Free Jazz

Ornette Coleman’s 1959 quartet at the Five Spot Café in New York — “Lonely Woman,” The Shape of Jazz to Come, Change of the Century, the double-quartet recording Free Jazz (1960) — defined the new form and named it. Free jazz removed the chord sequence from improvisation. The musicians no longer played “the changes” — the pre-agreed harmonic progression that had organized jazz improvisation since bebop. Instead they improvised melodically, responding to each other in real time without a harmonic grid.

Coleman called his theoretical framework harmolodics — the idea that melody, harmony and rhythm were equivalent and interchangeable, that each musician could express any of the three simultaneously. In practice, this produced music that sounded simultaneously chaotic and deeply conversational: the musicians were listening to each other more completely, not less, because there was no harmonic safety net.

The movement ramified in several directions. John Coltrane’s late work (Ascension, 1965; Meditations, 1965; Interstellar Space, 1967) pushed free improvisation toward religious ecstasy and sonic density. The Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) in Chicago — Muhal Richard Abrams, Anthony Braxton, the Art Ensemble of Chicago — brought a compositional seriousness to free jazz and connected it to a broader Black cultural project. Albert Ayler took it toward pure sound and folk melody simultaneously. In Europe, Derek Bailey, Peter Brötzmann and the British and German free improvisation scenes developed parallel and independent approaches. Free jazz remains the most contested and the most consequential development in the music’s history.