How Jazz Departed Tonality
& Became Arhythmic
The 1950s were a tremendous time for jazz. After the decline of the Swing Era, the music expanded in many different ways, picking up several new styles along the way. Right at the end of the decade was one style which reshaped what was considered jazz entirely, taking the established characteristics of jazz and completely rewriting what was seen as important for the music. For many, free jazz is not considered worthy of discussion and is ignored entirely, but you can’t look at the evolution of jazz in the 20th century without including some aspects of the avant-garde music that Ornette Coleman or John Coltrane helped create. For me, it took a long time to warm up to the style as it confronted my musical tastes on many levels. That was most likely due to my introduction to the style though, which didn’t really unpack the significance of the music I was being asked to play.
As a young 18 year old jazz bassist back in 2012, my main musical interests leaned on two specific styles: funk and big band jazz. Coming out of high school the previous year, I was slowly starting to learn about more famous jazz musicians and albums but it was early days in my journey. One day at a friend’s birthday party, I found out that the Melbourne Youth Jazz Orchestra was in need of a bassist that year, so I applied and was lucky enough to be accepted. One of the interesting aspects of the big band was that the annual program was built around a number of projects with guest directors. For that particular year, the majority were heavily swing focused except for one which leaned more into the original compositions from the Melbourne jazz scene.
Like many of the other students in the band, I had never been exposed to the broader scene growing up and most of my musical experiences had come directly from my school ensembles which played more straight ahead jazz. So I was completely unaware that Melbourne had many diverse musical communities made up of individuals who liked a wide variety of styles. One such community was made of those who focused on playing contemporary improvised music, an artform that had evolved from free jazz and focused purely on in-the-moment soloing and musical interaction. And it just so happened that the director had chosen music from this particular area of the Melbourne scene.
Having come from a pretty traditional musical background, both the repertoire chosen and the direction from the guest director were quite shocking to me. Instead of playing a walking bass line or following chord changes, I was instructed to play whatever I wanted. However, when I did so I was told that it wasn’t in the spirit of the music, leaving me quite confused and with a level of frustration toward both the music and the conductor. Unfortunately, for many years I let that initial experience define my thoughts on free jazz without bothering to look any further.
After moving away from Melbourne the next year, I was surrounded by a completely different set of colleagues and professionals on the other side of the world. While the large majority of them were focused on areas outside of free jazz, there were a number of doctoral students at the university I was attending that treated free jazz with a high level of significance. Even the head of the department, John Murphy, championed the style and could often be seen playing avant-garde music in local venues with a few like-minded DMA students. Even though it wasn’t enough for me to come around to the style, I’ll never forget one day when in a lecture with over 200 students present, Murphy began the class by standing on top of a Steinway concert grand piano and exclaimed at the top of his voice something along the lines of “free jazz is real jazz.” As someone that mainly kept to himself and was generally soft spoken, this was quite out of the norm, and afterward he explained to the class that he only stood on the piano so that we would have a better chance of remembering the message. And I guess it worked because I still remember that moment far better than the hundreds of other classes I attended.
While interactions with free jazz were still uncommon during my college years, they did help to chip away some of the strong dislike I had fostered toward the style in 2012. Then one day a friend of mine put together a small group that focused on free jazz, giving me my first real taste of what the music could sound like. Instead of simply having the whole group improvise he chose to focus on four different forms of free jazz and explained the approach behind each one. For the first time, I could see the logic behind the style and had a better idea of what was going on in the music. From that point on I realized that free jazz was a legitimate form of music and my initial experience didn’t do justice to what the music really stood for. That doesn’t mean I dropped everything I liked and pursued free jazz, but it did earn my respect and I now do consider it an important part of jazz history and the development of jazz through the second half of the 20th century.
Having now spent some time both listening and researching the style in more detail, there is a certain issue that arises when discussing a topic like free jazz in an arranging resource such as this. Like the other style resources I’ve written, the primary goal of this entry is to try and cover the main characteristics of free jazz and how you can capture them in your own writing. However, due to free jazz being built around the idea of breaking common musical conventions, many of the characteristics of the style are incredibly difficult to convey through traditional music notation. For example, it is quite common for musicians to not play in a given time signature or to create sounds which fall outside of melodic notation. As a result, this particular resource is a little different to the others I’ve written and focuses more on written analysis with accompanying recordings.
