Free to Not Make Sense

2025-07-14

Abstract Chapter 2, “Free to Not Make Sense,” focuses on Ornette Coleman after he had become a paragon of the new thing after his 1959 New York City premiere. The chapter explores the critical misrepresentation of Coleman, when his music was taken as an assault on modern jazz aesthetics, and how that was fueled by his musical autodidacticism and impulse toward nonconformity. For Coleman, music was a matter of the breath: the sound a musician produces should be as natural, free, and unique as the way they breathe. This conceptual revelation is what led to Coleman’s use of heterophonic ensemble textures—a more decentralized kind of group improvisation where distinctions between soloist and accompanist are minimized or blurred, a method that is fully formed by his double quartet recording Free Jazz of December 1960.

Anti Jazz, Anti Music

2025-07-14

Abstract Chapter 5, “Anti Jazz, Anti Music,” locates techniques of free improvisation diffused in the works of more established black improvising musicians. Their desire to experiment with new sounds and more abstract and immediate collectivized approaches to improvisation provoked them to change, aesthetically and creatively, and to forge new improvisatory terrain. The chapter discusses the recorded work of Sonny Rollins, Miles Davis (through the younger experimentalist drummer Tony Williams), and John Coltrane; each sought unique paths by experimenting with and hiring musicians involved in the avant-garde. Free (heterophonic) collective improvisation proliferated beyond the initial core of musicians identified as avant-gardists, becoming something of a new sonic grammar for improvising musicians in and outside of New York’s jazz scene and industry to grapple with. As in previous chapters, Chapter 5 pays attention to how these sonic experiments were misinterpreted by writers for music and culture magazines in 1965–1966.

Foreword

2025-07-14

Change

2025-07-08

Abstract Change: The “New Thing” and Modern Jazz is the first aesthetic and cultural history of jazz’s midcentury avant-garde that foregrounds the artists’ creative ideas and work, contextualizing the inner world of the music with its external social and political forces. It traces the emergence of jazz’s avant-garde in the United States as the new music began to shake the conceptual and sonic foundation of modern jazz. Change intervenes upon the standard free jazz narrative that positions the new music as a noisy and chaotic aberrance from or reaction to modern jazz—one that simply reflected and projected the political turbulence and social unrest of the era. The book proposes a new conceptual term, “heterophony,” to more accurately describe the abstract sound of the new thing; it describes the multiple instrumental voices that, in musicians’ collective improvisations, produced a dense sonic texture of decentralized simultaneity. That thick, undulating sonic lattice represented a bold new paradigm for collective improvisation in the 1960s and was perceived by critics, club owners, other musicians, and informed jazz listeners as inherently political and abhorrent. Grounded in archival research and deep listening of key recordings, Change vacillates between granular music analysis and cultural history to offer readers a new way to understand what we now commonly call “free jazz” by first considering what in modern jazz—and the modern world—was so unfree in the first place.

Closing: Black Power

2025-07-14

Abstract The Closing disentangles the trope of racial and political animus projected onto the new thing in print media from the affectual force of sonic-haptic energy as a medium by which ideals of empowerment and transcendence could be communicated from the performer to other performers and listeners. Sun Ra’s cosmic orchestra, the Arkestra, and his early exploration of electric keyboards and theatrical space-age performativity—which began in the 1950s—are central to the chapter’s reframing of the abstraction and heterophony of the new thing as a generative and conceptually expansive force, not simply grating, cacophonous noise. Ra’s visions and sonification of a new, cosmic plane of existence situate the new thing within yet another important experimentalist discourse: Afrofuturism.

Shapes of Jazz to Come

2025-07-14

Abstract The chapter sorts through several tropes in the jazz literature of the late 1950s to explain the change that occurs in the new decade. The idea of modern jazz interpolated visions of jazz’s aesthetic culmination and progress toward a model of erudition and refinement that mirrored classical music. Modern jazz’s symbol as a progressive music hinged on interracial collaboration that entailed black assimilation into European and European American cultural forms; the Modern Jazz Quartet and Dave Brubeck’s ensembles are examples. This “classical” signifier overshadowed a new consciousness articulated by black musicians seeking out Africa and Asia, appropriating more Eastern sounds as a way “out” of Western forms; Yusef Lateef’s work in the late 1950s and early 1960s is an example.

Preface

2025-07-14

Figures

2025-07-14

Appendix

2025-07-14

Notes

2025-07-14