Negotiating freedom: values and practices in contemporary improvised music.

Publication: Black Music Research Journal

Publication Date: 22-SEP-02

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COPYRIGHT 2002 Center For Black Music Research

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.

At approximately the same time that "freedom" was becoming a rallying point and a musical goal for many modern jazz musicians, improvisation resurfaced in the Euro-American "classical" tradition--after a century and a half of neglect--in the form of indeterminate, intuitive, and graphically designed pieces. (2) Composers not only expanded the amount of real-time creative input demanded of performers, but they explored, in substantial numbers, the potential of improvisation on their own, in a sense conflating the act of creation and performance by removing the interpretive step from the accepted musical equation. (3)

Since these pioneering early years in both North America and Europe, an approach to improvisation drawing on these and other traditions has emerged in the contemporary music community. A variety of names have circulated at various times and in various locales to describe this musical practice, each with its own group of adherents and each with its own sematic shortcomings. (4) The preferred terms tend to highlight the creative or progressive stance of the performers and the cutting-edge or inclusive nature of the music itself, for example, free or free-form, avant-garde, outside, ecstatic, fire or energy, contemporary or new, creative, collective, spontaneous, and so on. Stylistic references (jazz, classical, rock, world, or electronic) are variously included or excluded, as are cultural or national identity markers (Great Black Music or British Free Improvisation). The primary musical bond shared among these diverse performers is a fascination with sonic possibilities and surprising musical occurences and a desire to improvise, to a signficiant degree, both the content and the form of the performance. In other words, free improvisation moves beyond matters of expressive detail to matters of collective structure; it is not formless music making but form-making music. Musician Ann Farber explains: "Our aim is to play together with the greatest possible freedom--which, far from meaning without constraint, actually means to play together with sufficient skill and communication to be able to select proper constraints in the course of the piece, rather than being dependent on precisely chosen ones" (quoted in Belgrad 1997, 2).

To define free improvisation in strictly musical terms, however: is potentially to miss its most remarkable characteristic--the ability to incorporate and negotiate disparate perspectives and worldviews. Jason Stanyek (1999, 47) asserts that free improvisation is above all "a fertile space for the enactment and articulation of the divergent narratives of both individuals and cultures." Improvisers have frequently joined together to form artist-run collectives aimed at exploring these divergent narratives and at establishing creative and financial control over the production and dissemination of their work. (5) Although the lifetime of these various collectives runs the gamut from months to decades, the impulse to pool resources and to pursue communal approaches to creativity remains strong among improvisers.

Defining Freedom

Improvisation has received some scholarly attention, although its emphasis on in-performance creativity and interaction often defies the standard musicological tools of the trade and the accepted conservatory methods for evaluating competency and aesthetic value. (6) Authors interested in free improvisation vary considerably in their approaches to the subject, producing everything from biographical and formalist work to in-depth social, cultural, and political analysis. Arguing that the arts are predominently autonomous or self-referential discourses, some authors present the "freedom" in the music strictly in terms of varying degrees of liberation from functional harmony, metered time, and traditionally accepted performance roles and playing techniques (e.g., Dean 1992; Jost 1994; Westendorf 1994). Other authors have interpreted free jazz and free improvisation as a social and cultural response to the appropriation and exploitation of African-American musical styles (e.g., Jones 1963; Kofsky 1970; Wilmer 1977; Hester 1997). They focus considerable attention on the birth of the practice during the civil rights movement in the United States and on the music's place within the context of an emerging postcolonial world. Still other authors have allied themselves with Marxist or neo-Marxist critiques of hegemonic culture and have focused on free improvisation's implied critique of capitalism and its related market- and property-based economy (e.g., Attali 1985; Prevost 1995).

The diverse and emergent strands of free improvisation have problematized, for many, issues of identity and idiom. Not only has dissent raged within the jazz community since the early "assault" of Ornette Coleman and others, but the development of a distinctly European approach to free improvisation and the extreme hybridization of the music--incorporating avant-garde, electronic, non-Western, and popular music practices--has further strained issues of idiomatic coherence and cultural aesthetics. John Litweiler (1984, 257) states that "the precedents of free improvisation ... are in all kinds of music, and no single kind."

For some, one's approach to energy, virtuosity, and stylistic inclusion or exclusion can define quite clearly one's idiomatic allegiances. Despite their many differences, the first generation of African-American free-jazz musicians all seemed to share an intense approach to energy, momentum, and rhythmic drive; think of Cecil Taylor, Albert Ayler, John Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders, Henry Grimes, Archie Shepp, and Sunny Murray, among many others. The second generation of African-American pioneers along with many European contemporaries began to explore other ways--both more and less dense and more and less structured--of creating intensity. And for even a later generation of improvisers, this extreme range of approaches to energy and aesthetics can provide fertile creative ground, but it also presents a point of considerable contention in the community. The spectrum of contemporary improvisation appears to be both strongly linked to the traditions of free jazz and, at the same time, increasingly open to artists with little to no jazz experience. Steve Day (1998, 4) argues that "jazz always contains improvisation, but improvisation does not always contain jazz." Nick Couldry (1995, 7) describes free improvisation as "a hybrid of both classical and jazz traditions." Tom Nunn (1998, 13) elaborates on this often-mentioned connection:

One of the common links that developed between these two traditions was instrumental virtuosity, wherein techniques expanding and extending the sonic possibilities of instruments provided the material of improvisation. The use of atonality, dense textures, asymmetrical or non-metrical rhythm, and open forms or forms derived from the music rather than imposed upon it are other examples of developments common to both jazz and the avant garde leading up to today's free improvisation.

Despite any sonic similarities between the emerging avant-garde traditions, many contemporary composers have remained extremely critical of musical improvisation and reluctant to challenge the implied hierarchy of composer-performer-listener. For example, Luciano Berio (1985, 81, 85) dismissed improvisation as "a haven of dilettantes" who "normally act on the level of instrumental praxis rather than musical thought.... [B]y musical thought I mean above all the discovery of a coherent discourse that unfolds and develops simultaneously on different levels."

This passage and other statements by respected twentieth-century composers frequently betray a belief that musical notation is the only means to inventing complex musical structures and, by extension, the only valid measure of musical creativity (see also Boulez 1976, 115). This tendency to view all modes of musical expression through the formal and archtectonic perspective of resultant structure is deeply entrenched in the music academy and derives in great part from a bias toward the...

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