5 Free Jazz Albums To Wake You Up From Hibernation

This should be played at high volume, preferably in a residential area

I went to see my first free jazz concert in the early 1990s.

At the time, I was really into some of John Zorn’s and Bill Laswell’s projects, especially the groups Naked City and Painkiller, because I liked industrial and grindcore. A friend had also started drip-feeding me bebop and Blue Note classics, plus slipping me the odd mid-period Coltrane or Keith Jarrett live album.

Some readers might find my deep love for free jazz and improv weird, given my usual focus on ambient music and downtempo electronic sounds in this newsletter.

Thing is, I view ambient and free jazz as two sides of the same coin. Believe it or not, I listen to the most abrasive free improv and even noise records like I listen to ambient music or soundscapes. It’s all textural music to me, even if it has very different qualities.

That’s why it doesn’t surprise me to learn there’s a very active harsh-noise-to-vaporwave pipeline among producers. It doesn’t surprise me either when one of the most daring free improvising cellists of our time, Okkyung Lee, suddenly creates a gorgeous piece of environmental ambient music.

I tell this story quite often, but one of my go-to records during plane turbulences isn’t some soothing ambient to calm me down, but a wild 16-and-a-half-minute improvisation by drummer John Colpitts and violist Jessica Pavone. It mirrors the emotional chaos and anxiety inside of me, which feels more honest than trying to convince myself things are going to be alright.

Aside from plane music, free jazz is also the perfect springtime soundtrack for me. As soon as temperatures get warmer here in Berlin, I start gravitating towards improvised music in my listening diet.

Just a few weeks ago, I was lucky enough to snatch one of the last copies of Johannes Rød’s beautiful catalogue Free Jazz and Improvisation on LP and CD 1965–2024, released via Smalltown Supersound’s sts.press imprint.

This is a guide to 185 mostly small and independent labels. I’ve been spending decades listening to this type of music, and there are still so many albums listed in here that I’ve rarely even heard of. The book sent me down all sorts of fascinating YouTube rabbitholes. I’m not including a link as it’s now completely sold out.

Design: Kim Hiorthøy

Just a few days after I received it in the mail, I met a friend for lunch who surprised me with a copy of Japanese record digger Yusuke Ogawa’s Independent Black Jazz Of America. During a recent visit to Tokyo, he discovered these paperbacks at Disk Union and slipped an extra copy into his bag for me.

Ogawa is a Japanese DJ and writer whose voice has serious weight in the global collector community. His book is a catalog of formative U.S. indie jazz labels and their releases, including Strata-East, Black Jazz, Tribe, Strata, Nimbus, India Navigation, as well as selections from Japanese and European jazz labels.

I can’t read Japanese, but armed with DeepL and my phone camera I’m currently finding my way through it.

I’ve also ordered Now Jazz Now: 100 Essential Free Jazz & Improvisation Recordings 1960-1980, a new book by Byron Coley, Thurston Moore and Mats Gustafsson, with contributions by Neneh Cherry and Joe McPhee. My copy has yet to arrive, but boy am I looking forward to it.

I expect this to be an expanded form of Moore’s legendary Top Ten Free Jazz Underground list, published first in 1995 in the Beastie Boys’ Grand Royal magazine, and the list of 10 entry points into the strange world of free music that he recently provided to The Quietus. I know I will be wading through these obscure selections for months, probably years.

This past weekend, I’ve pulled five of my favorite free jazz albums from my CD collection to listen to while doing my spring cleaning. I’m sharing this list with you today. It’s not my all-time top 5 – just five records I was eager to hear again.

By the way, if you decide to read just one book about the topic, I recommend none of the above but Val Wilmer’s As Serious As Your Life: Black Music and the Free Jazz Revolution, 1957–1977.

If you’re interested in learning more about free jazz without reading a full book: In 2025, I’ve published a brief and accessible two-part primer covering all the main players of the early era, from Ornette Coleman to Albert Ayler, including definitive listening recommendations.

