Free Jazz: A Brief Reminiscence of Jazz in the 60s

Revised and expanded here, this piece, from 2001, originated as an
"oral essay" for the Cosmoetica Omniversica interview series on
www.sursumcorda.com.  

More or less officially unveiled with the first New York appearance of the Ornette Coleman Quartet at the Five Spot Cafe in the fall of 1959, free jazz (or new black music, space music, new thing, anti-jazz or abstract jazz as it would variously be labeled), gave new dimension to the perennial “where’s the melody?” complaint against jazz.

For most of the uninitiated, what the Coleman group presented on its opening night was, in fact, sheer cacophony.

Four musicians (a saxophonist, trumpeter, bassist and drummer) abruptly began to play — with an apoplectic intensity and at abone-rattling volume — four simultaneous solos that had no perceptible shared references or point of departure. Even unto themselves the solos, to the extent that they could be isolated as such in the density of sound that was being produced, were without any fixed melodic or rhythmic structure. Consisting, by turns, of short, jagged bursts and long meandering lines unmindful of bar divisions and chorus measures they were, moreover, laced with squeaks, squeals, bleats and strident honks. A number ended and another began — or was it the same one again? How were you to tell? No. No way this madness could possibly have a method.

But umbilically connected to the emergent black cultural nationalism movement, the madness did for sure have a method. The avowed objective of the dramatic innovations that musicians like Ornette, Cecil Taylor— and, in their footsteps, Sunny Murray,  Andrew Cyrille, Archie Shepp, Bill Dixon, Albert Ayler, Jimmy Lyons, Eric Dolphy and (the later period) John Coltrane among hundreds of others — initiated and practiced was to restore black music to its original identity as a medium of spiritual utility. When these men abandoned an adherence to chord progressions, the 32-bar song
form, the fixed beat and the soloist/accompanist format, and began toemploy, among other things, simultaneous improvisations, fragmented tempos and voice-like timbres, they were very deliberately replacing,with ancient black methodologies, those Western concepts and systems hat had, by their lights, worked to subvert and reduce black music in America to either a pop music or (for many of them no less a corruption of what black music was supposed to be) an art form.

Alan Silva, a one-time bassist with Cecil Taylor and then the leader of his own thirteen-piece orchestra, made this point in an interview I did with him for Rolling Stone.

“I don’t want to make music that sounds nice,” Silva told me. “I want to make music that opens the possibility of real spiritual communion between people. There’s a flow coming from every individual, a continuous flow of energy coming from the subconscious level. The idea is to tap that energy through the medium of improvised sound. I do supply the band with notes, motifs and sounds to give it a lift-off point. I also direct the band, though not in any conventional way — like I might suddenly say ‘CHORD!’ But essentially, I’m dealing with improvisation as the prime force, not the tune. The thing is, if you put thirteen musicians together and they all play at once, eventually acohesion, an order, will be reached, and it will be on a transcendent plane.”

I commented in the piece that “Silva says his band wants to commune
with the spirit world and you aren’t sure that it doesn’t. With thirteen
musicians soloing at the same time, at extraordinary decibel levels,
astonishingly rapid speeds and with complete emotional abandon for more
than an hour, the band arrives not only at moments of exceptional
beauty, but at sounds that rising in ecstatic rushes and waves and
becoming almost visible in the mesmerizing intensity, weight and force
of their vibrations, do for sure seem to be flushing weird, spectral
things from the walls, from the ceiling, from your head.”

It should be noted that not all of these musicians shared Silva’s
position entirely. Some saw the music as an intimidating political
weapon in the battle for civil rights and exploited it as such. Others,
like Taylor, did and quite emphatically, regard themselves as artists.
Though no less spiritually inclined than most of his associates, Taylor,
a pianist and composer who took what he wanted not just from Ellington
and Monk, but from Stravinsky, Ives and Bartók, it wasn’t about
jettisoning the Western elements of jazz but about discriminately
incorporating what he found valuable in classical European musics into a
specifically black aesthetic.

For the most part, however, disparities among the younger musicians
of the period amounted to dialects of the same language. All of them
shared the “new black consciousness” — a new pride in being black — and
their reconstruction of jazz, their purging or, in the case of musicians
like Taylor, the judicious implementation of certain of its Western
elements, was, to one degree or another, intended to revive and
reinstate the music’s first purpose.

Silva saw broad extra-musical ramifications in his procedures. He
believed that by rejecting all externally imposed constraints the
inherent goodness in men would surface and enable them to function in
absolute harmony with both nature and each other. “Man,” he said to me
upon coming off an especially electrifying set. “In another ten years we
won’t even need traffic lights we’re gonna be so spiritually tuned to
one another.”

