Five Minutes That Will Make You Love Avant-Garde Jazz

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“Five Minutes That Will Make You Love Avant-Garde Jazz
This challenging subgenre, including the subset of free jazz, is driven by the fire of spontaneity, and its rules are still being written. Eleven writers, critics and musicians share their favorites.

By Marcus J. Moore
July 5, 2023
Lately The New York Times has asked jazz musicians, writers and scholars to share the favorites that would make a friend fall in love with Herbie Hancock, New Orleans jazz, Sun Ra or Mary Lou Williams.

Now we’re putting the spotlight on avant-garde jazz, a challenging subgenre born out of the desire to do something that wasn’t as prescribed as bebop or post-bop, a sound carried by the fire of spontaneity by players who weren’t considered to be in the upper echelon of jazz. The definition of avant-garde jazz has been a point of contention since its inception. While the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians often played avant-garde that didn’t feel like jazz at all, others, like Amiri Baraka — on his 1972 album “It’s Nation Time” — fused poetry and polyrhythms to express a different side of the subgenre. Perhaps its biggest public advocate was the saxophonist and bandleader John Coltrane, who took an interest in free jazz — a subset of avant-garde jazz — in the mid-1960s and pushed for the saxophonists Albert Ayler and Pharoah Sanders to release their music on the mainstream label Impulse! Records.

Today, the rules for what is and what isn’t avant-garde are still being written. The list below doesn’t aim to be comprehensive, but it represents a broad cross-section of avant-garde then and now, discussed by some of the foremost experimental musicians today. Enjoy listening to these songs chosen by a range of musicians, authors and critics. You can find a playlist at the bottom of the article, and be sure to leave your own favorites in the comments.

Ana Roxanne, musician
“Longview” by Barre Phillips and John Surman

A friend of mine shared this piece with me recently and I’ve been enamored with this album by Barre Phillips, a Bay Area native who has resided in France for most of his life. In “Longview,” save for some flourishes and a couple of brief passages, the piece stays in the same key pretty much the whole time. I appreciate that a bassist who assigned himself to such few notes can keep such dynamicism. This piece has elements of a drone without sounding like one at all. Also, within avant jazz I tend to prefer vocals that lean more toward consonance, and so I admire the singers’ experimentation with sound, syllable and melody all while keeping a steady structure and never sounding stale, creating a soothing element to a lilting frenetic undercurrent of horns and percussion.




Julia Holter, musician and composer
“Yeh Come T’ Be” by Jeanne Lee

In this loud and hyper-edited era, our ears can be moved most powerfully by the rare work that coordinates thoughtfully with space and breath. The composer, vocalist, improviser and poet Jeanne Lee’s music has been inspiring to me in this way, and one of my favorite pieces of hers is the minimalistic and incantatory rumination on four words, “Yeh Come T’ Be,” from the singular 1975 record “Conspiracy.” As I listen, I lose sense of time in the wild contrapuntal interplay between breathy tones, yelps, sighs, whispers, chants. “Come to be/to become” — a litany of words teases away literal meaning, in preference for a felt sonic meaning. The performance came about decades ago, yet it feels alive, born and bold in each heard instant. Every listen is new and a revelation.




Laura Warrell, author
“Peanut” by Sonny Sharrock

Tell me a work of art “isn’t for everybody” and I want to see it. I admire artists who not only push the envelope but also tear it to shreds, and the jazz guitarist Sonny Sharrock was that kind of musician. “Peanut,” off 1969’s “Black Woman,” weaves a surreal patchwork of sounds that offers a transcendent musical experience. The opening melody, gently plucked on Sharrock’s guitar against a tumble of drums, promises a conventional, even folksy, tunefulness. Just before the two-minute mark, all sense of harmony disjoints: Sharrock’s warbling, squealing guitar abandons the established melody; rhythmless percussion bashes against a tumult of discordant notes played on an upright bass; piano keys sound like they’re being pounded by an unruly child. Each instrument could be playing a different song.

It’s the vocals, performed by Sharrock’s then-wife Linda, that assemble the other instruments into an awkwardly cohesive, slightly unnerving whole. At first, her vocals are operatic and pretty, but soon she shrieks and moans like a woman suffering labor pains or nightmares. I wonder what was in this woman’s scream. Pain? Rage? Ecstasy? Whatever the origin, Sharrock’s voice performs the kind of internal reconfiguration listeners might get from good art or good therapy. Those who make it to the end may wonder whether they truly like “Peanut” or are simply under its spell.