You’ll need a paid subscription to access the archive, but if you choose to sign up now, I have a limited springtime offer for you – a 20% discount link for a yearly subscription. Just click the button below.

5 Free Jazz Albums To Wake You Up From Hibernation

John Coltrane – Interstellar Space (Impulse!)

recorded 1967, first released 1974

On a cold February day in 1967, Rashied Ali drove out to Rudy van Gelder’s studio in New Jersey, expecting a full band recording to take place.

But Coltrane showed up alone.

Ali: “Ain’t nobody coming?”
Coltrane: “No, it’s just you and me.”
Ali: “What are we playing? Is it fast? Is it slow?”
Coltrane: “Whatever you want it to be. Come on. I’m going to ring some bells. You can do an eight bar intro.”

The entire record was cut in one take. It wasn’t released until seven years later. This wasn’t just hardly commercial, it felt outright offensive to the trad jazz listener.

For the rest of us, this remains breathtaking material, even almost 60 years after the recording. The late Mika Vainio famously referred to this as “grindcore jazz”. Thurston Moore concluded: “Rashied was too hardcore.”

This was one of the last albums the sage mystic Coltrane recorded shortly before his death. He sounds as if he was already transmitting from another world.

Don Cherry & Ed Blackwell – Mu First Part (BYG)

recorded & first released 1969

I love duo records with drums – albums like Interstellar Space, or Rashied Ali’s brilliant session with violinist Leroy Jenkins from 1975, Swift Are The Winds Of Life, or Duo Exchange by Ali and reedist Frank Lowe from 1973.

Mu, a duo recording of drums and trumpet/flute in two parts, was captured in the summer of 1969, during an exodus of American free jazz players to Europe. At home these musicians couldn’t get any gigs at the time, but in Paris, they were welcomed with opened arms. My CD copy pictured above isn’t the original on French label BYG, but an Italian reissue I scooped up for a few bucks.

Throughout the 1960s, Don Cherry had traveled Europe extensively and played with local musicians. He’d met drummer Ed Blackwell in Ornette Coleman’s legendary quartet at the start of the decade. In 1966/67, Cherry recorded two brilliant albums as a leader for Blue Note, Complete Communion and Symphony For Improvisers, for which he enlisted Blackwell too.

This is to say they understood and trusted each other at this point, so much that the music on this record was entirely improvised, meaning nothing was preconceived. They’d even create the compositional structure right there on the spot, not writing anything down.

Cherry is playing his trademark pocket trumpet, but various Indian and East Asian bamboo flutes as well. When listening back to it, I had to think of how Shabaka Hutchings pulled out flutes upon flutes from his bag of surprises at Berlin’s Xjazz festival last year.

This is wonderfully free music, played by two extremely skilled and sensitive musicians who were perfectly in tune with each other.

Evan Parker & Paul Lytton – Collective Calls (Urban) (Two Microphones) (Incus / Otoroku)

recorded & first released 1972, re-released 2023

After the pandemic, I’d landed a new day job as a commissioning editor of a jazz platform that required me to travel to London regularly. I’d spend most of my days there in boardrooms, but at night I’d jump on the train to Dalston.

My destination was Café Oto, a communal venue where grey-bearded free jazz freaks mingled with art school kids and ageing hipsters. Those nights at Oto rekindled my love for free improvisation.

One night, I was waiting for avant-garde trumpeter Nate Wooley to start his performance. A bunch of middle-aged women and men, including me, had assembled much too early that night.

We’d taken our seats and were sipping on a pint or a cup of tea. Some of us were reading, but I couldn’t read because the music playing in the background was absolutely mind-boggling.

After sitting there listening closely for about 20 minutes, I walked up to the barman, ordered another tea and asked what they were playing. He seemed mildly excited about my question, turned around the iPad that showed me the album cover and told me that they had re-released this record on their own Otoroku label.

