Free Jazz and the “New Thing”

Abstract

Ornette Coleman’s Free Jazz was at the center of controversy in early 1960s music journalism. Released in 1961, the album contains a single thirty-seven-minute performance that is abstract and opaque. Its presumed cacophony and lack of order made Free Jazz emblematic of the “new thing,” the moniker journalists used to describe jazz’s emergent avant-garde, and links were drawn between the album’s sound and the supposed anti-traditionalism and radical (racial) politics of its artists and their supporters. This article does three things. It examines prominent reportage surrounding the album and the “new thing,” outlining the analytical shortfalls that helped to promulgate common misunderstandings about the music. It presents a new analytical framework for understanding Free Jazz, and it explains how the performance was organized and executed by exploring the textural provenance of its abstraction: heterophony. Heterophony, a term commonly used in ethnomusicology but with various shades of meaning, is theorized here as an opaque, decentralized musical texture. It opens up new epistemological terrain in the context of experimental improvised music by affording multiple simultaneous subjectivities (i.e., different sonified identities), interpolating the listener into a dynamic and constantly shifting sonic mesh. The experiment that was Free Jazz, I argue, is one of collective musical agency, in which the opacity of that sonic mesh—woven by the musicians in coordinated action—subverts traditional expectations of clarity, cohesion, and order, beckoning the listener to hear more openly, or more “freely.”

Textures of Black sound and affect: Life and death in New Orleans

“…The complex interweaving of melodies heard in the jazz funeral procession—sometimes antiphonal, sometimes heterophonic, sometimes polyphonic, never in strict unison or synchrony—is called simply “the New Orleans style.” The blend of trumpet, trombone, and clarinet was the signature sound of early jazz as it emerged at the turn of the twentieth century (Brothers, 2006, 31–54; Hobson, 2014, 47–58). The dominant texture of the New Orleans style is heterophony, what Kwami Coleman (2021, 279) defines as “multiple autonomous improvising musical voices, each occupying the role of soloist and accompanist simultaneously.” Most significant is the “shared goal of synergetic cohesion” (279).…”

“…1212Kwami Coleman (2021: 279–80) suggests that the heterophonic textures heard in Ornette Coleman's 1961 LP Free Jazz “restored one of the canonical jazz tradition's most primordial elements: ‘spontaneous group improvisation’” (quoting a contemporary review of the album).…”