And I have to say that I was inclined to agree with him.

This was, after all, a period in history when “restrictions” of every
conceivable kind, from binding social and sexual mores to (with the
moon shot) the very law of gravity, were successfully being challenged.
If you were regularly visiting Timothy Leary’s “atomic” level of
consciousness, and if you could call a girl you’d just met for a date
and she might say, “Let’s ‘ball’ first and then I’ll see if I want to
have dinner with you,” you could be forgiven your certainty that nothing
short of a sea change in human nature itself was taking place.

And some of us who regarded Western values as both the cause of all
ill (had they not brought us to the brink of annihilation with the
hydrogen bomb?), and the principle impediment to such a transformation,
saw the new black music as leading the way, as the veritable embodiment
of what Herbert Marcuse called “the revolution of unrepression.”

Free Jazz vs. Rock

In so heady a time, earnest unself-conscious debates about the
relative revolutionary merits of free jazz and rock — the other musical
phenomenon of the period — were not uncommon.

I remember a conversation I had with John Sinclair, the Michigan activist, poet and author of Guitar Army (and the co-author, with me, of Music & Politics).

John took the position that rock was the true “music of the revolution.”

No, I argued, rock did stand against the technocratic, Faustian
western sensibility. It did, and unabashedly, celebrate the sensual and
sometimes the mystical. But in contrast to what some of the younger
black musicians were up to, rock was simply the first hip white popular
music.

Rock, it was my point, never got beyond expressing the sentiment
of revolution while free jazz, by breaking with, or selectively
utilizing, Western procedures — by going “outside,” as the musicians
termed it, of established approaches and methods and letting the music
find its own natural order and form — got to an actualization of what
true revolution would be. Rock’s lyrics, I said, promoted, in many
instances, the idea of a spiritual revolution, but musically rock
remained bound to the very conventions that its lyrics railed against
and the audience never got a demonstration or the experience of
authentic spiritual communion. Rock’s lyrics were attenuated in the very
act of their expression by the system used to express them. The new
jazz, on the other hand, achieved freedom not just from many of the
formal structures of Western musical systems, but, implicitly, from the
emotional and social ethos in which those systems were rooted.

As I say, it was a heady time.

Now, of course, free jazz, is just another genre. It has ceased to
exist altogether as a revolutionary entity. Like other emblematic
movements of the epoch with which it shared the faith that a new kind of
human being would surface once all structure and authority that wasn’t
internal in origin was rejected, free jazz was ultimately ambushed by
its naiveté.

But on purely musical terms free jazz has not been without an ongoing
impact. If it never achieved what Alan Silva expected it to, it did
expand the vocabulary and the field of options available to modern jazz
musicians. And while they function today in what are essentially spheres
of their own, Taylor, Coleman, Murray, Cyrille, Shepp and Dixon are
still very much around and continuing to discover the marvelous.

Indeed, stripped though they may be of their mystique as harbingers
of an imminent utopia, these extraordinary musicians continue to produce
musical miracles as a matter of course. For an always compelling
demonstration, try to catch Cecil in one of his live performances — what
he would call “exchanges of energy” — with drummers like Tony Oxley.

In a bad time in every department of the culture, a time of rampant — often, it seems, willful — mediocrity, I could name no better tonic.

Remarks on the ’60s from the interview that followed

It’s admittedly facile to cast it this way, but you could say that
what we mean by the “‘60s” began with the Cuban Missile Crisis and ended
with the moon shot — the moon shot and the Yippies failed attempt to
levitate the Pentagon and exorcise the “demons” that inhabited it.

At bottom the ‘60s were a reaction to the prospect of total
annihilation posed by the invention of the hydrogen bomb and they were
rooted in the belief that what was wrong, what had brought us to this
place, was the denial and suppression of our true selves, of the human
beings we were intended to be.

This belief — variously shaped, nourished and focused by a conflation
of psychedelic drugs, birth control pills, the popularization of
Freudian psychology and Eastern philosophies, glaring racial and gender
inequities and a clearly unjustified war in Vietnam — opened virtually
every tradition and institution, every custom and convention and every
embodiment and instrument of authority, order and structure, to attack.
On one level or another everything from the anti-war, civil rights and
woman’s rights movements, to the anti-materialism and sexual abandon of
the period, to spontaneous prose, rock and free jazz, stemmed from the
conviction that somewhere in antiquity humanity had taken the wrong path
and that the course could be corrected.