It should also be noted that free jazz marks a point in jazz history where musical characteristics start to be associated with specific artists more so than across a wide range of musicians. As such, this resource tries to look at similarities between artists but inevitably highlights many qualities of individuals in order to make sense of free jazz as a whole. But that’s enough of the formalities, let’s start talking about how free jazz actually started.
Three Pathways
When looking at free jazz, there are three main pathways that lead into the creation of the style: modal jazz, equality of all components of music, and collective improvisation. Each presented a different flavor but all of them contributed to the overall mission of pushing jazz once again in a new direction. To keep things simple, in this resource I’ve chosen to explore these pathways through the music of Charles Mingus, John Coltrane, and Ornette Colemtan. Three drastically different artists but very much influential in the creation of free jazz. To get things kicked off, let’s have a look at Mingus.
Group Improvisation
Ever since the start of jazz there has been group improvisation. In the beginning it looked like three horns, each with a clearly defined role, playing contrapuntal lines in response to one another. However, the concept lost popularity thanks to the rise of Louis Armstrong and the emphasis on an individualistic playing style rather than a collective. For the most part, group improvisation was primarily seen as a throwback to the 1920s more so than a major component of jazz in the 1950s. That is until Mingus began to integrate the technique into his own compositions.
Unlike other hardbop composers at the time, Mingus created his own unique writing style which drew from gospel music, the many sounds of Duke Ellington, and the blues. The result was a sound that to me feels more human compared to artists such as Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, but could also be more confrontational to the ears. Mingus pushed the limits of what was considered hardbop, so much so that much of his music could be categorized in a league of its own. There is a lot that can be said about his writing style, much of which should be allocated to a dedicated resource purely on his life and music, but right now what matters the most is his use of collective improvisation.
Interestingly, there are two ways that Mingus allowed collective improvisation to take place in his compositions. The first being a more traditional approach where it is simply layered soloists reacting to one another. A wonderful example of this is in Ysabel’s Table Dance released in 1957 where at many times the alto sax and trombone are improvising against each other. Over the entirety of the recording the improvised sections eventually build to a peak at around the 8:40 mark where the drums start getting involved and the bass changes tempo. As an early example of Mingus using collective improvisation, the recording primarily shows the technique being used as a way of building energy, soon making way for a solo piano which brings a level of peace to the situation before returning back to the main time feel once again. Another fantastic example of Mingus utilizing this technique in a similar manner is his iconic composition Moanin’ released in 1960, where multiple instruments build on top of each other, replicating the sound of many different conversations taking place at once.
The second approach is a little bit more complicated as it speaks more to how Mingus composed for his ensemble. Similar to what we saw with modal compositions like Flamenco Sketches on the Birth of the Cool album by Miles Davis, Mingus doesn’t just notate fixed lines for his players but also gives them considerable freedom to co-compose in the moment. At times, instead of writing melodies he gives players a sketch or a set of notes or a scale he wants them to draw from but they are able to interpret it as they like. One such example is Pithecanthropus Erectus released in 1956, which upon listening to the alto and tenor sax from the 0:28 mark might seem like standard group improvisation, however by looking at the liner notes it revealed that both players were given scales to play over with the next section being on cue. With this in mind, Mingus treated this particular section more as a way for the players to compose their own melody in the moment with the collective improvisation simply being one possible outcome.
It is clear when listening to both approaches that neither sound anything like the group improvisation of Early Jazz. Importantly to the creation of free jazz, Mingus was one of the musicians who helped rekindle the idea of collective improvisation, providing an alternative method which bridged the gap between hardbop and the explorations of jazz at the end of the 1950s. While Mingus was never really considered a free jazz musician, he did pave the way for many of the main characteristics of the style and very much established a bridge between mainstream jazz and the formation of free jazz in 1960.