Of course I took a copy home with me that night.

Saxophonist Evan Parker and percussionist Paul Lytton are towering figures of European improvised music. This record was the fifth release to appear on Incus, the now-legendary free jazz label co-founded by Parker. Recording in a South London loft, the duo improvised with early electronics, tape recorders and self-built instruments like the ‘Dopplerphone’. Don’t ask me to explain what it is.

I don’t know what they’re even doing here. This feels more like early noise music than anything I’d usually associate with the term ‘jazz’. Even for people like Parker and Lytton, this is clearly on the weirder end of their discographies.

The liner notes say that Lytton was obsessed with a Folkways record, Sounds of the Junkyard, at the time. That album had track titles like “Steel Saw Cutting Channel Iron in Two Places”, which would totally work for Collective Calls too.

If I had to give you references, I’d have to use a typical journo phrase like ‘somewhere between Stockhausen and Sunny Murray’, which doesn’t say much, does it? Frankly, try not to overthink it. Just play this record loud, with the windows open.

Decoy with Joe McPhee – AC / DC (Otoruku)

recorded 2019, first released 2023

A handful of groups preserve some of the best properties of 60s/70s free jazz for the present day, still making this style of music sound exciting and vivid.

Besides Irreversible Entanglements and [Ahmed], who tend to receive more press coverage, there’s also this brilliant UK trio called Decoy, consisting of double-bassist John Edwards, drummer Steve Noble and organist Alexander Hawkins.

At Berlin’s JazzFest 2024, Decoy had the ungrateful job of playing after a spellbinding solo piano concert by Marilyn Crispell, a show that everyone was still raving about a year later.

They didn’t seem to mind though. Together with their special guest Joe McPhee on reeds, they blasted through their set with such energy and intensity that it was an utter joy to witness, especially after the introspective mass that Crispell’s set had been.

Back home, I immediately bought two of their albums, 2011’s double disc Spontaneous Combustion and this follow-up, recorded live at Cafe Oto (here we go again) on 10 May 2019.

All four musicians seem to be having the time of their lives on this recording. Hawkins is conjuring the weirdest, most eerie sounds from his Hammond B3. The rhythm section is playing loose and spacious, at times surprisingly funky, driving the group improvisation forward for a quarter of an hour and then making way for McPhee’s soulful melody lines.

As the title implies, AC / DC isn’t for the faint of heart. But it’s absolutely the right choice if you’re looking for some frenetic, cathartic free jazz to blow through your ear canal.

Silvia Bolognesi / Dudù Kouate / Griffin Rodriguez – Timing Birds (Fonterossa / Astral Spirits)

recorded 2021, first released 2023

Timing Birds was recorded over a December weekend in Siena, Tuscany, where Silvia Bolognesi lives.

At the center of the music is her powerful double-bass playing; Dudù Kouate contributes splashes of African instruments like the ngoni and the kalimba and some other percussion, while Bolognesi’s husband Griffin Rodriguez provides live electronic treatments and (post-)production.

This album is an infectious, weirdly accessible mix of AACM-style spoken word poetry (recited by Bolognesi and Kouate), earthy jazz-folk improvisations and subtle electronic effects.

It isn’t really free jazz in a strict sense, as parts of it – especially the poems – would probably have been written down beforehand, but it definitely has a free jazz feel to it.

The music seems to draw from Don Cherry’s Codona and the Art Ensemble Of Chicago, and it reminds me of a similarly percussion-focused early 70s free jazz outfit from St. Louis, the Black Artists Group (BAG).

There’s just something fresh and uncompromising about this music, a countercultural non-confirmist spirit that is quite rare to find these days.

Whereas much modern creative jazz tends to feel rather heady and heavy, Timing Birds sounds strangely light and effortless. A truly special album, which I’m extremely lucky to have discovered upon release and which I return to often.