In the continuously
evolving history of artistic expression, certain movements
emerge that challenge the very foundations of our aesthetic
sensibilities. In the early and mid-20th century, Expressionism
and free jazz were two audacious musics that not only
broke all the rules but broke the spirit of many well-intentioned
listeners.
If the terms are
not quite interchangeable, Expressionism and free jazz
share a common genesis that goes back to the early 20th
century with the introduction of the 12-tone chromatic
scale, a revolutionary construct that dispensed with
a tonal center. Among Expressionism's major luminaries
were Anton Webern, Alan Berg and Arnold Schoenberg.
In classical music expressionism elevates the subjective
realm of human feelings to a paramount position. It
embraces atonality as a means of conveying intense psychological
states while reflecting the anxieties and upheavals
of the era.
In the late 1940s,
Abstract Expressionism takes the art world by surprise.
The movement is led by iconoclast Jackson Pollack, who
retires his brush in favour of hurling paint at the
canvas. With a nod to bebop, the baton is next passed
in the 1960s with the explosive arrival of free jazz.
In both genres, the aleatoric (chance) is incorporated
as a structural device; and with the advent of free
jazz, it becomes fashionable to 'compose in real time,'
a feat that, by its very nature, blurs the distinction
between improvisation and composition.
For the purpose
of this essay, I will be using the term free jazz to
describe music that emerged in America through the ground
breaking work of such Black composers as Ornette Coleman,
John Coltrane, Cecil Taylor, Sun Ra and Archie Shepp.
Free jazz, in
its broadest strokes, can be described as music unburdened
by preconceived chordal or time patterns and unconstrained
by conventional harmonic structures. But it was also
a music that imposed an almost unrealistic burden upon
its listeners, a weight that, as it turned out, few
were equipped to carry.
If the three predominant
scales in the world are the pentatonic, which forms
the basis of Chinese and Japanese music, the diatonic
comprised of the black and white notes on the piano,
and the maqam, common to the Arab world and India, it
is the Western diatonic scale that has enjoyed the most
widespread global reception. The genesis of these scales
corresponds to distinct emotional states and cultural
divergences. The maqam scale necessitates more precise
intervals to reflect the predominantly tragic worldview
prevalent in India and Islam throughout much of their
history. Free jazz, in its quest for purity of expression,
borrows heavily from the atonal and 24-tone maqam scale.
This short-shrifting of the orthodox Western chromatic
scale is not merely a technical departure; it is a statement
of intent.
Free jazz shatters
all established aesthetic rules. Or to cast a more charitable
light upon its intentions, it endeavors to redefine,
or reinvent our conventional understanding of aesthetics
and beauty. This brave new aesthetic, or perhaps more
accurately, anti-aesthetic, did not emerge ex nihilo,
which raises the question:
Why would musicians
consciously create a form of music that appeared to
expressly, almost aggressively, keep the listener at
arm's length? Free jazz was often so dense, so overwhelmingly
powerful, so seemingly depleted of oxygen, that even
the best-intentioned listeners found themselves unable
to penetrate its sonic wall.
If the outsider
is to understand the satisfaction this new music provides
the composer and musician, he must view its development
though both historical and psychological lenses.
Since their unasked-for
arrival in America, Blacks have been systematically
and brutally excluded from virtually all forms of participation
in the nation they helped build. Just as it is a widely
recognized psychological phenomenon of relationships,
that the abused, when presented with the opportunity,
often, and tragically, becomes the abuser. Since Blacks
were economically and socially excluded, free jazz,
in a perverse yet historically understandable inversion,
afforded them the opportunity to become the excluder,
which in America and Europe would have targeted the
predominantly white audience. This may sound facile,
or overly simplistic, but how else are we to account
for a music that conjures up the image of an impenetrable
fortress, seemingly designed to keep the listener out?
Free jazz weaponized
music, and as an angry music it is without precedent.
In John Coltrane's "Expression," his final
recorded album from 1967, the torrent of notes seem
to issue from an automatic weapon. Before this sonic
onslaught, the ear instinctively cowers, contracts,
desperately seeking safe harbor from what sounds like
machine gun fire masquerading as notation. Well-intentioned
listeners, devoted jazz lovers, yearn for entry, for
a point of connection, but find none. Instead, they
find themselves facing a wall of sound. In a profound
and deeply unsettling sense they are shut out, just
as Blacks were unjustly shut out from every normal facet
of life. The immediate effect is that the listener is
left stranded, grappling with the question of what circumstance
could have unleashed such anger and abuse, especially
when juxtaposed against Coltrane's memorable collaboration
with Johnny Hartman, where the former played with the
sweetness and elegance of a nightingale.
However, the insurrectionary
nature of free jazz did not go unnoticed by some of
its critics who struggled to reconcile its brave new
aesthetic with the more orthodox notion of musical artistry.
LJC, the London
Jazz Collector, in its review of Archie Shepp's
"Magic of the Ju Ju" observes: "has
abandoned the cool aesthetic of angular melodies and
shimmering space, and replaced it with chaos and anger,
in a raging fiery act of spiritual exorcism..."
Zotter, commenting
on Coltrane's "Expression," offers a similar
assessment: "the cosmic dissonances, brought
to their most extreme boundary (devoid of boundary),
were now and forever abandoned to themselves, tossed
there in a corner."