Modal Jazz
We can’t forget that at the same time Mingus was pushing his own agenda, significant explorations were taking place by other musicians. Namely those associated with Miles Davis. As we explored in the modal jazz resource, the sound of jazz had started to move in a new direction by the second half of the 1950s. Instead of focusing on resolving chord tones and navigating arpeggio based improvisation, the new concept was to explore the sound of a given scale or mode that was associated with a given chord. For the first time, jazz had moved away from functional harmony and landed in a new territory where the rules had yet to be defined. As a result, modal jazz created a new type of improvisation somewhat accidentally, where phrases were liberated from repeated forms of functional resolutions and focused purely on melody. Of course this was still within the harmonic parameters of whichever mode or scale was being highlighted, but led to phrase lengths feeling considerably more organic with the ability to start and stop whenever the musician felt it was necessary. Within this new style of playing, one of the most significant saxophonists of all time emerged and started to push the concept of modal jazz further.
Having been a member of Miles’ first great quintet, John Coltrane was invited back when the band expanded to a sextet for the Kind of Blue recording session. At the time, he had been working on another concept thanks to his collaborations with Thelonius Monk in previous years, where he would stack various unrelated chords above the fundamental chord tones of a given chord symbol. He would somewhat manically blow through them all at a blistering pace, ultimately creating a unique texture which was given the name “sheets of sound.” Although prior to the Kind of Blue session he hadn’t focused on modal playing to the same degree as Miles, he embraced the idea fully and in doing so paved a new direction for his playing.
After a quick detour with the release of Giant Steps in 1959, his following album, My Favorite Things, brought modal jazz back into focus. This time around, instead of simply highlighting specific modes or scales, Coltrane went a step further by implementing chromatic passing and approach tones in his solos, adding a new level of chromaticism into the modal concept. However, this was only the start and in 1961 he pushed the limits of modality further when he teamed up with Eric Dolphy. Unfazed by the original intentions of modal jazz, Dolphy and Coltrane departed from the sound of outlining a single scale and started incorporating a large number of notes outside of any given mode. A perfect example of this is in the live recording of India from the Village Vanguard.
Over the span of two years, Coltrane had used modal jazz as a new platform in which to shape his improvisations. At first it allowed him to almost solo endlessly, trying to capture the sounds of a given mode. But then he started adding chromatic notes, merging his sheets of sound concept into modal vocabulary as well as leaving modes entirely. By the early 60s, his music modal explorations could hardly be called modal anymore and now had elevated into a new realm where he was simply pursuing ideas above any specific harmony. Eventually, this all came to a climax in 1964 with one of his most iconic albums, A Love Supreme, which blended all of the elements he had been working on in his career to that point and connected them through thematic development. While free jazz had already been established at this point, Coltrane had not specifically entered the space quite yet, but with A Love Supreme he started to show how one might logically enter the free space through extending the limits of modal jazz. Unlike Mingus though, who never associated himself with free jazz, after the release of A Love Supreme, Coltrane submitted to the new style and embraced it fully with his next release Ascension. However, before going any further there is one more important character to discuss.
Equality
Like all things in jazz, many of the major developments that took place musically didn’t just occur by themselves and often were linked to social changes taking place within various communities around the United States. At first it was the movement of emancipated slaves to urban centers which helped create the unified sound of the blues, then it was the great migration which helped spread hot jazz around the country, and so on. At almost every corner a social movement helped forge the path of jazz throughout the 20th century, and free jazz was no different. The mid 1950s were an important time for black Americans and signalled the start of the Civil Rights Movement. The thought of equality was everywhere, and given just how important the movement was to American history, it is easy to see that it would most likely have an impact on music created by black Americans.
Typically in this period, most people point to the more popular artists such as Marvin Gaye, Nina Simone, or Sam Cooke, but in the world of jazz there was a lesser known voice that took the concepts of freedom and equality and started to incorporate it into his own music. These days he is seen as one of the main pioneers of free jazz, and his album The Shape Of Jazz To Come released in 1959 is often seen as the starting point of the style.
Unlike Mingus or Coltrane, Ornette Coleman was considerably unknown up until the late 50s and early 60s. He hadn’t played in a major dance band, hadn’t been associated with one of the more popular jazz artists of the time, and had mainly spent his early life playing in rhythm and blues bands. It wasn’t until 1958 when he caught his first big break after showcasing some of his compositions to a record producer which resulted in him being signed for two albums. Coming into the sessions with his friend Don Cherry on cornet, unfortunately these first two albums by Coleman don’t show the full extent of his concepts on music due to the rhythm section being provided by the label. The melodies themselves fall into the hardbop category but it is in Coleman’s improvisations that we can hear a new approach emerge.
