When hearing free jazz for the first time, many people’s reaction is: What are they doing?
There’s no melody to hum along to, the beat seems to have disappeared, the saxophone sounds like it’s screaming, and the piano is played as if someone is elbowing the keyboard. You might suspect you’ve opened the wrong file.
But if you give it a little time, it might become the most honest music you’ve ever heard. Or rather, it’s actually accessible enough—just closing your eyes and letting it stimulate your senses is enough to understand it.
Profound Origins
The story starts in 1959. At that time, jazz was already very mature. Bebop had been played for nearly twenty years, and rhythm, chords, and musical forms all followed a set of rules. Most people thought it was fine, but some musicians began to feel they should make something new.
Ornette Coleman was one of them. He came from Texas with a white plastic saxophone and started performing at the Five Spot club in New York. He pulled together a band with no pianist (eliminating the constraints of chords), and what they played had almost no fixed key or beat—just a group of people improvising, listening to each other, and responding to each other.
The only thing each musician had to do was genuinely listen to what the other musicians were playing, so they would know what to play themselves.
At the time, even Miles Davis was confused, saying he was “all mixed up inside.” Traditionalists thought it was a joke, but Coleman went on to release The Shape of Jazz to Come (1959), and then in 1960, he released the album named exactly that: Free Jazz—a double quartet, eight people improvising simultaneously for forty minutes. The name “Free Jazz” was officially established.
In the following years, this path widened. John Coltrane was originally a giant of hard bop, but he increasingly moved in this direction, releasing Ascension in 1965, an almost unceasing group improvisation that sounded like music on fire.
There was also Sun Ra, wearing a pharaoh hat, leading a large group of people to play what he called “music from outer space.” You couldn’t tell if he was joking or serious, but it was exactly this ambiguity that made his music so fascinating.
Chaos
Simply put: it’s like Master Ma’s “Lightning Five-Whiplash”—chaotic, but not completely random.
The core of free jazz is collective improvisation. It’s not one person soloing while the others accompany; rather, everyone is playing, listening, and making decisions all at the same time. This requires an extremely high degree of tacit understanding, and it also requires you to be willing to surrender the sense of control. In the music, there is no “what the next measure should be like,” only “what am I hearing right now, and how should I respond.”
The rhythm is free; it might suddenly speed up, slow down, or disappear completely. The pitch is free; they might deliberately blow out hoarse noise, or scream in the high register for a long time. There is usually no melody, or only fragments. But the emotion is intensely strong—anger, sorrow, ecstasy, devotion—which is very hard to fake.
There is a saying I find quite accurate:
Free jazz is theater without a script.
Where to start listening
I don’t recommend starting with the most extreme ones. Try a few classics first; if you like them, you can explore further on your own.
Ornette Coleman’s The Shape of Jazz to Come
John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme (1964)
Albert Ayler’s Spiritual Unity (1964)
Cecil Taylor’s Unit Structures (1966) Pharoah Sanders’s Karma
Taken out of that historical context and listened to today, what it gives me is more personal. Truthful expression and unadorned directness, which, in an age where everything is meticulously produced, have actually become quite rare.
