“NEWFOUND FREEDOMS…”
The jazz universe of Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler and more
T here was no eureka moment where free jazz began: like previous developments in jazz’s history, it resulted from players exploring the possibilities implicit yet latent in the music. Certainly, though, figures like Ornette Coleman, whose 1960 double quartet album gave free jazz its name, and Cecil Taylor were fundamental to its development. It reached, perhaps, its apex with John Coltrane’s Ascension, a devastating mind-meld from 1966, where 11 players reached for the infinite. A number of other great artists seized on the most raucous possibilities of jazz’s newfound freedoms. Albert Ayler, on albums like Spirits Rejoice and
Bells (both 1965), took gospelised melodies and exploded their logic, unspooling mammoth lines of gutbucket noise from a swaying, torching quintet. In Germany, Peter Brötzmann and his octet unleashed 1968’s Machine Gun, where the brass sounds like it’s melting into a monolith of rough, burnished and bloodied sound.
Plenty of players have since picked up on that energy: check out Arthur Doyle’s astonishing private-press blowout Alabama
Feeling (1978), or Noah howard’s rough housing The Black Ark (1969). In Upstate New York, the three members of Borbetomagus were listening, and by the time of 1989’s Snuff Jazz the molten core of their two-sax-one-guitar wall of noise was perfected. And back in the UK, on crucial sets like 1996’s Broadcast, Stefan Jaworzyn and Tony Irving’s Ascension blasted guitar and drums into a perfect post-hendrix world of intuitive, unbridled improvisation. JD