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Title: Free Jazz: The Jazz Revolution of the '60s
Author: Robert Levin
Article:
Revised and expanded here, this piece originated as an "oral
essay" for the Cosmoetica Omniversica interview series on
www.sursumcorda.com.
More or less officially unveiled with the first New York
appearance of the Ornette Coleman Quartet at the Five Spot Café
in the fall of 1959, free jazz (or new black music, space music,
new thing, anti-jazz or abstract jazz as it would variously be
labeled), gave new dimension to the perennial "where's the
melody?" complaint against jazz.
For most of the uninitiated, what the Coleman group presented on
its opening night was in fact sheer cacophony.
Four musicians (a saxophonist, trumpeter, bassist and drummer)
abruptly began to play-with an apoplectic intensity and at a
bone-rattling volume-four simultaneous solos that had no
perceptible shared references or point of departure. Even unto
themselves the solos, to the extent that they could be isolated
as such in the density of sound that was being produced, were
without any fixed melodic or rhythmic structure. Consisting, by
turns, of short, jagged bursts and long meandering lines
unmindful of bar divisions and chorus measures they were,
moreover, laced with squeaks, squeals, bleats and strident
honks. A number ended and another began-or was it the same one
again? How were you to tell? No. No way this madness could
possibly have a method.
But umbilically connected to the emergent black cultural
nationalism movement, the madness did indeed have a method. The
avowed objective of the dramatic innovations that musicians like
Ornette, Cecil Taylor-and, in their footsteps, Sunny Murray,
Andrew Cyrille, Archie Shepp, Bill Dixon, Albert Ayler, Jimmy
Lyons, Eric Dolphy and (the later period) John Coltrane, among
hundreds of others-initiated and practiced from the late '50s
into the early '70s, was to restore black music to its original
identity as a medium of spiritual utility. When these men
abandoned an adherence to chord progressions, the 32-bar song
form, the fixed beat and the soloist/accompanist format, and
began to employ, among other things, simultaneous
improvisations, fragmented tempos and voice-like timbres, they
were very deliberately replacing, with ancient black
methodologies, those Western concepts and systems that had, by
their lights, worked to subvert and reduce black music in
America to either a pop music or (for many of them no less a
corruption of what black music was supposed to be) an art form.
Alan Silva, a one-time bassist with Cecil Taylor and then the
leader of his own thirteen-piece orchestra, made the point in an
interview I did with him for Rolling Stone.
"I don't want to make music that sounds nice," Silva told me. "I
want to make music that opens the possibility of real spiritual
communion between people. There's a flow coming from every
individual, a continuous flow of energy coming from the
subconscious level. The idea is to tap that energy through the
medium of improvised sound. I do supply the band with notes,
motifs and sounds to give it a lift-off point. I also direct the
band, though not in any conventional way-like I might suddenly
say 'CHORD!' But essentially I'm dealing with improvisation as
the prime force, not the tune. The thing is, if you put thirteen
musicians together and they all play at once, eventually a
cohesion, an order, will be reached, and it will be on a
transcendent plane."
(I commented in the interview that "Silva says his band wants to
commune with the spirit world and you aren't sure that it
doesn't. With thirteen musicians soloing at the same time, at
extraordinary decibel levels, astonishingly rapid speeds and
with complete emotional abandon for more than an hour, the band
arrives not only at moments of excruciating beauty, but at
sounds that rising in ecstatic rushes and waves and becoming
almost visible in the mesmerizing intensity, weight and force of
their vibrations, do for sure seem to be flushing weird,
spectral things from the walls, from the ceiling, from your
head.")
Of course not all of these musicians shared Silva's position
entirely. Some saw the music as an intimidating political weapon
in the battle for civil rights and exploited it as such. Others,
like Taylor, did and quite emphatically, regard themselves as
artists. For Taylor, a pianist and composer who took what he
needed not just from Ellington and Monk, but from Stravinsky,
Ives and Bartok, it wasn't about jettisoning Western influences
on jazz, but about absorbing them into a specifically black
esthetic.
For the most part, however, disparities among the younger
musicians of the period amounted to dialects of the same
language. All of them shared the "new black consciousness"-a new
pride in being black-and their reconstruction of jazz, their
purging of its Western elements, or their assertion of black
authority over those elements, was, to one degree or another,
intended to revive and reinstate the music's first purpose.