Zoh Amba, musician and composer
“Unity, Part I” by Frank Wright

I first heard Reverend Frank Wright’s music when I was a child back in Tennessee. The music deeply filled my heart with flowers of gratitude. This record, “Unity,” really makes me go inside myself and search. What I feel is a sacred journey together and great endless love. This record makes me feel grateful to be here and feel the sunshine. The quartet is Frank Wright, Bobby Few, Alan Silva and Muhammad Ali, recorded in 1974 at the Moers Festival in Germany.




Elucid, rapper and producer
“Science Fiction” by Ornette Coleman

I couldn’t help but fall in. Ornette Coleman’s “Science Fiction” still feels like everything I was looking for and nothing I had experienced before. An electric organism of Don Cherry horn squeals, double drummer cymbal crashes by Billy Higgins and Ed Blackwell, and Charlie Haden’s bass line wanderings. Surging. On its toes. Pulsing and gnashing. Melodious and chaotic. Swinging real loose. David Henderson came through with base elemental declarations sounding like a ghost of an old spooky religion: “How. Many. Enemies. Make. A. Soul?” Cue crying baby. For lovers of hyper-aural freak-outs.




Chad Clark, musician and producer
“Max Brown” by Jeff Parker

If I tell you I’m going to play some “avant-garde jazz,” I think I know what you are expecting.

You’re expecting to hear something challenging. And we both know “challenging” is a euphemism for “difficult.” And “difficult” sometimes means “unpleasant.” But I’m gonna throw on the guitarist/composer Jeff Parker’s dulcet, winning “Max Brown.” You are met with a soothing electronic soundscape enfolding Parker’s understated, post-Grant Green guitar. The genre will remain indeterminate. But the music feels good. Horns enter and the song begins to feel like a futuristic take on the crepuscular, narcotic blues of Mingus’s “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat.”

So why do I call this calming music “avant-garde jazz” and not the smarmy candy known as “smooth jazz”? Simply: smooth jazz is a category. But this music resolutely defies categorization. Since the 1990s we’ve grown accustomed to hip-hop importing and metabolizing the sonorities and techniques of jazz. But “Max Brown” is jazz that has imported and metabolized the sonorities and techniques of hip-hop. It may not be the first track to ever attempt this, but it is the first track to do it this stylishly and charismatically. Feels like a bellwether. It’s not Parker’s intent to announce this provocation. His innovation works better if you just … enjoy the ride.




Melanie Charles, musician and producer
“The Inflated Tear/Haitian Fight Song” by Rahsaan Roland Kirk

“True Black music will be heard tonight!” is Rahsaan Roland Kirk’s setup for one of the greatest moments in TV history: when Kirk and his group of artists, playwrights, provocateurs, composers and Eulipions defiantly played on “The Ed Sullivan Show” in 1971. At first glance, Kirk is a funny-looking blind man whose gimmick is playing three horns at the same time. But the goal of Kirk and his Jazz and People’s Movement was to diversify television and amplify Black voices. Known for hiding in audiences and breaking out into a cacophony of bells and whistles, they forced people to see the value of jazz or, as Kirk preferred, “Black Classical Music.”

With a fiery rhythm section of Charles Mingus, Sonelius Smith and Roy Haynes slated to play Stevie Wonder’s “My Cherie Amour” on the “Ed Sullivan” broadcast, Kirk instead starts by quoting his theme from “The Inflated Tear.” Sounding like a woodwind section all by himself, Kirk displays his idiosyncratic multi-horn technique. He introduces the band members and gives them an opportunity to blow.

Finally, Kirk sets up Mingus’s “Haitian Fight Song,” written in the 1950s in the midst of the civil rights movement. The climate of social change echoed the success of the Haitian revolution 100 years prior. The players transition into a Dixieland feel as the collective falls into chaos, challenging listeners to wake up. Kirk and company deliver here an electrifying demonstration of public rebellion.




Amirtha Kidambi, composer and vocalist
“Triptych: Prayer/Protest/Peace” by Max Roach and Abbey Lincoln

Vocalists are woefully underrated in the “avant-garde” or “free jazz” idiom, which tends to favor instrumental shredders in a not-so-subtly patriarchal way. The extremely powerful voice and artistry of Abbey Lincoln is ultra-marginalized, seldom mentioned unless in tandem with Max Roach per their romantic entanglement. Lincoln, who passed in 2010, is to me the definition of avant-garde, light years ahead of her time in her abstract, expressive and wordless vocalizations on the seminal civil rights-era suite “We Insist! Freedom Now” (1964), with Roach, Coleman Hawkins and Olatunji, among other proto-free jazz instrumentalists.