C. Michael Bailey,
from All About Jazz, does not mince his words
in his review of Ornette Coleman's album "Free
Jazz" (1961): "Without context, this music
is effectively un-listenable . . . begins as a schizophrenic
note salad, borne in chaos and given only a 'whiff'
of direction. The music may best be described as the
best New Orleans Dixieland exposed and mutated by
radiation exposure. It is the phenomenon where the
music, at first blush, sounds completely untethered."
Adducing the word
'whiff' in a musical context is arguably as revealing
as the music that aroused the sensation, perhaps of
the kind latrine orderlies are all too familiar with.
Thomas Cunniffe,
referring to the master of dissonance, experimenter
sans égal, Sun Ra, described his contribution to the
genre as "joyful noise." Well, he got it half
right.
Free jazz is insurrectional.
At the expense of everything else, and with the compliance
of the jazz elite and recording companies, self-expression
is turned into a tyranny. Anger that once merely smoldered
is liberated and transmuted into a form of music that
ambushes instead of embraces. Black musicians do not
simply cancel the mostly white audiences; they mow them
down, render them helpless and confused vis-à-vis what
they had come to expect and what is, in fact, delivered.
Under the auspices
of free jazz, the piano, normally a melodic and harmonic
anchor, is turned into a more percussive instrument,
its keys struck with a force that often verges on violence.
The saxophone, capable of unparalleled lyrical beauty,
is transformed into what can only be described as a
spit or shriek machine, its notes abrasive, its overall
sound resembling a disgorgement or vomiting.
Earlier in the
20th century, atonal or dissonant music emerged as the
white musician's expression, but it was not an angry
music but rather an expression of alienation, of how
the composer or musician felt in a world he no longer
recognized. The music was the measure of a world gone
to hell, of mass culture for whom a line of credit and
a line of coke were the new gods on the block. Free
jazz, in its own manner, prefigured the coming into
being of the "Nowhere Man," immortalized in
a song by John Lennon in the mid-1960s.
However, the war
free jazz waged against foundational aesthetics did
not succeed. It is one thing to refuse to pander to
an audience, it is altogether something else to disenfranchise
it. If the critics managed to find a cozy niche for
the movement in the history of jazz, it was only because
the best white musicians, shameless epigones, bought
into it. Imitation continues to be the highest form
of flattery.
Free jazz failed
to resonate with broader audiences because it violated
what might be considered the non-negotiable laws of
music aesthetics, an aesthetic evolved over thousands
of years in respect to what constitutes an acceptable
temporal interval (1/4, 1/8... 1/32) between the notes
as well as the crucial spaces (silences) between them.
It seems that no matter how elastic are the concepts
of beauty and melody, they can only be stretched so
far before they break, or, in the case of free jazz,
snap back with jarring, punitive recoil. It is true
that the 24-tone Arabic scale, with its micro-tones,
appears to break these Western-centric rules, but the
appreciation of that music is largely confined to the
hard-scrabble life of peoples for whom the future, for
much of their history, has held little promise. The
premise and purpose of that music is to provide an alt-world,
a temporary respite from the real world.
As for the apologists
of free jazz, those who truly believe that we just do
not get it, can we agree that the truth of where we
stand vis-á-vis the position we take on a particular
music is inescapably revealed in the music we consistently
listen to and return to again and again in the privacy
of our homes? I can shout to the world that I love the
late Coltrane, but if I only listen to Bill Evans, then
it means that the former, or free jazz, regardless of
how passionately I argue for its merits, simply, but
decisively, did not cut it.
If, as Arthur Koestler
observes, "a snob is someone who when reading Dostoyevsky
is moved not by what he reads but by himself reading
Dostoyevsky," I can't help but wonder what percentage
of free jazz enthusiasts are snob. The truth of who
we are at any given moment is determined by what we
spend our time on, or as Antoine de Saint-Exupéry writes
in The Little Prince: "the value of the
rose is the time I spend with it."
On the subject
of jazz and snobism, André
Hodeir has much to say. From Jazz: Its Evolution
and Essence,
Jazz fans are
too thoroughly convinced of the superiority of their
taste to be able to keep it to themselves . . . the
jazz concert is the gathering place for all kinds
of intolerance and prejudice . . . only a step divides
intolerance from fanaticism. The most forbidding fan
is the one who feels that he has been initiated into
all the secrets of jazz. The exclusive partian of
one kind of jazz wouldn't think of letting his neighbour
listen in peace to an opposing tendency.(p.15-16)
Finally, I must
allow that I have made all manner of claim and presumption
in this declarative essay. Since aesthetic judgments,
by their very nature, cannot be rationalized, I cannot
prove, as in mathematics, that one genre of music is
inherently superior to another. I am simply presenting
my critical arguments against, just as free jazz has
entered its aesthetic into the public domain, where
what works for one person or culture, may not work for
another. Yet there is something to be said about music
that possesses a global reach, that is able to find
a permanent home in a foreign culture, and/or endures
though time.
During the Montreal
Jazz Festival just prior to Covid, I had occasion to
attend concerts by Ornette Coleman and Wayne Shorter,
both then well into their 70s. At peace with themselves,
all the anger and hatred purged by the hard-earned wisdom
of their years, and notably playing conventional jazz,
the ear delighted in the wonderful balance and beauty
that issued forth. In turn, the audience felt exalted,
and perhaps even wiser for having been present. It occurred
to me that the musical choices made during those two
concerts were tantamount to a critique of free jazz
by, nota bene, two of jazz's most distinguished
exemplars.