Instead of going down the bebop route by outlining chord changes or the modal route by outlining scales and modes, Coleman opted for a different idea where he focused on creating phrases around tonal centers. The core concept was to build lines that highlighted a given note, with that note not necessarily having to be related to a given chord change or mode. Due to having an accompanying pianist in the first album, Something Else!!!! The Music of Ornette Coleman, the general idea was not as successful due to the harmonic clashes between the two instruments. However, the piano was dropped for the second album which allowed for more freedom in Coleman’s part and resulted in solos which could move to any tonal center he pleased. A great example is the title track of the second album, Tomorrow Is The Question, which starts off with clear bebop-esque language before slowly moving into new territory with shifting ideas built on different tonal centers.
But both of these albums pale in comparison to the monumental album Coleman released the following year. As a black man living in a country where he was not considered equal to the white people he saw around him, Coleman chose to fight for equality by pushing it through his music. To do so required tremendous courage, because in reality it meant departing from a majority of the characteristics that people had come to associate with jazz. While he may have had this idea from the very start of his recording career, due to having a rhythm section assigned to his first two albums, he was forced to try and musically negotiate with others who only knew the status quo. Whereas, in 1959 when he moved to New York and was signed to the Atlantic label for another six albums, he came into the sessions with his own quartet.
In order to fully realize equality into his music, it meant seeing every component as completely valid. Intonation, form, tempo, dynamics, melody, harmony, rhythm, almost everything seen as normal in western music was up for grabs and full authority was given to the individual musicians to bring to the table whatever approach they wanted. Upon reading that statement you might envision the music shifting drastically to something completely outside of the realm of comprehension but in reality the first foray with his quartet was still quite structural and shared many similarities to other jazz recordings in the 1950s. Each track had a given melody, form, and featured a consistent rhythmic accompaniment from the drums. The biggest difference was a departure from tonal harmony. In the melody segments, the bass lines were derived purely from the notes Charlie Haden heard against Coleman’s lines and were free to go in any direction. Then in the solo sections, any and all notes were up for grabs from all of the melodic instruments.
Interestingly, Mingus also experimented with similar ideas in the late 1950s and early 60s but in a completely different way. Being both a bassist and composer, he often would take the bass out of the accompaniment role and treat it like a melodic instrument, restructuring its place and in some ways giving it a level of equality when observed through the lens of Coleman’s approach. One such example of this is in the 1960 release of What Love.
Looking outside of instrumental roles, Mingus also provided a model for changing tempo, time feel, and time signatures in his compositions. At a time where the norm in jazz was to stick to one tempo and maybe imply double time or half time figures, again you could say that he was bringing equality to those specific musical conventions. Regardless of how he came about the idea in the first place, he was one of the few people to pave the way in this department and established the foundation for others, particularly free jazz musicians in the 60s to take the idea further. Fortunately for us, Mingus’ music is littered with examples of these sorts of tempo and groove changes with one of my favorites being Los Mariachis.
Between Mingus’ use of collective improvisation, Coltrane’s expansion of modal jazz alongside Dolphy, and Coleman’s focus on musical equality within his quartet, jazz was being pushed further into the avant-garde and leaving the typical musical conventions of hardbop behind. However, this was just the start and simply created the foundation for the music to go further in the 1960s, particularly with Coleman who became one of the early icons of the new style. Like most styles, free jazz grew organically out of many sources, three of which we’ve explored in this resource, and the exact start or end date is hard to define. But one thing we do know is that by 1961 with the release of a new album by Coleman titled Free Jazz, the official first wave of the style had begun.
The First & Second Wave
When looking at free jazz, scholars often divide the style into two distinct sections, the first being more in line with artists such as Ornette Coleman in the late 1950s and early 60s and the second with the likes of John Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders from the mid 60s onward. As the first wave came directly out of hardbop, it was considerably more tame in comparison to what came later, often opting for the bass and drums to play more conventional roles while the horns explored a more open range of tones and textures, much in the same way we just saw with Coleman’s The Shape Of Jazz To Come. However, by the mid 60s free jazz was changing and featured far more freedom across all instruments, no longer being held in place by a driving bass or drum pattern.
