The Variety of Free Jazz and Improvised Music Today
I spent a lot of the Christmas period listening to Keith Jarrett, the solo albums, the trio especially the Inside Out album recorded live in London and Jarrett’s American Quartet with Dewey Redman, Charlie Haden and Paul Motian. I think that this quartet is one of Jarrett’s great groups and I wonder why it is somewhat neglected. But this is not the point I wish to explore here. Listening to these various recordings made me realise what a range of music now contains free improvisation and what a broad term ‘free jazz’ now is.
Jarrett’s solo performances are all totally improvised and Jarrett has talked about how he quite consciously avoids thinking of certain melodies and motifs before the concert so that his mind is completely clear when he starts playing. Of course, during the performance he does develop melodies and motifs and I don’t think we really think of these performances as ‘free jazz’. The American Quartet follows in the tradition of Ornette Coleman’s groups and could be considered to be playing free jazz, but it is more a case of a group incorporating a certain amount of free playing into a structured context with tunes, time signatures etc. Interestingly, the Inside Out trio album is totally improvised with the group abandoning its normal playing of standards in favour of a totally free approach. As Jarrett says on the album sleeve, free playing is ‘an amazingly important part of true jazz history’. He goes on to say:
We need to be even more in tune with each other to play this way, without material; and even more attentive. Every possibility is available if you take away the tunes, but only some are valid under the circumstances. It is only our sensitivity to the flux that determines whether the music succeeds or fails.
(Inside Out Album Sleeve ECM Records).
The term free jazz began to be used in relation to Ornette Coleman’s groups of the late 1950s, and the totally improvised album called Free Jazz for two pianoless quartets may well have established this term. Other groups coming under the definition of ‘free jazz’ are Cecil Taylor’s groups from the same period, Albert Ayler and John Coltrane’s final period especially once Rashied Ali had replaced Elvin Jones on drums. Now much of this style of jazz seems to be a natural progression from the hard bop and modal jazz movements of the 1950s and 1960s with the free playing often coming into a still fairly structured context with tunes framing the improvisation. Both Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor wrote great tunes, but of course the improvisations did cast aside all the conventions and harmonic rigours of the bop and post bop styles.
In many ways this movement and its developments are now one of the mainstreams of jazz and major players such as Dave Douglas, Tim Berne, Joe Lovano and even Pat Metheny all often incorporate some free playing into their concerts or albums and more avant garde American players such as Ken Vandermark do play in a recognisably jazz style even when playing with European improvisers who show less of a jazz influence.
It is in Europe that the free jazz has developed its greatest freedom and improvisers such as Evan Parker, Peter Brotzmann, Alex Schlippenbach, Albert Mangelsdorff and many others have established playing styles that have moved away totally from the conventions of American jazz. It was instructive to listen to two albums (also over the Christmas period!) produced as a result of Birmingham Jazz initiatives. Opus de Life with the Profound Sound Trio (Paul Dunmall, Henry Grimes and Andrew Cyrille) strikes me as free jazz that comes naturally from the jazz tradition. There are no tunes and everything is totally improvised, but the styles of playing of all three players seem to me to derive from a jazz approach. Of course, both Grimes and Cyrille were pioneers of free jazz in the 1960s playing with Cecil Taylor and Albert Ayler amongst others, but both had become established playing older styles of jazz, Grimes with Gerry Mulligan and Sonny Rollins and Cyrille with Roland Kirk and Mary Lou Williams. Paul Dunmall has mostly played in free jazz settings in recent years, but he too was an excellent player in the hard bop style. In the Profound Sound Trio we get some fascinating improvisations, and varieties of mood, but much of the time Henry Grimes when he is playing bass (rather than violin) and Andrew Cyrille do seem to be playing a rhythmic role supporting and adding very subtly and interactively to Paul Dunmall’s front line playing. But when we listen to Firefox, an album recorded on the 2008 tour that Birmingham Jazz set up with Ken Vandermark, Barry Guy and Mark Sanders we hear something very different with three more or less equal front line partners with each player taking initiatives. This is music that is much more in the European style of free improvisation.
Improvisation in both styles described above usually replaces the phenomenon of swing with an approach based on ‘energy’. Of course free jazz is not always energy music and both CDs referred to above contain passages of great gentleness and beauty and this is a constant feature of the best of free jazz. But this energy of free jazz does have an affinity with certain kinds of rock music. In recent years there have been a lot of collaborations between free jazz players and less mainstream rock or punk artists. Evan Parker has, for example, played with Jah Wobble and a number of ‘noise’ players; Paul Dunmall has played with Chris Corsano, Bjork’s drummer who also played a totally improvised duo set with Mick Flower on keys at The Supersonic Festival in 2009 and members of The Guillemots run their own free jazz group The Gannets. One of my favourite albums of 2009 was Sunn O>>>’s Dimensions and Extensions which put together Sunn O>>>’s drone metal guitar work with jazzers Julian Priester and Cuong Vu. Then a number of jazz groups such as The Thing, Peter Wareham’s Acoustic Ladyland and, even more, Pete’s The Final Terror and Led Bib are deliberately incorporating a strong rock and ‘in-your-face’ punk element into their approach.
It’s all a sign of how interesting the alternative music scene is at the moment and how barriers and boundaries are being broken down. One very interesting concrete piece of evidence of all this is the fact that a group called brass unbound is touring in late January and early February with the punk band The Ex and it seems that they will be playing together. Brass unbound consists of Mats Gustafsson of The Thing, Ken Vandermark, both on saxophones , Roy Paci on trumpet and Dutch trombonist Wolter Wierbos.
This comes to Birmingham on Monday 1st February at the Hare and Hounds in a Capsule gig. For further details see on the Capsule website here
Tony
