Avant Garde/Free Jazz Vs Cool Jazz

Collaboration West

(I was listening to Mike Westbrook being interviewed on radio last weekend and playing excerpts from some of his favourite records. Some great stuff from Louis, Bird, Duke, all pretty obvious but none the worse for that. But then he played "Lonely Woman" and I just thought, this tops any of it.)

I reckon that the ear must have become more accustomed to it over the years because even Joe Henderson's Mode For Joe is classed as avant garde. Having said that I bought Cecil Taylor's Conquistador on spec (mid '60s, blue note)...& returned it the next day.

I'm not comfortable I could defend the way I tend to segregate musicians between avant-garde and non-avant garde. It's very impressionistic. I mean Monk was a revolutionary in his day but I don't think of him as avant garde. Maybe I should. Maybe I like avant garde jazz more than I thought.

at the time, the scenes were certainly as much defined by the kind of clubs they played in and the kinds of labels that they were associated with => the gap between artistic-political statement and marketing genre-label was surprisingly tight and often unremarked (rockwriters from the offset talked a LOT more about the mechanics of record-making blah blah, and its presence in the world under discussion, than jazzwriters generally did, in the 50s and 60s anyway).

Stolen from http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=C4478

like most genre names then...they don't really give you a guide to the things going on within the 'genre' maybe only the instrumentation that is being used. This definetely applies to 'Jazz'.

''and did jazz really die by 1975?''

heh...derek bailey would say jazz died by 1958 but it's probably him saying 'I'm not Jazz OK'. I wouldn't say it's dead but I don't know enough at the moment to really say so...

Mark, why did Ornette call his alb 'Free Jazz' then? Was that an Atlantic imposition/decision?

(In fact onne definition of avant-garde that has long appealed, though I do recognise the obvious difficulties, is jazz that challenges musical conventions for extra-musical reasons (political, social and philosophical beliefs). It appeals partly because Ornette would just about squeeze in on the right side of the fence and late Coltrane would not. Ok, ok everyone can probably blow this idea out of the water in two seconds flat but I still kind of like it).

haha what do you mean by the "right side of the fence", ArfArf? Inside or out? (Oh yes: "out" was another word used the the New Thing...)

so if everyone does it "hurrah that is what we wanted" not "boo it's all spoiled" surely?

Most stuff by Roy Ayers and Herbie Hancock between about 70 and 78.

The Diggin Deeper comps are excellent for this kind of stuff and I also got a good one last week called Focus On Fusion on BGP records.

George Duke: Brazilian Loe Afair Grover Washington Jr.: Live at the Bijou Chick Corea: Return to Forever, not to be confused with the band Return to Forever which was lead by Chick. THis earlier album features Flora Purim and Airto Moirea and so is much more Brazilian in flavour rather than RTF's pompous warriors of fusion stance.

ornette's electric-harmolodic stuff from the mid-80s (and shannon jackson's and james blood ulmer's) are arguably fusion, but definitely avant-garde in the sense of noisy and skronky if yr expecting chet baker: miles's early 70s things are also very noisy and daunting in some ways, yet still get called "jazz-rock" => "fusion" as they're just easy on the ear

"Light as a Feather" is another excellent early RTF album in a more Brazilian vein, also featuring Purim on vocals. I also like "Hymn of the 7th Galaxy" which, apart from the cover art and song titles, is far from being pompous.

I have more albums by Coltrane than any other artist except possibly Miles, but not only do I prefer "Blue Train" to "Ascension" I'm starting to think that's the radical choice. Because people who come to jazz through rock seem to find it easier to like avant garde than mainstream jazz. A basically modal structure with dissonant squalls is closer to their previous listening experience than a complex functional harmony like "Moments Notice". In the same way that it's easier for most people nowadays to like Picasso than the Old Masters.

(A good example was that idiot who compiled 100 albums to get rid of and included "Giant Steps" as his example of modern jazz at its most self-indulgent. The harmonic structure on those compositions stretches bebop harmony to breaking point but they are still very tight, very controlled, architectonically precise. Some great player are still struggling to absorb these harmonies. Seeing writers conflate this with "free" suggests some folks think that writing about music doesn't involve any obligation to listen.)

This is definitely true in my experience. When I started listening to jazz, it was much easier for me to appreciate Sun Ra that Duke Ellington, for instance. But how limited my appreciation would have been if I had never gone on to grok the tradition.

This definition makes sense, but what it doesn't expose is that a lot (I say most, and I'd love to say all) of the time, artists are completely aware of what they're doing in this regard. I.e., avant- garde is not just the sound of their technique and ideas, but the choice to make them markedly experimental or in advance of what is generally excepted.