Silva saw broad extra-musical ramifications in his procedures.
He believed that by rejecting all externally imposed constraints
the inherent goodness in men would surface and enable them to
function in absolute harmony with both nature and each other.
"Man," he said to me once, coming off an especially vigorous
set. "In another ten years we won't even need traffic lights
we're gonna be so spiritually tuned to one another."
And I have to say that I agreed with him.
This was, after all, a period in history when "restrictions" of
every conceivable kind, from binding social and sexual mores to
(with the moon shot) the very law of gravity, were successfully
being challenged. If you were regularly visiting Timothy Leary's
"atomic" level of consciousness, and if you could call a girl
you'd been set up with on a blind date and she might say, "Let's
'ball' first and then I'll see if I want to have dinner with
you," you could be forgiven your certainty that nothing short of
a revolution in human nature itself was taking place.
And some of us who regarded Western values as both the cause of
all ill (had they not brought us to the brink of annihilation
with the hydrogen bomb?), and the principle impediment to such a
transformation, saw the new black music as leading the way, as
the veritable embodiment of what Herbert Marcuse called "the
revolution of unrepression."
In so heady a time, earnest unself-conscious debates about the
relative revolutionary merits of free jazz and rock-the other
musical phenomenon of the period-were not uncommon.
I remember a conversation I had with John Sinclair, the Michigan
activist, poet and author of Guitar Army.
John took the position that rock was the true "music of the
revolution."
No, I argued, rock did stand against the technocratic, Faustian
western sensibility. It did, and unabashedly, celebrate the
sensual and the mystical. But in these respects it only caught
up to where jazz had always been. In contrast to what some of
the younger black musicians were up to-the purging of white
elements African music had picked up in America-rock was simply
the first hip white popular music.
Rock, it was my point, never got beyond expressing the sentiment
of revolution while free jazz, by breaking with formal Western
disciplines-by going "outside," as the musicians termed it, of
Western procedures and methods and letting the music find its
own natural order and form-got to an actualization of what true
revolution would be. Rock's lyrics, I said, promoted, in many
instances, the idea of a spiritual revolution, but musically
rock remained bound to the very traditions and conventions that
its lyrics railed against and the audience never got a
demonstration or the experience of authentic spiritual
communion. Rock's lyrics were undermined and attenuated in the
very act of their expression by the system used to express them.
The new jazz, on the other hand, achieved freedom not just from
the purely formal structures of western musical systems, but,
implicitly, from the emotional and social ethos in which those
structures originated.
As I say, it was a heady time.
Now, of course, free jazz, in anything resembling a pristine
form just barely exists, and obviously it has ceased to exist
altogether as a revolutionary movement. Like other emblematic
movements of the epoch with which it shared the faith that a new
kind of human being would surface once all structure and
authority that wasn't internal in origin was rejected, free jazz
was ultimately ambushed by its naiveté.
But on purely musical terms free jazz has not been without an
ongoing impact. If it never achieved what Alan Silva expected it
to, it did (however contrary to its original ambition), expand
the vocabulary and the field of options available to mainstream
jazz musicians. And while they function today in what are
essentially universes of their own, Taylor, Coleman, Murray,
Cyrille, Shepp and Dixon are still very much around and
continuing to discover surprise and the marvelous.
Indeed, stripped though they may be of their mystique as
harbingers of an imminent utopia, these extraordinary musicians
continue to produce musical miracles as a matter of course. For
an especially vivid demonstration, try to catch Cecil in one of
his live performances-what he would call "exchanges of
energy"-with drummers like Max Roach or Elvin Jones.
In a bad time in every department of the culture, a time of
rampant-often willful-mediocrity, I could name no better tonic.
About the author:
Former contributor to The Village Voice and Rolling Stone.
