Avant-garde jazz

1950s#

While some avant-garde jazz concepts were originally developed in the late 1940s (such as the collective free improvisation on Lennie Tristano’s 1949 works of “Intuition” and “Digression”), the advent of avant-garde jazz (synonymous with free jazz at the time) is usually considered to be sometime in the mid- to late 1950s. As a genre, avant-garde jazz was founded among a group of improvisors who rejected the conventions of bebop and post bop in an effort to blur the division between the written and the spontaneous aspects of these genres. In addition to continuing the tradition of experimentation within jazz (a phenomenon evidenced by the development of earlier offshoots of bebop, such as cool jazz, modal jazz, and hard bop), jazz artists would also begin incorporating modernist ideas, such as atonality and serialism. With the release of The Shape of Jazz to Come in 1959, saxophonist Ornette Coleman paved the way for free (and avant-garde) jazz.

1960s#

After the birth of avant-garde jazz in the 1950s, the “second wave” of avant-garde jazz was marked by artists such as John Coltrane, Eric Dolphy, Charles Mingus, and Albert Ayler (among others). recorded spoken word tracks with the New York Art Quartet (“Black Dada Nihilismus,” 1964, ESP) and Sunny Murray (“Black Art,” 1965, Jihad). While avant-garde jazz did gain some traction throughout the 1960s (especially with John Coltrane), most avant-garde jazz musicians did not enjoy the same levels of popularity. Avant-garde jazz gradually shifted from being performed mainly in jazz clubs to other spaces, such as museums and community performance centers, with some artists relocating to Europe.

See also#

• European free jazz
• BYG Actuel
• ESP-Disk
• Jazz fusion

Bibliography#

• Berendt, Joachim E. (1992). The Jazz Book: From Ragtime to Fusion and Beyond. Revised by Günther Huesmann, translated by H. and B. Bredigkeit with Dan Morgenstern. Brooklyn: Lawrence Hill Books.
• Kofsky, Frank (1970). Black Nationalism and the Revolution in Music. New York: Pathfinder Press.
• Mandel, Howard (2008). Miles, Ornette, Cecil: Jazz Beyond Jazz. Preface by Greg Tate. New York City: Routledge.