The Truth is, Free Improvisation is Extremely Easy to Do....

[AllenLowe]

I honestly think the style, which was liberating initially, has run its course. Here is a mystery guitarist with me on tenor: who is this guitar player? Though based on a blues, the guitarist is playing in an open style, implying the changes in a "free" style:

 

 

featuring me and the same guitarist:

 

this does not mean that there were not a few great "free" players - I think Ornette and Shepp are good examples; also Roswell Rudd and the Art Ensemble, Roscoe Mitchell, et al; but even Shepp, discussing a period when he was sick and playing poorly, said that "it was free jazz, so no one could tell."

I have found ways, I think, to energize the form, to give it an advanced sense of narrative; but the basic format, with the cult following of the form, has become, I truly believe, something of a scam.

......an easy way to deal with performance and repertoire - lazy, formulaic. It is now a matter of being stuck in the kind of repetition that bored these same musicians with bebop.

Edited July 9, 2023 by AllenLowe

[mjzee]

I generally agree with this, but I'd extend the criticism to Ornette; never understood the cult adulation of the guy.  While listening to free jazz can be liberating, it's really (in my opinion) just a tonic to jazz based on more melodic forms, such as the great American songbook; it doesn't have much value on its own.  My sense, too, is that musicians playing free jazz just assume the music is great - they don't take the time to "sell" the music to potential listeners, to explain what they're doing and showcase enjoyable moments.  

An example: Someone on this board used to post lists of the best albums of the past year.  I decided to try two albums released in 2014: Anna Webber's "Simple" and Steve Lehman's "Mise en Abîme."  Neither made much of an impression on me; just sounded like more free jazz, almost like slices of salami off a larger loaf.

A similar critique can be made about most ECM releases.  Just my opinion; I know others here disagree.

[AllenLowe]

17 minutes ago, mjzee said:

I generally agree with this, but I'd extend the criticism to Ornette; never understood the cult adulation of the guy.  While listening to free jazz can be liberating, it's really (in my opinion) just a tonic to jazz based on more melodic forms, such as the great American songbook; it doesn't have much value on its own.  My sense, too, is that musicians playing free jazz just assume the music is great - they don't take the time to "sell" the music to potential listeners, to explain what they're doing and showcase enjoyable moments.  

An example: Someone on this board used to post lists of the best albums of the past year.  I decided to try two albums released in 2014: Anna Webber's "Simple" and Steve Lehman's "Mise en Abîme."  Neither made much of an impression on me; just sounded like more free jazz, almost like slices of salami off a larger loaf.

A similar critique can be made about most ECM releases.  Just my opinion; I know others here disagree.

oh that's fine, to each his own, but I do believe Ornette was a special kind of genius; the melodicism of his solos was something that I can tell you, as the horn player I am, is incredibly inventive; the proof, to me, is that no one has come close to duplicating his style. Another I should have mentioned is Julius Hemphill, who was such a powerful personality that he created his own inimitable frame of of reference. Same, I should add, with Eric Dolphy, as did the others I mentioned in my initial post. But today I just hear too much laziness, too much mannerism. empty improvisational gestures. And today there are players like Aaron Johnson, who is a master at all aspects of improvisation, as well as Ned Ferm, a tenor player living in Denmark.

Edited July 9, 2023 by AllenLowe

[JSngry]

Competently mediocre people will make competently mediocre music, regardless of idiom.

The world is overrun with competently mediocre people these days. That's why AI is not going to get any substantial pushback. And why should it? 

Remember analog aspirationality? How quaint it seems today. Quaint, yet true 

[JSngry]

42 minutes ago, mjzee said:

I generally agree with this, but I'd extend the criticism to Ornette; never understood the cult adulation of the guy.  While listening to free jazz can be liberating, it's really (in my opinion) just a tonic to jazz based on more melodic forms, such as the great American songbook; it doesn't have much value on its own.  My sense, too, is that musicians playing free jazz just assume the music is great - they don't take the time to "sell" the music to potential listeners, to explain what they're doing and showcase enjoyable moments.

Something else that's extremely easy to do - blame the musicians and the music itself when you neither get it nor like it to begin with. 

Nobody has a right to insist on being sold to before yielding their interest. That's just some kind of deeply flawed lazy vanity.

Figure shit out on your own, do THAT work. 

[danasgoodstuff]

Well, what is 'free' anyway?  Having played in amateur to barely professional level 'free' situations, it's not too hard to show up and play something.  But a lot of that is just as cliched as any more formally structured style.  To actually follow your imagination and play what's in your head wherever that might take you, that's not easy since it requires being able to execute whatever pops into your head on the spur of the moment.  It would take a lot more practice than I've ever done to do that.  and to have that be worth listening to is very hard in my estimation, never having been much closer than spitting distance and then largely by chance or the grace of whatever gods of music there be.  Most of the examples given above aren't really free of formal constraints, are they?  Dolphy said everything he played was tonal, even if dissonant.  And Ornette usually played tunes, and had pet licks, and so on.  And I love some of his work but seeing it as overturning the apple cart, when it was just bouncing enough to lose a few apples, is evidence of how compulsively conformist the '50s were.  Free can be anything and then morph into anything else, or not.  Is People in Sorrow free, and does that matter compared to how beautiful it is?  As an option to have at your disposal and a field of possibilities, i think it's far from being played out and probably never will be.  But as a scene, a movement, a moment in time, it was done a long time ago.