Although it may seem hard to highlight characteristics of a style that is built around musical freedom and breaking traditions, many of the artists actually followed some kind of logic behind their choices, so much so that once you know what their approach was, it becomes much easier to unpack their musical explorations. As the primary voice of the first wave, understanding Coleman’s approach to free jazz offers a fantastic insight into the qualities of the first wave. Before doing so, I should reiterate that within the scope of free jazz are dozens of artists, each approaching the music in a different way. What this means is that not everything we see with Coleman’s music is applicable to other first wave artists, but it does provide a fantastic model in which to enter the world of free jazz.
Every now and then an album or idea comes along which disrupts the status quo. Bebop was one such instance, moving against the grain of the Swing Era and causing a lot of the older musicians to voice their dislike of the new pursuit by those such as Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker. The Shape Of Jazz To Come was no different, with Ornette Coleman becoming an infamous figure in the jazz scene. Some respected what he was trying to do while most others couldn’t make any sense of it, resulting in overly harsh critique from a number of places. Regardless, Coleman pushed on with his vision and kept experimenting, taking the music further and further away from the safety of hardbop.
As we saw earlier, his initial recordings didn’t necessarily showcase too much different from the sound of jazz at the time. But with The Shape Of Jazz To Come he redefined what jazz could be by stretching the limits of tonality. Over the coming years he continued to release album after album, slowly taking the idea of equality further. Across these albums, two distinct types of compositions emerged, one which drew more heavily on the sound and rhythm of hardbop/bebop but played through the filter of harmonic freedom, and the other which featured considerably more flexibility between phrases and sections, piecing together multiple tempos and themes to create a mosaic of compositional textures. A great example of the first type can be heard on Chronology where you can hear a consistent driving feel throughout. Whereas a tune like Peace falls into the second category.
In 1961 Coleman went even further with his album titled Free Jazz, bringing together two quartets to create what many have considered as the earliest proper example of the style. Unlike his previous albums, Coleman allowed the eight musicians to follow their own instincts for the full thirty or so minutes of the album, creating a cacophony of textures that had the freedom to collide with one another. Instead of distinct melody sections, Coleman organized the piece into moments of collective improvisation followed by individual soloists with rhythm accompaniment. Sometimes these collective moments would turn into set figures that must have been worked out to some degree ahead of time, but rarely feel like a prominent melody section and instead are more comparable to some kind of interlude. At times the sound of so many instruments soloing at once can be quite confronting but if you take the time to process what is going on in these moments you can hear that each player is not just playing for the sake of playing but are contributing their own unique melody. In some ways it could be described as a polytonal variation of the three horn improvisations of Early Jazz, where each instrument is clearly outlining a unique melody that overlaps with the others. The main difference being a larger array of instruments playing lines that aren’t necessarily bound to a single key or time feel. Following on from what we discussed earlier, each voice was seen as truly equal to one another.
One point of interest that comes out of the Free Jazz album is the use of two bassists and two drummers. Up until this particular album, the norm was to have the bass and drums play some sort of continuous time feel underneath the free improvisations of the horns. Although they played time, there was no set time signature or harmony but the two instruments were still somewhat restricted to providing an underlying sense of motion. However, by having two of each instrument it gave a new level of freedom where one bassist and drummer could break free from their typical role and start to act more in line with the horns.
By unpacking Coleman’s Free Jazz, it exposes the basic sound of the first wave of free jazz. There is a high level of structure to each of the pieces, with the freedom more specifically being found in the lines each instrument played. For the most part that freedom was not found across all instruments though as the bass and drums were still primarily associated with some sort of time feel albeit slightly further removed from conventional hardbop accompaniment styles. It should also be mentioned that the improvised melodies that the horns played were also derivative of the 12 note western music system, and the interest of each line mainly came from the unique keys and tempo each individual chose and how they interacted with one another. Some chose to play more rhythmically syncopated phrases while others leant into blues or bebop inspired licks. When isolated nothing of particular note stands out, but when combined it creates the true essence of free jazz. But if that’s where the first wave of free jazz sounded like, how could it push the envelope further? To understand the transition into the second wave we must return to John Coltrane and look at his 1964 album Ascension.
