development of new forms of bodily identity. New music emerges whose kinetic power reflects and reinforces the new bodily identity; the music and dance resonate with each other. These episodes of transformation inevitably generate alarm about the release of unbridled sexuality and trigger efforts to repress and supervise dancing and the places where it occurs.

History, myth and legend: the problem of early jazz

There are many tantalising tales of early jazz and its origins that conjure up both romantic and tragic images of an evolving musical tradition. These tales become a bit hazy as they are passed down, and the truth often obscured. Because jazz has frequently been accorded great reverence by its loyal fans, the tales of its heroes and their exploits have grown in great proportion, often leading to misunderstandings. It is only recently through accurate and patient research that we have come to some less colourful but more informative conclusions about the origins of this music. Likewise, viewing a faded old photograph may cause us to wax nostalgic about the persons staring at us across a century or more. If we could find a pristine negative of the photo and could make a new print of it, we would have a truer representation of that moment in time. There would be greater detail and clarity. However, with the sharper, truer image, we would miss some of that faded quality from which mystique and legend emerge. One of the great legends of the pre-history of jazz was an African-American cornettist from New Orleans named Buddy Bolden (1877–1931). To many he is considered to be the first of all jazz musicians. Stories of his powerful cornet are among the earliest and most prominent in jazz. Legend tells us that Bolden played loud and low down, drank heavily, ran with fast women. His music was exciting and intoxicating.