[JSngry]

2 minutes ago, danasgoodstuff said:

To actually follow your imagination and play what's in your head wherever that might take you, that's not easy since it requires being able to execute whatever pops into your head on the spur of the moment. 

Harder still is to have a head into which substantive notions are able to pop. 

[danasgoodstuff]

Attacking Ornette because of some posited 'cult adulation' is a classic straw man argument.  and calling it an argument of any sort is probably being unduly kind.  Ornette is a player with his own approach, he has his own sound, favours certain cadences that make his work seem more samey than it really is, and he's never even come close to building a coherent theory of harmolodics.  But he opened up new territory for others to explore, and I find Ramblin' and Lonely Woman to be as satisfying to listen to as any recorded music of the last century.  And as a player, Lonely Woman is a challenge and a joy.

1 minute ago, JSngry said:

Harder still is to have a head into which substantive notions are able to pop. 

Yes, that's what I was trying to say.  

[JSngry]

Straw men (and women) are a classic diversionary tactic.

The real issue is why people are not getting smarter as time goes by.

But hell, EVERYBODY makes records these days, so how can you really tell? 

[Teasing the Korean]

Cookie Monster on vocals?

[AllenLowe]

I hear a lot of open improvisation as just dull and formulaic gestures- and i define it as improvisation over unplanned tonal centers. It can sound good and coherent but it is no longer interesting to me unless it is part of a shaped, compositionally-based performance, a narrative in the broadest possible sense, one that draws upon ideas that have not only a sense of inevitability but also a coherent relationship to composition. But most of what I hear is taking the easy way out, substituting glib aesthetic philosophy for real imagination. It’s a formalist trap, as though formal rationale, intelligently stated, means the music is the same. It is lazy, like stringing together random sentences and calling it a novel because it shadows, philosophically, the literary form, meets some kind of broader intellectual rationale. It is a failure of imagination, and I see musicians over and over who are like little kids who have discovered a certain kind of freedom without accepting any responsibility for the conceptual implications of producing thd work. I find it, again, irresponsible, an abdication of self. 

The particular performance above is my example - though not sticking strictly to my criteria, the guitarist is me; I hadn’t played the instrument in years, all I did was play around with bits of chords, knowing enough about the instrument to imply certain harmonies. And the truth is that I did it as well as a certain McArthur Genius awardee whom  I have heard play this way on many occasions. It was easy and simple. Honestly I could do this kind of thing when I was 15 on both guitar and saxophone but I wouldn’t, as I knew it was an artistic shortcut not worthy of the music. 

Edited July 10, 2023 by AllenLowe

[JSngry]

All this talk about context and composition is going to make me dive back into Mantana Roberts Coin Coin series. That's the stuff right there! 

Call me jaded, but it's time to move on. A few people already have. Many more can't/won't because they don't have the imagination or other skill sets to have an idea of what that would sound like. Move on to what?

But don't look at me, I'm just as clueless as almost everybody else. All I can do is try to pay attention. 

But yeah, context matters. And a 21st Century context matters even more. 

[Larry Kart]

30 minutes ago, JSngry said:

All this talk about context and composition is going to make me dive back into Mantana Roberts Coin Coin series. That's the stuff right there! 

Call me jaded, but it's time to move on. A few people already have. Many more can't/won't because they don't have the imagination or other skill sets to have an idea of what that would sound like. Move on to what?

But don't look at me, I'm just as clueless as almost everybody else. All I can do is try to pay attention. 

But yeah, context matters. And a 21st Century context matters even more. 

It's Matana, not Mantana.

[rostasi]

I say: be the improv king that you think you should be,
by playing with others in the manner you think it should be done - 
pretty much like any other art form.

Yes, Matana - and Chapter Five is coming the end of September!

… and Allen, I love you, but you are in no way even remotely playing guitar -
or even interacting with another instrument - anywhere near the way Halvorson does.

[JSngry]

I know that.

I just tested, and my phone auto-"corrected" my correct initial, correct, spelling.

So no longer is it enough to know right and to do right, but now we need to ensure that our technology does what we want instead of the other way around.

Hardly news, but things are getting worse not better. Oddly related to the topic of this thread. 

Grrrrrr.... 

[Stompin at the Savoy]

Times change, musical styles go in and out of fashion.  This is to be expected.  Is it going to be interesting now to repeat the explorations that seemed so vital and new around 1959?  Probably not.  That said, I think Ornette Coleman is a genius and I still love listening to his music.