Coauthor and coeditor, respectively, of two collections of
essays about rock and jazz in the '60s: "Music & Politics" and
"Giants of Black Music." Essays and fiction on numerous web
sites
THANK YOU FOR USING GOARTICLES.COM
The Articles Search Engine
Take A Moment To Visit Our Other Top Web Sites:
http://sitepronews.com http://ezinehub.com
http://www.allbusinessnews.com http://www.exactseek.com
================================================================
Title: Free Jazz: The Jazz Revolution of the '60s
Author: Robert Levin
Article:
Revised and expanded here, this piece originated as an "oral
essay" for the Cosmoetica Omniversica interview series on
www.sursumcorda.com.
More or less officially unveiled with the first New York
appearance of the Ornette Coleman Quartet at the Five Spot Café
in the fall of 1959, free jazz (or new black music, space music,
new thing, anti-jazz or abstract jazz as it would variously be
labeled), gave new dimension to the perennial "where's the
melody?" complaint against jazz.
For most of the uninitiated, what the Coleman group presented on
its opening night was in fact sheer cacophony.
Four musicians (a saxophonist, trumpeter, bassist and drummer)
abruptly began to play-with an apoplectic intensity and at a
bone-rattling volume-four simultaneous solos that had no
perceptible shared references or point of departure. Even unto
themselves the solos, to the extent that they could be isolated
as such in the density of sound that was being produced, were
without any fixed melodic or rhythmic structure. Consisting, by
turns, of short, jagged bursts and long meandering lines
unmindful of bar divisions and chorus measures they were,
moreover, laced with squeaks, squeals, bleats and strident
honks. A number ended and another began-or was it the same one
again? How were you to tell? No. No way this madness could
possibly have a method.
But umbilically connected to the emergent black cultural
nationalism movement, the madness did indeed have a method. The
avowed objective of the dramatic innovations that musicians like
Ornette, Cecil Taylor-and, in their footsteps, Sunny Murray,
Andrew Cyrille, Archie Shepp, Bill Dixon, Albert Ayler, Jimmy
Lyons, Eric Dolphy and (the later period) John Coltrane, among
hundreds of others-initiated and practiced from the late '50s
into the early '70s, was to restore black music to its original
identity as a medium of spiritual utility. When these men
abandoned an adherence to chord progressions, the 32-bar song
form, the fixed beat and the soloist/accompanist format, and
began to employ, among other things, simultaneous
improvisations, fragmented tempos and voice-like timbres, they
were very deliberately replacing, with ancient black
methodologies, those Western concepts and systems that had, by
their lights, worked to subvert and reduce black music in
America to either a pop music or (for many of them no less a
corruption of what black music was supposed to be) an art form.
Alan Silva, a one-time bassist with Cecil Taylor and then the
leader of his own thirteen-piece orchestra, made the point in an
interview I did with him for Rolling Stone.
"I don't want to make music that sounds nice," Silva told me. "I
want to make music that opens the possibility of real spiritual
communion between people. There's a flow coming from every
individual, a continuous flow of energy coming from the
subconscious level. The idea is to tap that energy through the
medium of improvised sound. I do supply the band with notes,
motifs and sounds to give it a lift-off point. I also direct the
band, though not in any conventional way-like I might suddenly
say 'CHORD!' But essentially I'm dealing with improvisation as
the prime force, not the tune. The thing is, if you put thirteen
musicians together and they all play at once, eventually a
cohesion, an order, will be reached, and it will be on a
transcendent plane."
(I commented in the interview that "Silva says his band wants to
commune with the spirit world and you aren't sure that it
doesn't. With thirteen musicians soloing at the same time, at
extraordinary decibel levels, astonishingly rapid speeds and
with complete emotional abandon for more than an hour, the band
arrives not only at moments of excruciating beauty, but at
sounds that rising in ecstatic rushes and waves and becoming
almost visible in the mesmerizing intensity, weight and force of
their vibrations, do for sure seem to be flushing weird,
spectral things from the walls, from the ceiling, from your
head.")
Of course not all of these musicians shared Silva's position
entirely. Some saw the music as an intimidating political weapon
in the battle for civil rights and exploited it as such. Others,
like Taylor, did and quite emphatically, regard themselves as
artists. For Taylor, a pianist and composer who took what he
needed not just from Ellington and Monk, but from Stravinsky,
Ives and Bartok, it wasn't about jettisoning Western influences
on jazz, but about absorbing them into a specifically black
esthetic.
