Negotiating freedom: values and practices in contemporary improvised music.

Free improvisation is not an action resulting from freedom; it is an action directed towards freedom.

--Davey Williams (1984, 32)

A compromise between order and disorder, improvision is a negotiation between codes and their pleasurable dismantling.

--John Corbett (1995, 237)

During the last half century, an eclectic group of artists with diverse backgrounds in avant-garde jazz, avant-garde classical, electronic, popular, and world music traditions have pioneered an approach to improvisation that borrows freely from a panoply of musical styles and traditions and at times seems unencumbered by any overt idiomatic constraints. Although a definitive history of this often irreverent and iconoclastic group would be impossible--or at least potentially misleading--to compile, this article highlights several values and practices that have been, and continue to be, negotiated within the contemporary improvising community.

Freedom, in the sense of transcending previous social and structural constraints, has been an important part of jazz music since its inception. The syncopated rhythms and exploratory improvisations and compositions of jazz have consistently stretched the structures and forms of American music. The music has also provided a symbol and a culture of liberation to several generations of musicians and listeners, both at home and abroad. But when Ornette Coleman offered the jazz community Something Else in 1958, he galvanized an approach to freedom that has continued to inspire and inflame many in the jazz community. (1)

At that time, Coleman and other like-minded musicians began to explore performance practices that relied less on preconceived musical models and explicitly defined ensemble roles. For sympathetic musicians, critics, and audiences, the "freedom" implied by these new musical approaches allowed for creativity unencumbered by the constricting harmonies, forms, and rigid meters of bebop and swing styles. It evoked a return to the collective practices and ideals evident in the earliest forms of jazz and pointed the way toward a more inclusive musical approach that could draw on insight and inspiration from the world over. To unsympathetic listeners, "freedom" resulted only in musical mayhem devoid of the swing, melody, and harmony that made traditional jazz music so vital and technically demanding.