Peace on Earth

Brecker. Liebman. Lovano. Coltrane's 'Peace on Earth'. No other comment needed.


http://rapidshare.com/files/17479663/04_-_Peace_On_Earth.mp3

There's a Trumpet in My Soul

Thought I'd put some music up today - this is an LP rip of Archie Shepp's 1976 album 'There's a Trumpet in My Soul', released on Freedom Records. In terms of accessibility, it falls somewhere between the more mainstream approach of 'Attica Blues' and 'The Cry of My People' and the avant-garde experimentaiton of 'New Thing at Newport' or 'Live at Antibes'. It's not a perfect record (what is?), but is definitely worth a listen. (I've posted a more detailed review below).

Here's the (updated) download link.

And if you want to buy Archie Shepp music, go here:
http://www.archieshepp.com/cdorders.html



ARCHIE SHEPP: THERE’S A TRUMPET IN MY SOUL
Freedom Records, 1976

Archie Shepp: tenor and soprano sax
Semenya McCord, Bill Willingham: vocals
Bill Hasson: poem recitation
Roy Burrowes, Alden Griggs: trumpet, flugelhorn
Charles Majid Greenlee: trombone
Ray Draper: tuba
Walter Davis, Jr.: electric piano
Dave Burrell: piano
Brandon Ross: guitar
Jimmy Garrison, Vishnu Wood: bass
Beaver Harris: drums
Nene Defense, Zahir Batin: percussion

One of Coltrane’s foremost disciples, and a leading force in the ‘new wave’ of 1960s and 70s Free Jazz, Shepp always had his foot firmly in the traditional camp as well (for example, his duets with Horace Parlan). In fact, I’ve read him described as “a wolf in sheep’s clothing”, and, in his older years, he has started to sound more and more like Ben Webster. There’s a good balance of his lyrical and exploratory sides here. The record opens with a ‘suite’: first, the title track, sung with breathtaking purity by Semenya McCord, who is at first accompanied by just acoustic guitar; Shepp then comes in for the brief, and utterly wonderful, Samba da Rua (which shows just how good his lyrical playing can be), before Zaid, Part 1, ups the heat a notch. Driven on by a propulsive piano riff, Shepp is given ample opportunity to stretch out on tenor, before a trombone solo fades out and something weird happens. Shepp had previously done an ironic (and not entirely successful) cover of Jobim’s ‘Girl from Ipanema’ on ‘Fire Music’, but here, he offers up a seemingly straight bossa-nova/popish song on which he plays soprano saxophone (with a light, creamy tone), and Bill Willingham offers some smooth and effortless vocals. It’s hard to know what to make of this (hardly the sort of thing you expect from one of the leaders of the avant-garde) but it’s very pleasant listening, and it works a treat (better than much of the original bossa nova!).

The second half of the ‘There’s a trumpet in my soul’ suite picks up Zaid again, runs with it for fourteen minutes, segues into a poem, declaimed with appropriately stern seriousness by Bill Hasson (‘It is the year of the rabbit…’), and then ends with a final smattering of Zaid. Shepp’s playing is certainly ferocious on the driving group textures of Zaid (divided into three parts to split up the intensity, which certainly accounts for an easier listening experience, though whether or not it’s a more rewarding one is debatable), and he has some fine support. The texture can sometimes get a bit muddy (not sure how good an idea it was to have both the acoustic and electric pianos playing together). All in all, though, it’s fine stuff; in fact, it might be a good place to start for the uninitiated.

Music is the Healing Force of the Universe

THE DIFFERENT STATUSES OF MODERNISM IN VISUAL ART AND MUSIC

Modernist visual art has arguably become part of our visual culture - we think nothing of a once-shocking Picasso painting and Warholian collages are part and parcel of TV makeover design. But modernist music hasn't permeated mainstream musical culture to nearly the same extent. Why is that modernism in the visual arts has received so more widespread acceptance than modernism in music? Virtually everyone knows who Picasso is, and could probably recognise one of his works if they tried, but mention Schoenberg or Cecil Taylor or Captain Beefheart and you'll either get a bemused, non-comprehending look or a sigh of disgust.