[danasgoodstuff]

Somewhat surprising to me is that so-called Spiritual Jazz, combining elements of free and modal, has found a new audience.  Martin Williams would be disappointed since he loved Ornette but didn't really get much of 'Trane or Pharoah's work for Impulse!  People who lump that all together aren't really paying attention.

[JSngry]

Shepp, discussing a period when he was sick and playing poorly, said that "it was free jazz, so no one could tell."

yeah, well, HE could tell.

If he couldn't, then fuck him.

But I bet he could...

[AllenLowe]

6 hours ago, rostasi said:

I say: be the improv king that you think you should be,
by playing with others in the manner you think it should be done - 
pretty much like any other art form.

Yes, Matana - and Chapter Five is coming the end of September!

… and Allen, I love you, but you are in no way even remotely playing guitar -
or even interacting with another instrument - anywhere near the way Halvorson does.

Give me a few hours and I will provide a musical example.

[Rabshakeh]

I sometimes feel that the free improv scene is a little played out. A lot of the scene, younger or older, has been ploughing the same furrow since the mid 1990s, and sometimes it feels like it needs a refresh. But I think that's always the case with a mature scene. There are still lots of new and interesting acts popping up all the time. I depends where you look.

Edited July 10, 2023 by Rabshakeh

[Rabshakeh]

11 hours ago, JSngry said:

Shepp, discussing a period when he was sick and playing poorly, said that "it was free jazz, so no one could tell."

yeah, well, HE could tell.

If he couldn't, then fuck him.

But I bet he could...

I sometimes do wonder with Shepp. There are a few free-side A listers who have sometimes struck me as either having comparatively weaker abilities or a small bag of tricks. Shepp is one of them (God knows that John Zorn certainly is). Obviously, ability on the saxophone is not everything, and Shepp makes up for it in other ways. 

There is an early 80s Canadian film (I forget the name) in which Shepp, Paul Bley, Cecil Taylor and Bill Dixon talk about their music. Everyone other than CT looks like hell and is at the nadir of their careers (although Dixon at least is wearing a cool leather hat and is quite a fun interviewee, albeit clearly a few cocktails deep). Shepp in particular seems on the verge of tears. By that point he had already moved into his neo-swing stage, and he is filmed playing in a hesitant way that really reminds me of Coleman Hawkins' performance on Sirius. Shorn of all the fire of the earlier Impulse! and BYG records, and the huge canvass projects of the later Impulse! period, he struck me as a limited player, but, unusually, one who was both aware of and almost panicked by his limitations.

That said, I know several on this board treasure the Steeplechase period of Shepp most of all, so maybe it is a purely personal thing.

Edited July 10, 2023 by Rabshakeh

[jlhoots]

Kind of an "emperor has no clothes" situation in some players.

[HutchFan]

44 minutes ago, jlhoots said:

Kind of an "emperor has no clothes" situation in some players.

I think this is always a potential pitfall for any type of Art -- be it jazz or painting or film or whatever -- that seeks to move beyond formal conventions, no?

Ignoring (or intentionally breaking) "the rules" can be a way of expanding possibilities, finding new means of expression.  But it seems like the most interesting innovators are the ones who have fully embraced and understood what came before them, rather than bypassing it. 

OTOH, maybe that just happens to be the type of innovator that I prefer.  I'm usually drawn to artists who somehow maintain a sense of continuity and extension -- even if they're creating something that's very unconventional & new.  This preference is likely an expression of my temperament.

So... who knows.   

 

Edited July 10, 2023 by HutchFan

[Dub Modal]

What is the goal of this critique? Is it a plea for players to create a new style, or to revert to older styles of expression and playing? Or for a hybrid of sorts? 

[Big Beat Steve]

27 minutes ago, HutchFan said:

I think this is always a potential pitfall for any type of Art -- be it jazz or painting or film or whatever -- that seeks to move beyond formal conventions, no?

Ignoring (or intentionally breaking) "the rules" can be a way of expanding possibilities, finding new means of expression.  But it seems like the most interesting innovators are the ones who have fully embraced and understood what came before them, rather than bypassing it.

 

Exactly ... you nailed it IMHO.

Like I tried to make this point in another discussion a while ago ... Anyone from the "free" (or "avantgarde") players who considers himself on a muscially or artistically higher level than everything that (stylistically) came before him (within possibly more formal conventions) would have to be able to (for example) "out-bird Bird" (on Bird's musical ground) first before he could lay any claims to have attained an artistically higher level. If he cannot or isn't able to (and at any rate, "I don't play like that" would be a lame excuse - or attempt at an explanation - for not being able to), then he may well have branched out SIDEWAYS into a DIFFERENT or NEW direction but certainly not into one that (by itself) is on an artistically higher level.

Edited July 10, 2023 by Big Beat Steve