Tom Surgal's Fire Music: The History of Free Jazz

Hmm... I can think of plenty of *types* of free jazz/free music that don't particularly appeal to me, and I can think of free jazz recordings that don't seem to work very well. Too noisy, too undisciplined, too loud, too little communication between the players, too much 'showmanship', too much reliance on empty gesture, too bombastic... But these are all rather subjective judgements, aren't they, and make me think that while the reasons may be harder to articulate, the reasons why some free jazz may be 'meagre' or 'deficient' are as varied and as subjective as those that describe *any* music that fails to please us. An interesting question, bassman.

Thank you Alunsevern, "Fire Music..."  is a documentary I'll look forward to seeing, hearing.

Thus inspired, I took out my copy of Archie Shepp’s wonderful 1965 Impulse recording FIRE MUSIC for a re-listen after many years. This is one of those early Impulse beauties, with a laminated gatefold cover that shows an abstract painting in luscious reds by Mel Cheren. Though the music is unusual, at the time definitely considered a part of the “avant-garde,” I would hesitate to call it “free jazz” - it is mapped out and arranged to the hilt, much of it being chordal and riff-based in nature: to paraphrase LeRoi Jones’ note on the back cover…Shepp’s “range of expression is so broad…(with)…specific schools having really not much to do with it.” That is, “it’s all just music, man.”

I find the notion that free jazz doesn't follow rules to be fairly intellectually bankrupt. It definitely showed how some rules could be discarded successfully. But a lot of the jazz improvising tradition is simply: can you play what you would sing?

My favorite “free jazz” albums: Ornette Coleman’s FREE JAZZ and John Coltrane’s ASCENSION. Add something by Cecil Taylor, Albert Ayler, Sun Ra….

Pharoah Sander’s suite of “Aum,” “Venus” and “Capricorn Rising,” from TAUHID is one of the most extraordinary and best uses of “free jazz,” where sections of what may appear to be chaos alternate with sections of achingly beautiful melodic music. Fire music indeed.

I have the original mono version of TAUHID and just recently heard the stereo version for the very first time. It was quite an ear-opener, especially to hear Sonny Sharrock’s guitar sound move around the room. I wonder if this was Van Gelder magic or simply Sonny walking around while playing.



Another piece where there is a superb integration of the tropes, or methods, of “free jazz” into a musical whole is bassist Marcello Melis’
album on Black Saint (BSR 0012), THE NEW VILLAGE ON THE LEFT, with Enrico Ravi, trumpet, Roswell Rudd, trombone and Don Moye on drums. Here collective improvisations are blended not only with melodic jazz music and the brass marching band but also with the ancient Sardinian tradition of cantu a tenore (which utilizes overtone or “throat” singing) to create a little known masterpiece.

An interesting feature of the album is that it opens and closes with long collective improvisations – however, the last track – called “The Fifth House” – is actually the first half of the piece played on the opening track – “The First House” – so that the album creates a closed circle of music. I have been unable to find this highly creative album on line, except for a very short excerpt.

“can you play what you would sing”

Sorry, bassman, I can’t tell you exactly what Stravinsky meant nor the language he used. Duncan Heining simply says in his sleeve notes:

The composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein was adamant — “Music is never about anything. Music just is.” […] Twenty-three years earlier Igor Stravinsky had made similar remarks in his autobiography. To the Russian the very idea that music might express something other than the black markings on a stave was an actual obstacle to its appreciation on a “higher plane” and to the realisation of its “intrinsic value”.

Heining goes on to say that even such august views cannot be allowed to stand and that Gibbs music amply refutes them.