POSSIBLE REASONS FOR THIS: MUSIC AS A LINK TO FEELINGS AT THE DEEPEST LEVEL

Is it because music reaches to a deeper level, cuts to the heart, cuts beneath the barrier we can construct between ourself and what we see, what we read? We can filter these through our mind, we can take time to consider them: we can look at a work of art for minutes on end, because as it exists as an object in space, we can read a sentence from a book and then ponder it for several minutes before moving on to the next sentence. But music is different - you can't keep pausing it to digest the latest bit of information, you can't stand around it and examine the details like you can with a painting or sculpture, except afterwards, in your mind, or, if you're very dedicated, and with the appropriate technology, by going back to the track and playing it a few seconds at a time. If you listen to a piece of music, you have to let it flow straight into you, and because it's much more of an immediate thing than other art forms, it's also more frightening; it exposes you to the possibility of having to feel. Sure, you can be moved by a painting or a novel, or a poem, but, I'd argue, not in the same way as you can be moved by music. It catches you off your guard, there's something about it that provokes a deep level of feeling in the listener that is beyond words, beyond images - something deep and mysterious which accounts for its great attraction to so many people. In early cultures this might have been the intense physical sensation of banging the drum (the next step up from banging the bone on the piece of rock, from tapping out the first rhythm), or of letting loose the voice from the throat, in an aesthetised version of such deep-rooted, primeval human noises as the scream, the cry, the laugh. [Incidentally, on this point, my ideas about the blues are that they are also deeply connected to such sounds. Interestingly, the playing of Ornette Coleman, a player who, though pioneering free jazz, was heavily influenced by blues feeling (if less so by blues form), was described as "like someone crying...or laughing." More on this stuff in my future post on the concept of the blues].

MUSIC AS SPONTANIETY, SOMETHING OF THE MOMENT

As Eric Dolphy puts it in an interview snippet at the end of his superlative record 'Last Date' (which I highly reccommend), "when you hear music, after it's over, it's gone, in the air. You can never capture it again." It doesn't exist as an object. It exists as something living, not static - to paraphrase T.S. Eliot, words and music move in (or through) time. And it's in the twentieth century, with the advent of jazz, and, in particularly, the absolute spontaneity of elements of free jazz and free improvisation, that music's potentiality for such a flowing, organic, NATURAL role has really found expression, after centuries of thought-through, composed classical music. This is particularly applicable to jazz, as I'll go on to explain. Different performers of classical works undoubtedly bring different interpretative elements to the music, meaning that it can never be heard exactly the same way twice - there is no absolutely precise template for how it should sound, though the musical notation of the composition gives a pretty precise idea. However, such differences are generally minimal - even an extreme case, like Glenn Gould's different recordings of Bach's Goldberg Variations, taking at radically different tempos and with different emotional viewpoints, are recognisably versions of the same notated piece of music. (More on Gould here - http://www.amazon.com/State-Wonder-Complete-Goldberg-Variations/dp/B00006FI7C) Jazz improvisation is a different kettle of fish, though: by its nature, it is something of the moment, expressing the player's socially/culturally/musically conditioned attitudes (whether to a small or large extent depends on the player) but in a spontaneous form which lays them bare. And maybe it's this we don't like - it expresses the things beneath the surface, things we might be uncomfortable with, it implies the loss of control, away from the safety of written notation and into a region where creativity can be exercised in a much freer, looser way.

AN ASIDE ON IMPROVISATION AND VIEWS OF JAZZ

Now I realise this view of improvisation in jazz is very simplistic, and is certainly not applicable to much of jazz - but that's perhaps also because players and audiences don't really understand what jazz really is (more on this in the next paragraph). Classical music (and pop music, etc, etc) can of course express emotion wonderfully well - I am by no means implying that music being written makes it less viable, less emotionally strong. Far from it, in fact - perhaps having time to think through your ideas and write them down means you express them more fully, you draw out every last inch of emotion. And some jazz seems almost emotionally shallow compared to classical music.

To audiences especially, it becomes just a sound, a way of being less stuffy than classical music but more sophisticated than pop music, an idea of 'cool'. The 'Beat generation' of the 1950s saw writers such as Kerouac linking it with a whole social attitude, so that it became a sort of zietgiest, the soundtrack to a counter-cultural movement (in much the same way as Hendrix, Santana, et al, would be for the 60s Hippie Movement). But today, jazz is either pleasant, sophisticated background music, or, if not background music, music not to be listened to THAT closely, not to be analysed too much, because it's not an intellectual form, it's easy on the ear, it's not too much trouble. (An alternative view is that perhaps encouraged by some critical commentary on jazz, that perpetuated by the Fast Show sketch where it becomes a series of stock, smarmy 'hipster' phrases ("nice...great...") and hopelessly members-only musical jargon spinning ("the famous chorus in double time modulating between the keys of B and A flat, and resolving itself in E...crazy!"). In short, it becomes a cliche, without serious thought into what the musical tics that have become cliches once stood for, and what once made them so innovative (such as be-bop melody and phrasing, once at the forefront of jazz modernism, now turned into old hat by decades of use). At its best though, jazz improvisation embodies the qualities expressed a few paragraphs ago: the exercise of creativity in a freer, looser sense than in written music.

