Free jazz
Free jazz or Free Form in the early- to mid-1970s[1] is a style of avant-garde jazz or an experimental approach to jazz improvisation that developed in the late 1950s and early 1960s when musicians attempted to change or break down jazz conventions, such as regular tempos, tones, and chord changes. Musicians during this period believed that the bebop and modal jazz that had been played before them was too limiting, and became preoccupied with creating something new. The term "free jazz" was drawn from the 1960 Ornette Coleman recording Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation. Europeans tend to favor the term "free improvisation". Others have used "modern jazz", "creative music", and "art music".
For the Ornette Coleman album, see Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation.Free jazz
The ambiguity of free jazz presents problems of definition. Although it is usually played by small groups or individuals, free jazz big bands have existed. Although musicians and critics claim it is innovative and forward-looking, it draws on early styles of jazz and has been described as an attempt to return to primitive, often religious, roots. Although jazz is an American invention, free jazz musicians drew heavily from world music and ethnic music traditions from around the world. Sometimes they played African or Asian instruments, unusual instruments, or invented their own. They emphasized emotional intensity and sound for its own sake, exploring timbres.
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Canadian artist Stan Douglas uses free jazz as a direct response to complex attitudes towards African-American music. Exhibited at documenta 9 in 1992, his video installation Hors-champs (meaning "off-screen") addresses the political context of free jazz in the 1960s, as an extension of black consciousness[23] and is one of his few works to directly address race.[24] Four American musicians, George E. Lewis (trombone), Douglas Ewart (saxophone), Kent Carter (bass) and Oliver Johnson (drums) who lived in France during the free jazz period in the 1960s, improvise Albert Ayler's 1965 composition "Spirits Rejoice."[25]
New York Eye and Ear Control is Canadian artist Michael Snow's 1964 film with a soundtrack of group improvisations recorded by an augmented version of Albert Ayler's group and released as the album New York Eye and Ear Control.[26] Critics have compared the album with the key free jazz recordings: Ornette Coleman's Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation and John Coltrane's Ascension. John Litweiler regards it favourably in comparison because of its "free motion of tempo (often slow, usually fast); of ensemble density (players enter and depart at will); of linear movement".[27] Ekkehard Jost places it in the same company and comments on "extraordinarily intensive give-and-take by the musicians" and "a breadth of variation and differentiation on all musical levels".[28]
French artist Jean-Max Albert, as trumpet player[29][30] of Henri Texier's first quintet, participated in the 1960s in one of the first expressions of free jazz in France. As a painter, he then experimented plastic transpositions of Ornette Coleman's approach. Free jazz, painted in 1973, used architectural structures in correspondence to the classical chords of standard harmonies confronted with an unrestrained all over painted improvisation.[31]
Jean-Max Albert still explores the free jazz lessons, collaborating with pianist François Tusques in experimental films : Birth of Free Jazz, Don Cherry... these topics considered through a pleasant and poetic way.[32]