Free Jazz

Free Jazz takes its name from alto saxophonist Ornette Coleman's 1960 Free Jazz LP, and remains a controversial genre four decades later. While earlier musicians like pianist Lennie Tristano had experimented with unstructured, spontaneous group interplay prior to Coleman's arrival on the New York scene, his group's approach marked a clean break with the rules of Bop and modal jazz. The goal was to use pre-composed material as a jumping off point, without the safety net provided by predetermined backing harmonies or chord progressions. As the decade moved on, the music took on more radically expressionistic angles, with tenor saxophonists like Albert Ayler and later John Coltrane blowing furious cascades of sound amidst storming, surging drumbeats that often bore little resemblance to the swinging and metrical rhythms of Bop. Dwindling audiences and the deaths of leaders like Coltrane and Ayler led the genre toward decline by the late '60s, but artists both old and new still work to keep the music alive on an underground level.