Ekkehard Jost's Free Jazz (Part 2)

Archie Shepp, Albert Ayler, Don Cherry, the AACM and the Sun Ra Arkestra

This is a brief, non-scientific summary of Ekkehard Jost’s standard genre primer Free Jazz, first published in 1975. All quotes, except where otherwise indicated, are from the 1994 Da Capo Press paperback edition of this book.

In the first part of this post, I’ve looked at late 1950s modal jazz and early to mid-1960s free jazz by analyzing the music of John Coltrane, Eric Dolphy, Charles Mingus, Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor.

In this second part, I’ll follow three game-changing reedists of the second free jazz generation from the mid- to the late 1960s: Archie Shepp, Albert Ayler and Don Cherry. We’ll also take a look at Chicago’s Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), and arguably the first big band of free jazz, the Sun Ra Arkestra.

For the longest time, jazz music had been defined by a largely homogenous system of shifting musical conventions and agreements: The dominant style went from swing (1930s) to bebop (1940s) to cool jazz and hard bop (1950s).

The 1960s were different. Sure, it was the era of post-bop and free jazz, but those styles weren’t as homogenous as previous ones; instead they were shaped by the heterogenity of many players’ individual styles.

“Their only point of agreement lay in a negation of traditional norms”, musicologist Ekkehard Jost writes in Free Jazz. “As a result, the conventions that arose in free jazz (…) were never as universally binding as those in traditional areas of jazz.”

In Ron Mann’s 1981 documentary Imagine the Sound, pianist Paul Bley explains that the liberation of jazz from its strict musical conventions happened in two stages:

• First on the harmonic level – the rhythm stayed the same, but the improvisation in the solos proceeded from the tonal center to “take a trip”.

• In a second phase, the rhythm section followed course:

  • Bassists stopped playing steady time and played melodic material that was usually reserved for the soloists.

  • Drummers were the last to give up their time-keeping role, eventually leaving steady meter behind completely.

• As a consequence of these changes, Bley says, “the music changed character in a dramatic way. It sounded chaotic to the casual listener.”

What felt hectic, disorganized and shrill to some, others embraced as an apt expression of their inner landscapes and the turmoil of the political sphere.

To this day, the music of the following game-changing artists represents disobedience, rebelliousness and nonconformity.