| Avant-garde Jazz | |
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| Cultural origins | Mid-1950sUnited States |
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Avant-garde jazz (also known asavant-jazz,experimental jazz, or"new thing")[1][2] is a style of music andimprovisation that combinesavant-gardeart music and composition withjazz.[3] It originated in the early 1950s and developed through the late 1960s.[4] One of the earliest developments within avant-garde jazz was that offree jazz, and the two terms were originally synonymous. Much avant-garde jazz is stylistically distinct, however, in that it lacks free jazz's thoroughly improvised nature and is either fully or partially composed.[5]
While some avant-garde jazz concepts were originally developed in the late 1940s (such as the collectivefree improvisation onLennie Tristano's 1949 works of "Intuition" and "Digression"),[6][7] 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.[8][9] As a genre, avant-garde jazz was founded among a group of improvisors who rejected the conventions ofbebop andpost bop in an effort to blur the division between the written and the spontaneous aspects of these genres.[10] In addition to continuing the tradition of experimentation within jazz (a phenomenon evidenced by the development of earlier offshoots of bebop, such ascool jazz,modal jazz, andhard bop), jazz artists would also begin incorporatingmodernist ideas, such asatonality andserialism.[11]
With the release ofThe Shape of Jazz to Come in 1959, saxophonistOrnette Coleman paved the way for free (and avant-garde) jazz.[10] Soon thereafter, he was joined byCecil Taylor,[10] and they formed the "first wave" of avant-garde jazz music.[11] Eventually, some would come to apply avant-garde jazz differently fromfree jazz; avant-garde jazz emphasizes structure and organization by the use of composed melodies, shifting but nevertheless predetermined meters and tonalities, and distinctions between soloists and accompaniment (rather than a "free" approach to improvisation devoid of predetermined structure).[12]
After the birth of avant-garde jazz in the 1950s, the "second wave" of avant-garde jazz was marked by artists such asJohn Coltrane,Eric Dolphy,Charles Mingus, andAlbert Ayler (among others).[11] In Chicago, theAssociation for the Advancement of Creative Musicians began pursuing their own variety of avant-garde jazz. The AACM musicians (Muhal Richard Abrams,Anthony Braxton,Roscoe Mitchell,Hamid Drake, andthe Art Ensemble of Chicago) tended towardseclecticism. PoetAmiri Baraka, an important figure in theBlack Arts Movement (BAM),[13] recorded spoken word tracks with the New York Art Quartet (“Black Dada Nihilismus,” 1964, ESP) and Sunny Murray (“Black Art,” 1965, Jihad).[14]
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.[11] 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.[11]
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