What I love about Lincoln is that she is not afraid to get dirty and ugly, to make the listener uncomfortable in a visceral way. She utilizes what is academically referred to as “extended technique” in her growls, screams and harsh vocalizations, a term I detest for its normative Eurocentric bias. Rather than “extending” the vocal instrument, I see Lincoln as mining its absolute essential and maximal emotional range, something only approximated in mimicry by horns and other instruments. She is especially potent and effective on “Triptych: Prayer/Protest/Peace,” in conversation with Roach’s drums, yelping, hollering and screaming in pain, in a real-time response to those turbulent years of American racial violence and struggle. Lincoln was no supper-club singer, uninterested in light entertainment, and more concerned with shaking an audience into consciousness. We could use Lincoln’s voice and message now, too.




Marcus J. Moore, jazz writer
“Steps” by Cecil Taylor

When we talk about the beginnings of free- and avant-garde jazz, we often go to Ornette Coleman and start there. It makes sense, given the courage it took to title his 1959 album “The Shape of Jazz To Come,” then pepper it with challenging structures that were tough to wrangle. For me, though, I’ve always looked to Cecil Taylor as the foremost purveyor of the avant-garde, his rolling piano chords tucked between tidal waves of unrelenting drums and saxophone. Perhaps no song typifies this better than “Steps,” the opening song of his 1966 album, “Unit Structures.” I’ve always loved how precarious it feels, organized and chaotic at the same time. A complex tune with bright colors and vigorous sonic arrangements, “Steps” also confronts my sensibilities, making me a bit uneasy. But that’s why I appreciate it the most. It’s a reminder that jazz can soothe and agitate, that just because something is easy and relaxed doesn’t mean it’s better.




V.C.R, recording artist, violinist and composer
“The Creator Has a Master Plan” by Pharoah Sanders

Growing up as a preacher’s kid in Memphis, my world was filled with cognitive dissonance. In home-school, my father taught me the basics of music theory and songwriting. During this time I was solely allowed to study two genres: gospel and classical. Even though this felt like a daunting disadvantage, I now see how that rigid upbringing served as the foundation for my music career today.

Fast forward to 2016 and I’m sitting in my bedroom in Dallas. At the time, I was only experimenting with writing my own songs. I wanted to make music that was audiovisual and edifying to the soul. My art would be healing and palpable. In my search, I stumbled upon Pharoah Sanders’s “The Creator Has a Master Plan.” From the first second, I was captured by the roaring saxophone. Very different from my classical background; you could feel the musicians breathing together and freely channeling the “holy ghost,” as they say. Suddenly, the song transitions into a trancelike chant but no words are uttered. The melody is repetitive, like the prayer services I grew up in. Then a subtle solo vocalization splits the sea of sound, with “The Creator has a working plan …”

Warm tears rolled down my face, and I knew my search was over. This was the blueprint, and Pharoah was my guru. I knew from that moment on, my music would have to flow from the same channel and carry his message. I’m eternally grateful to Pharoah Sanders for my personal paradigm shift and pray everyone gets to experience that level of bliss.




Carlos Niño, producer and musician
“Water Music” by Albert Ayler

Avant Garde?
Albert Ayler is/as God
Mary Maria Parks his Wife
“Water Music” is Life
They’re open hearts
Bobby Few and Stafford James
Please say their blessed names,
Impulse! Fire Music, yes!
but labels aside, (1969)
Here’s a yearning Lullaby
so Beautiful and Alive!
Jazz? Because of the Saxophone?
I hear a totally unique Gospel …
Thank You Ed Michel,
this Magic from the same Sessions
that rang: “Music Is the Healing Force of the Universe”
Wellness, wholeness, ESP,
“Water Music” waves courage,
the first time I heard this word,
was from Poet Kamau Daáood,
Spirits, Bells, Love Cry, Rejoice,
that Eternal, Radiant, Inspired Soul Voice
New Grass, so vibrantly Green, Spiritual Unity,
Deeply, inner, Tenor tone, feeling,
Flowing, gleaming,
Sparkling, infinite,
I am so grateful for it.




A correction was made on July 5, 2023: An earlier version of this article misstated which instrument is heard in the opening seconds of Pharoah Sanders’s “The Creator Has a Master Plan.” It is a saxophone, not a trumpet.“

thanks jazzhead, while my take would have been quite different, I've been surprised by more than one track: and this reminds me to go back to all I never had the opportunity to listen in the past.