Between Kind of Blue and A Love Supreme, most of Coltrane’s music can be seen as part of the hardbop, bebop, and modal categories, that all changed with Ascension though as Coltrane fully embraced the world of free jazz for the first time. Listening to the album, a few similarities with Coleman’s Free Jazz present themselves. The recording itself is one long span of consistent improvisation, structured in an almost identical way where group improvisation trades off with individual solos throughout. The instrumentation is also fairly similar, with a few more saxophones being present on Coltrane’s album in comparison to Coleman’s double quartet. But while they do share some similarities, there are some notable differences. Coletrane’s approach to collective improvisation is quite different, focusing on the overall sound of all of the instruments together more so than the melodies of each individual. The rhythm accompaniment is also free to join in the collective sections, providing no sense of driving time feel until the individual solos. Furthermore, the piano comping provided by McCoy Tyner feels far more orientated in modal jazz in a similar vein to prior Coltrane releases. With this in mind, looking at the collective lines in more detail reveals that most are drawn from specific modes rather than being truly free from tonality too. However, the dips into modality aren’t enough for Ascension to be considered purely modal jazz as far too many other elements fall into the free jazz world.
With the emphasis on the collective improvisation sections being heard as one entity and not a collection of individual melodies, Coltrane shifted the sound of free jazz into a new realm, ushering in the second wave of the style. Melody now played a secondary role and instead overall sound and conceptualization were the new priority of a piece. While this was showcased in the group sections of Ascension, one particular soloist was also able to capture the idea in their own individual solo. At the 11:50 mark you’ll hear Pharoah Sanders take the tenor sax to a new level, pushing past specific notes and purely exploring sound and texture through the instrument. After the release of Ascension, Sanders joined Coltrane and explored free jazz further. If you’re looking for more examples of this type of playing, check out Coltrane’s album Om recorded in 1965.
If you’re new to free jazz it can be hard to fully understand the two waves and how to differentiate one another. So to make things a bit easier here’s a brief list of characteristics:
First Wave
Not bound to a certain key, harmony, tempo, rhythm, or time signature
Bass and drums play a general time feel underneath the soloists
Still a high level of melody in both the improvised lines and collective statements
Can feature collective improvisation as well as individual soloists
Second Wave
Main focus is on sound rather than notes, this can result in instruments using extended techniques to make sounds that are not typically found within jazz
Bass and drums are free to play as they wish
By the mid 60s, free jazz had moved to such a place that almost none of the original characteristics of jazz could be found. These days, most people that play or write this style of music generally think of it as belonging to the improvised music category more so than being connected to jazz. Either way, it definitely pushed the limits of music and entered a realm which caused division in the jazz community. Interestingly, looking back at both Coltrane and Coleman, many still associate Coltrane with being one of the greatest tenor sax players of all time regardless of the style shift he underwent later in his life. Whereas Coleman is often linked with the infamy that he received back in the late 50s, which is surprising given that his music is often more tame in comparison to Coltrane’s later albums.
Although my introduction to free jazz was less than ideal, I’m glad that over the last decade I’ve been able to come around to the style and respect it for the amazing amount of innovation it represents. Late Coltrane and Coleman may not be high on my listening list, but many of the precursor artists that led into free jazz such as Mingus are, and it is only a small jump between the collective improvisation of Mingus or the modal playing on A Love Supreme to the many free jazz artists of the 1960s. If you’re someone like me that was turned off by the style to begin with, I would highly suggest giving it another chance, especially the first few albums by Coleman which are considerably more structured and have a foot in hardbop and bebop vocabulary.
The Takeaway
The end of the 1950s was a very interesting time for jazz. Whether it be the modal explorations of Miles and Coltrane, the development of hardbop into soul jazz, or the departure from tonality with free jazz, something about that period was extraordinarily special in the overall scheme of jazz history. As I mentioned earlier, free jazz wasn’t just created overnight by a single person. It was built by numerous musicians, each adding their own approach into the mix and eventually creating a set of characteristics that became known as its own new style. While it may not be everyone’s cup of tea, free jazz is still a part of jazz history and represents a major turning point. One notable influence it had was on Miles, who not only took on aspects in his second great quintet but also explored the style in his own way with electronic instruments at the end of the 60s. But like always, I’ll cover that in more detail in a different resource.