Word: jazzing
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Avant-garde jazz grew out of a reaction to the increasing slickness of jazz in its hard bop and cool phases in the late '50s. Musicians who had grown up with the bop revolution could rattle off chordal solos with such facility that there were no longer any challenges left. To restore the music's freshness, another revolution was necessary, but like most revolutions, it brought changes for which few were prepared. Musicians such as Cecil Taylor and Ornette Coleman sought to move outside the boundaries of traditional musical structure, to ignore the rules of harmony and tonality. Such...
...least a temporary suspension of conventional musical expectations is also necessary for an appreciation of these four albums. Given such a suspension, the records present a superb example of both the successes and failures of the music that has been labelled avant-garde jazz. The four featured musicians represent a fair selection of the music's most important figures. Ornette Coleman (alto saxophone) and Cecil Taylor (piano) were among the first of avant-garde's proponents. Albert Ayler (tenor sax) was an influential force in the music throughout the '60s and Marion Brown (tenor sax) is a late-blossomer...
Albert Ayler founds his approach to jazz on a search for simplicity. His music reaches back into the origins of jazz for its most basic, primal elements. He rejects the modern sophistication of chordal structures to construct a new blues form. Ayler digs deep into the tenor saxophone's gutteral voice to produce a sound that is harsh, unsubtle and unpolished. He plays in a strong, brutal manner; he bends, bashes and torments notes until they express what he desires. Usually building around a simple recognizable theme, Ayler relies on a rawness of emotion unfiltered through traditional structure that seems...
Drawing on both classical and jazz traditions, Taylor's music defies classification. Often described as a percussive pianist, Taylor needs no rhythm section to make his compositions swing, they do so inherently. Taylor hits the keyboard hard, stabbing out long strings of single notes, then suddenly plunges into heavy chords. The juxtaposition of the two is so rhythmic that at times it approaches a ragtime beat...
Perhaps what these four records bring out clearest is that avant-garde jazz, far from being a music apart, is one that stems directly out of the jazz tradition. The music makes more radical demands on the listener than earlier forms of jazz, but it also offers proportional rewards. While these records represent an important step towards American recognition of avant-garde jazz, they also ironically underline America's neglect of the music. All four alubms were recorded in Europe and three of the four have been widely available there for several years. Clearly the music deserves better...