This does *not* mean everyone who does this is consciously trying to be "avant-garde" -- and I think that's why nobody talks about Thelonius Monk being a-g. Mark S is right to talk about a-g's image in the early 60s, because even among classical composers, there was sort of a bad taste left by ultra-cultured European composers who would have you believe only the super-educated had business writing something new under the sun (not so much in their words, afaik, but in the fact that no kid off the street writes 12-tone pieces for fun - - but that's another thread).

However, in jazz at that time, I think the image/label was the only part of being avant-garde that wasn't applied to the musicians. You could argue that a musician like Miles Davis, who was *consciously* trying to do new things and *consciously* trying to do it better than anyone had ever done was the ultimate avant-garde jazz musician, because he never strayed from those ethics until post-retirement.

And yes, this is pretty obviously exposing my belief that intent plays a part in evaluation -- but in this case, I think it's only in attempting to classify the spirit of the music being played.

Re: fusion. IMO, no. Reasons being 1) I don't think you can classify whole genres of music (like "jazz fusion") as a-g or otherwise, and 2) it seems to have been a re-directing of passions using pre-existing techniques and ideas. In other words, RTF was no more a-g than, say, Bruce Springsteen because both were celebrating and taking the torch from the best of everything they had grown up hearing, while not necessarily creating a new musical vocabulary.

For AG jazz, try Out to Lunch by Dolphy, Unit Structures by Taylor, Meditations by Coltrane, Love Cry by Ayler. These are all early classics, and hence relatively more available than others. As for newer stuff, Matthew Shipp has put out some incredible releases. I only know one well enough to recommend, and it is called "Expansion, Power, Release" with William Parker on bass and Mat Maneri on violin. The music is heavily influenced by 20th century compositions, and Shipp has the ability to solo in this style very convincingly.

As for fusion, a lot of people seem to like Tony Williams' Lifetime band. Jack Bruce of Cream played in one edition of the band, and Tony Williams is, as Miles said, the motherfucker, which is the highest compliment Miles can pay to anything (anyone ever read his autobiog.?). I haven't heard any Lifetime material, but people I trust recomend it heavily. Also, I like "Love, Devotion, Surrender" with Carlos Santana and John McLaughlin. Lastly, a record that is somewhat fusion and mostly Avant-Garde is Sonny Sharrock's Ask the Ages, with Sonny playing some beautiful droneing electric guitar, especially on the track "many mansions".

As for jazz, being dead or not, it depends on your view of life. Jazz is like d'n'b in that the major periods of rapid evolution are over because the extremes have been reached to a certain extent. Plenty of people still listen to both jazz and d'n'b, and there are plenty of good records that will come out in the future from obth genres. Jazz, being the broader genre, has a lot more left in it than d'n'b, though.

For me, this is THE most exciting time to be into Jazz. Shipp puts out amazing things, and William Parker, and Susie Ibarra and there are a million other names. Right now, there is the interaction with 20th century music, as well as the continued explorations of other cultures, other musical configuration (one Ibarra record has tracks with hand percussion, harp, and violin only) and also the interaction with electronics. Also, with jazz, there is not the premium placed on youth that can cripple rock, so older artists can also be trusted to amaze. Last year, for instance, I saw Reggie Workman (classic bassist since the 1950's) play with and avant-garde drummer and a woman who played a traditional Japanese instrument like a dulcimer (sorry forgot name). She was also triggering samples by intrrupting a light beam above her head. Amazing stuff, no album unfortunately...

This must have been Miya Masaoka. The instrument is called a koto. I saw her play the "optical" koto a couple of years ago at the LMC's experimental music fest.

I don't think of fusion as a genre as being avant-garde either. I think individual albums that fall within the fusion category could be considered avant-garde (for instance, some of Ornette Coleman's work with Prime Time), but not the genre as a whole. I just don't think it was a radical enough break from what came before to be called a.g. I know that's kind of a hand-wavy reason, but I think a.g. is kind of like porn in that way - i.e., it's not easy to define, but you know it when you see (or hear) it.

In other words, RTF was no more a-g than, say, Bruce Springsteen because both were celebrating and taking the torch from the best of everything they had grown up hearing, while not necessarily creating a new musical vocabulary

I'm not that familiar with Springsteen so I couldn't really comment on this comparison. However, it does seem to me that RTF does at least expand on the music vocabulary, if not creating a new one. I wouldn't call them a.g. either though. For one thing, it seems like they make an effort to be accessible, whereas a.g. music often seems to be studiously inaccessible.

Didn't Genesis P-orridge already do this with his dick? (Just kidding, but I'd be surprised if he hand't.)

i hope you're not ignoring a whole subgenre full of great music because it's not the 'radical choice' - i'm sure personal taste comes into it somewhere. you can flip-flop across the 'which is the more oppositional perspective' divide until you're dizzy, but i think in the end, both Inside and Outside jazz have their share of innovators and charlatans. and then there's mark s, who is both and neither depending on your perspective (so i can't figure out why he and Coltrane are not bosom buddies?!).

Sorry to steer this thread ov-topyck.