For the most part, however, disparities among the younger
musicians of the period amounted to dialects of the same
language. All of them shared the "new black consciousness"-a new
pride in being black-and their reconstruction of jazz, their
purging of its Western elements, or their assertion of black
authority over those elements, was, to one degree or another,
intended to revive and reinstate the music's first purpose.
Silva saw broad extra-musical ramifications in his procedures.
He believed that by rejecting all externally imposed constraints
the inherent goodness in men would surface and enable them to
function in absolute harmony with both nature and each other.
"Man," he said to me once, coming off an especially vigorous
set. "In another ten years we won't even need traffic lights
we're gonna be so spiritually tuned to one another."
And I have to say that I agreed with him.
This was, after all, a period in history when "restrictions" of
every conceivable kind, from binding social and sexual mores to
(with the moon shot) the very law of gravity, were successfully
being challenged. If you were regularly visiting Timothy Leary's
"atomic" level of consciousness, and if you could call a girl
you'd been set up with on a blind date and she might say, "Let's
'ball' first and then I'll see if I want to have dinner with
you," you could be forgiven your certainty that nothing short of
a revolution in human nature itself was taking place.
And some of us who regarded Western values as both the cause of
all ill (had they not brought us to the brink of annihilation
with the hydrogen bomb?), and the principle impediment to such a
transformation, saw the new black music as leading the way, as
the veritable embodiment of what Herbert Marcuse called "the
revolution of unrepression."
In so heady a time, earnest unself-conscious debates about the
relative revolutionary merits of free jazz and rock-the other
musical phenomenon of the period-were not uncommon.
I remember a conversation I had with John Sinclair, the Michigan
activist, poet and author of Guitar Army.
John took the position that rock was the true "music of the
revolution."
No, I argued, rock did stand against the technocratic, Faustian
western sensibility. It did, and unabashedly, celebrate the
sensual and the mystical. But in these respects it only caught
up to where jazz had always been. In contrast to what some of
the younger black musicians were up to-the purging of white
elements African music had picked up in America-rock was simply
the first hip white popular music.
Rock, it was my point, never got beyond expressing the sentiment
of revolution while free jazz, by breaking with formal Western
disciplines-by going "outside," as the musicians termed it, of
Western procedures and methods and letting the music find its
own natural order and form-got to an actualization of what true
revolution would be. Rock's lyrics, I said, promoted, in many
instances, the idea of a spiritual revolution, but musically
rock remained bound to the very traditions and conventions that
its lyrics railed against and the audience never got a
demonstration or the experience of authentic spiritual
communion. Rock's lyrics were undermined and attenuated in the
very act of their expression by the system used to express them.
The new jazz, on the other hand, achieved freedom not just from
the purely formal structures of western musical systems, but,
implicitly, from the emotional and social ethos in which those
structures originated.
As I say, it was a heady time.
Now, of course, free jazz, in anything resembling a pristine
form just barely exists, and obviously it has ceased to exist
altogether as a revolutionary movement. Like other emblematic
movements of the epoch with which it shared the faith that a new
kind of human being would surface once all structure and
authority that wasn't internal in origin was rejected, free jazz
was ultimately ambushed by its naiveté.
But on purely musical terms free jazz has not been without an
ongoing impact. If it never achieved what Alan Silva expected it
to, it did (however contrary to its original ambition), expand
the vocabulary and the field of options available to mainstream
jazz musicians. And while they function today in what are
essentially universes of their own, Taylor, Coleman, Murray,
Cyrille, Shepp and Dixon are still very much around and
continuing to discover surprise and the marvelous.
Indeed, stripped though they may be of their mystique as
harbingers of an imminent utopia, these extraordinary musicians
continue to produce musical miracles as a matter of course. For
an especially vivid demonstration, try to catch Cecil in one of
his live performances-what he would call "exchanges of
energy"-with drummers like Max Roach or Elvin Jones.
In a bad time in every department of the culture, a time of
rampant-often willful-mediocrity, I could name no better tonic.
About the author:
Former contributor to The Village Voice and Rolling Stone.
Coauthor and coeditor, respectively, of two collections of
essays about rock and jazz in the '60s: "Music & Politics" and
"Giants of Black Music." Essays and fiction on numerous web
sites
