Free Jazz: An Album to Liberate a Genre - Larry Blumenfeld

 ‘Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation by the Ornette Coleman Double Quartet’ was and remains a radical recording thanks to an unencumbered exchange of sonic ideas among a bevy of talented musicians.

PHOTO: RYAN INZANA

By Larry Blumenfeld

Appeared in the December 19, 2020, print edition The Wall Street Journal.

Copyright ©2020 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 

On Dec. 21, 60 years ago, alto saxophonist Ornette Coleman gathered eight musicians, all now significant jazz names, at A&R Studios in New York. The 36 minutes and 23 seconds of continuous music resulting from this session were released in 1961 by Atlantic Records, without retakes or edits, as “Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation by the Ornette Coleman Double Quartet.” Even within a jazz world upended by game-changing innovations in 1959 from the likes of Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Dave Brubeck and Coleman himself, this music was shocking.

In the original album liner notes, critic Martin Williams, a consistent champion of Coleman, called it “exceptional in so many ways that it is hard to know where to begin!” In an essay within a 1998 reissue, composer-historian Gunther Schuller remarked that Coleman’s album “sounds as fresh and compelling as it did 37 years ago.” When I first heard this music—rich, varied, full of instrumental exchanges that sound like spontaneous conversations, unpredictable and yet suggesting a clear point of view—I began to grasp what Coleman described as “harmolodics,” which is better understood as his approach to music-making than as a music theory. The album continues to shape my understanding of both jazz’s root impulses and its possibilities. Sixty years on, it remains a guiding light for musicians seeking to dissolve the tensions between composition and improvisation, and between personal and collective expression.

Slight and soft-spoken offstage, Coleman nevertheless asserted revolutionary intent from the start. Consider the titles of his initial Atlantic releases: “The Shape of Jazz to Come” (1959); “Change of the Century” (1960). Such inclination was evident in the sound of his alto saxophone (at the time, a white plastic one)—bold yet fragile, almost unbearably human, unlike anything else in modern music. Yet Coleman’s ideas about contexts for and modes of musical communication remain his most radical and lasting contributions.

Many musicians and critics have interpreted the title “Free Jazz” as a compound noun, asserting a new musical subgenre. It is more apt to sense a verb in there. Coleman was liberating himself and his associates from strict forms such as 12-bar blues and chord progressions and from the hierarchy of bandleader and sidemen. “Modern jazz, once so daring and revolutionary, has become, in many aspects, a rather settled and conventional thing,” Coleman wrote in the liner notes to “Change of the Century.” “The members of my group are now attempting a breakthrough to a new, freer conception of jazz, one that departs from all that is ‘standard’ and cliché.”

The “double quartet” Coleman assembled—two ensembles, each with a reed instrument, a horn, a bass and drums—included his quartet partners at the time, Don Cherry (on pocket trumpet), bassist Scott LaFaro and drummer Ed Blackwell ; his former bassist and drummer, Charlie Haden and Billy Higgins ; Eric Dolphy, a woodwind virtuoso who was among the most inventive jazz musicians of his day, here playing bass clarinet; and trumpeter Freddie Hubbard, then 22 years old, whose subsequent stardom aligned more clearly with jazz’s mainstream. Listeners heard one quartet (Coleman, Cherry, LaFaro and Higgins) in the left channel, the other (Dolphy, Hubbard, Haden and Blackwell) in the right. This effect contrasted individual approaches—the earthiness of Haden’s bass playing from the right, for instance, and the advanced technique, mostly in his instrument’s upper range, of LaFaro from the left—while also showcasing the communion achieved as both channels blended.

Jazz innovation often inspires controversy. Coleman’s first New York engagement, a gig at Manhattan’s Five Spot Café in 1959 that lasted 2 1/2 months, elicited both hero worship and harsh criticism. The release of “Free Jazz” prompted contrasting reviews in Downbeat magazine—one awarding five stars and hailing an “ultimate manifesto of a new wave,” the other giving zero and denouncing a “witch’s brew” steeped in “a bankrupt philosophy of ultra-individualism.”

For all the individual brilliance within “Free Jazz”—not least Coleman’s ability to weave memorable melody from nearly any idea—and despite this music’s then-jarring newness, the emphasis is on a quality of collective improvisation and a sense of call-and-response drawn from early New Orleans jazz, which Coleman acknowledged as both a primary influence and, he feared, a fading tradition. Coleman also advanced his own distinctive ideas. Ten seconds in, improvisations that seem chaotic cohere as the horns sound seven simultaneous long tones—Coleman’s idea of “harmonic unison,” through which assigned pitches are meant to connote unity more so than harmony. The liberties within “Free Jazz” in fact rely on structure and form: There are six major sections, each with introductory ensemble passages, as well as featured space wherein each player guides the music’s flow. Within that frame, the musical content took shape organically, the ideas of solo and ensemble, of foreground and background, blurred in magnificent manner.

“Free Jazz” was the beginning of a path Coleman remained on until his death in 2015, at age 85. “It’s not that Ornette thought outside the box,” drummer Denardo Coleman—who first recorded with Ornette at age 10—said at his father’s memorial service. “He just didn’t accept that there were any boxes.” The musicians, dancers, poets and painters assembled that day formed a community only Coleman could have brought together. His ideas, still radical in some quarters, have seeped into all of the arts the way fundamental change always does.

—Mr. Blumenfeld writes about jazz and Afro-Latin music for the Journal.