The enemy was the superego, the cultural, social and psychological
restraints we’d inflicted on ourselves. Destroying the superego would
yield the good human beings we were supposed to be. It was, again as
Marcuse described it, a “revolution of unrepression.” We wanted to
abolish the apparently arbitrary and misbegotten rules that artificially
limited us and led to deluded thinking and behavior. We wanted,
ultimately, to abolish the constricting forces of guilt and shame
themselves. Guilt and shame were invented by authority, they were trips
governments and parents laid on you to keep you in line. We wanted to
take an unfettered pride and joy in our bodies. We wanted to be free of
the guilt and shame that had crippled and disfigured us.

This is where Jerry Rubin was coming from when he exhorted us to kill our parents.

Of course, I’m talking about what the ‘60s were in their deepest
aspirations. The vanguard figures — like Timothy Leary, Alan Watts,
Norman Brown, Allen Ginsberg, Marcuse — envisioned a kind of benign
anarchy, a society with no need for governments or police; a society
ordered by natural needs, appetites and rhythms and made up of men free
of neurosis and in perfect harmony with both nature and other men.

And fueled as it was by the sheer number of people involved (and in
what seemed every corner of the culture) I don’t think the sense of
utopian possibility we were feeling could possibly be exaggerated.
Certainly the intensity of the psychic fevers we were experiencing in
the East Village (which to me was the epicenter) can’t be overstated. In
the East Village, and in addition to all manner of radical political
activity, there was an amazing pullulation of iconoclastic art in every
category — dance, music, theater, poetry, painting. People like
Ginsberg, Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Sam Shepard, Ornette Coleman, Cecil
Taylor, Roi Jones (Amiri Baraka), Kate Millet, Yvonne Ranier, Lucinda
Childs, Meredith Monk, Ed Sanders and the Fugs (I’m forgetting a couple
of dozen other major players) were all living and working within a
one-mile radius and feeding, challenging, validating and energizing one
another.

But upheavals like this were hardly limited to New York. They were
occurring everywhere — San Francisco, Paris, on every college campus and
in the smallest towns. And, Jesus, we were going to the fucking moon —
successfully breaking the very law of fucking gravity!

So those of us who were sucked into the vortex of the ‘60s can maybe
be forgiven the fact that we were failing to recognize something very
basic — that we were challenging a reality that was beyond our capacity
to fundamentally change. There was, after all, only so far we could go
without entering into a void. We could tinker with social, cultural,
economic and political systems — make reforms, expand our horizons,
achieve more justice — but essentially society already reflected the
best we could do.

I mean we didn’t recognize (and I’m standing behind Ernest Becker
here) that the very problems we were attempting to overcome — the
constraining social and sexual codes, the emotional hang-ups and the
destructive tendencies we wanted to relieve ourselves of — were actually
working solutions to our worst and deepest problem, the problem of
mortality. (We also didn’t appreciate that guilt and shame weren’t
created by society, but were built into our essence, that they were a
natural consequence of living under a death sentence.)

We didn’t understand the legitimacy and necessity of repression and
delusion. We didn’t understand (I’ve said all this elsewhere, but I
think it bears repeating) that as debilitating as repression and
delusion were, they enabled us to deny and distort certain untenable
truths of existence and to make an otherwise intolerable condition
somewhat manageable. We didn’t realize that we had no choice, that what
made us crazy, stupid and destructive (what, for an obvious example in
the current world — and to the objective of transcending death in an
afterlife — has spawned all these suicide bombers and Christian
Fundamentalists) was our profound and abiding need to mitigate the
terror that the fact of death causes us. We didn’t see that the reality
of the human condition required us to be screwed up.

Off-the-wall as it sounds, you could say that the hydrogen bomb was invented in order to create a potentially controllable death locus to focus on.      

But in our millennial zeal we were oblivious to such things and I
think that at the Pentagon and with the Apollo landing, we were
expecting some kind of palpable divine ratification, expecting God to
show His face and prove us right. That didn’t happen, of course. Our
acid visions turned out to have no physical application at the Pentagon.
And the moon was only a barren rock — no Kubrickian monolith buried
there to give blessing and impetus to the project. It was
disappointments like these, disappointments equal in their size to the
size of our aspirations, that took the heart out of the ‘60s.

It wasn’t long afterwards, remember, that mind-expanding drugs began
to be replaced — and necessarily — by mood-elevating stimulants like
cocaine.

Beyond the moon shot it was just the motor revolving down after it’s
been shut off. I know the ‘60s are commonly judged to have ended when we
withdrew from Vietnam. But they’d already expired at the foot of the
Pentagon and in the deserts of the moon.