This Is Our Music: Free Jazz, the Sixties, and American Culture

by Iain Anderson

This Is Our Music , declared saxophonist Ornette Coleman's 1960 album title. But whose music was it? At various times during the 1950s and 1960s, musicians, critics, fans, politicians, and entrepreneurs claimed jazz as a national art form, an Afrocentric race music, an extension of modernist innovation in other genres, a music of mass consciousness, and the preserve of a cultural elite. This original and provocative book explores who makes decisions about the value of a cultural form and on what basis, taking as its example the impact of 1960s free improvisation on the changing status of jazz.

By examining the production, presentation, and reception of experimental music by Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, John Coltrane, and others, Iain Anderson traces the strange, unexpected, and at times deeply ironic intersections between free jazz, avant-garde artistic movements, Sixties politics, and patronage networks. Anderson emphasizes free improvisation's enormous impact on jazz music's institutional standing, despite ongoing resistance from some of its biggest beneficiaries. He concludes that attempts by African American artists and intellectuals to define a place for themselves in American life, structural changes in the music industry, and the rise of nonprofit sponsorship portended a significant transformation of established cultural standards. At the same time, free improvisation's growing prestige depended in part upon traditional highbrow increasingly esoteric styles, changing venues and audience behavior, European sanction, withdrawal from the marketplace, and the professionalization of criticism. Thus jazz music's performers and supporters—and potentially those in other arts—have both challenged and accommodated themselves to an ongoing process of cultural stratification.

Genres: Music, Jazz, Nonfiction, History

Paperback

First published October 1, 2006

Reviews

[RA · Rating 3 out of 5]

Rather clinical discussion of "improvised" "avant-garde" "free jazz" music as it developed from the early 60's, looking at the early major "free improvisers" (Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Alber Ayler, John Coltrane, Sun Ra) and how they affected the idea of "jazz.". The focus of the book is about the "critique" of free improvisation during the last 50+ years, with information about Black Nationalist co-operative groups, music funding, racial politics, stylistic analysis, with plenty of reference to many of music/jazz critics over that same time period. One of the main concerns is to define how "free improvisation" fits into the jazz narrative.

[Jack Theaker · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very well researched, Anderson lays bear the device which gave rise to the revolutionary genre of jazz - specifically 'free jazz'.

Anderson first sets out the context in 1950s America, as jazz (specifically the bebop of dizzy gillespie and others) was exported as a unit of soft power in the cold war, to counter soviet claims that the States suffered from "cultural backwardness". In doing so they created an idealised conception of jazz that superficially epitomises everything American - progress, community, and individualism. The American establishment however, in their hubris, overlooked the fundamental contradictions rife in American society that gave rise to jazz in the first place. Freedom is an illusion in capitalist society, a system built on oppression.

The book then proceeds to explore attempts made to uncover the racial oppression ubiquitous throughout American society - hence, free jazz. The freedom principle was based on relentless, penetrating innovation that sought to elevate the genre to classical-like levels of profundity, particularly through the works of Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, and John Coltrane (or the first wave). Doing so sparked rigid debates about 'the black aesthetic', and how to counter onslaughts of commodification, appropriation of the genre, and crises of direction. Anderson spends much time assessing Amiri Baraka's contribution to this aesthetic debate and his understanding of culture as fundamental to political struggle (after visiting Cuba!). Tensions within the revolutionary impetus existent within free jazz are revealed through the rigid separatism of some exponents who want to exclude white people from the genre - of which Baraka disagreed with. Though I wouldn't take a side; the fact that free jazz came about explicitly as a result of black experience, something exceptional to African American culture, that ultimately resulted in an art form irreplicable from the white perspective - tends to make me sympathise towards Mingus when he states that white people "have no right to play it". The constant battle raged on between the jazz greats and the market, fighting for an aesthetic autonomy that would not only represent what it means to be an African American, but also further their revolutionary struggle.

Ultimately however, the market wins out. Faced with the overwhelming hegemony of the culture industry that subjects all art forms to a state of servitude that accompanies commodification, free jazz is not able to maintain its struggle. Through gradual assimilation into the establishment, a sense of classicism is restored in jazz through the likes of Wynton Marsalis who seek to rigidly define the genre in terms of set conventions and procedures - something Ornette Coleman would be turning in his grave about.

[Fernando Pestana da Costa · Rating 4 out of 5]

An extremely interesting book about the rise of free jazz, its relations with the jazz canon, its not always comfortable relations with the European avant-garde music on the one and the emergent black nationalist movement on the other, the difficult acceptance of free jazz and in particular its most radical forms of free improvisation by the music establishment and by the general public, and the shift that this phenomena entailed, namely the increasing reliance on private and public sponsors, as well as the self image of the jazz musician as an avant-garde performer whose music production, like that of avant-garde classical musicians, becomes largely indifferent to its acceptance by the general public. Along the book, the work of seminal jazzmen of the era, like Cecil Taylor, Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, the musicians of the AACM, and many others, as well as their reception by critics, entrepreneurs, and the general public, is presented. Overall this book is a compulsory reading to everyone interested in modern jazz, particularly in the free jazz movement and the important period from the 1950s to the 1970s.

[Bob Brownlee · Rating 4 out of 5]

Decent overview of the free jazz scene. The usual call for government funding of unpopular jazz styles--not gonna happen in the US.

[Al Filreis · Rating 3 out of 5]

The first chapters are especially fascinating. A very good introduction to free jazz and its connections with (and quasi-alignment with) the Black Arts movement.