BACK TO MUSIC AS FEELING...

However, that's not really the point I'm trying to make here - I'm not trying to argue the case for the virtues of improvisation over composition or vice versa (lets not even begin to get into the complexities of the chord changes (limiting the improvisation or tying it down?), jazz composition, and so on). I'm instead trying to argue that music makes us FEEL, hits us in a different, almost physical way that other art forms can't (apart from film, which utilises music for a lot of its emotional appeal, and then you have the actual moving image, an approximation of reality far greater than any other art form, which makes it something else entirely, and out of my scope today). The thing with feeling is that we often can't control what we feel, though we can hide it, to the outside world, or even partially to ourselves, through social conditioning and emotional denial, or apathy. And if music makes us feel, then perhaps we're reaching to emotional levels we might not wish to reach - yes, it's fine if it's the easy romantic glow or tear-jearking of the pop ballad, or the brash exuebrence of soul music or the I don't give a fuck attitude of rock music. But modernist music? - that's something different. The fact is, a lot of us don't like being put in touch with the pessimism, the despair, the bleakness of much 12-tone classical music (such as Schoenberg's hideously disturbing Pierrot Lunnaire - http://www.cduniverse.com/search/xx/music/pid/1057813/a/Schoenberg:+Pierrot+Lunaire,+etc+%2F+Boulez,+Sch%E4fer,+et+al.htm), the bizarre, twisted humour of Captain Beefheart's experimental blues-rock (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trout_Mask_Replica) or the anger, the pain, the utter depth of feeling in the free jazz of Archie Shepp or Peter Brotzmann (both using the music to express their radical political views).

MODERNIST MUSIC AS REFLECTING THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, A CENTURY OF PROGRESS, TURMOIL AND CHANGE, AND ITS ROLE IN HELPING US COPE WITH THE CONSEQUENCES OF THE CENTURY

The fact is that free jazz, and modern classical music, and experimental music of various other forms, expresses what the twentieth century was really all about - progress, to an extent (what progress! technology, arts - you name it, it's progressed massively), but, more importantly, the realisation that established forms of authority were corrupt/inadequate (take your pick), and the attempt to overthrow them. The failure of religion, of Communism, of government - all engendered feelings of rebellion and anger and pain, yet at the same time, there was a real sense of vitality and excitement at the changes. This paradox comes through precisely in free jazz - while Schoenberg may be stuck in a gloomy Expressionist forest of pessimism (though he has his lighter moments) and Webern retreats into a crystalline, microscopic world of his own, the brutality and vitality of free jazz echoes the mixed feelings the various counter-cultural and rebellious movements of the twentieth century brought with them.

A few lines from T.S. Eliot seem uncannily appropriate to the chaotic nature and apparent randomness of such music:
"Words strain,/Crack, and sometimes break, under the burden,/ Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,/ Will not stay still. Shrieking voices/ Scolding, mocking, or merely chattering/Always assail them." (Four Quartets, Burnt Norton) He could almost be talking about a John Coltrane or Pharoah Sanders or Albert Ayler solo - cracked notes, multiphonics, split reed technique - all methods of distorting the pure notes (or words) to try and get at the essence, to express the inexpressable (in Coltrane's case, to express several ideas at once), to get back to the pure sound so often submerged by the weight of words, of conversation, of musical form - the cry, the scream, the shout.

It may all be tottering on the edge of the brink (of meaninglessness, of despair, of utter pessimism, of death), but if it's going to go over, it's going to go over with a bang - it's not going to go timidly. Thus, modernist music may seem incomprehensible in terms of our normal expecations of music - meaningless of terms of what has gone before. But in a century inventing new ways of thinking, of acting, of being, perhaps that's what was needed. The Pollockian notion of action painting, the random amounts of paint chucked onto the canvas, comes to mind - Ornette Coleman's landmark recording for 'double quartet', "Free Jazz", had a Jackson Pollock painting on the front of the album sleeve, and though Coleman's essentialy melody-based, blues-soaked style isn't the best analogy, the Pollockian notion of action painting does have strong parallels with the free improvisations of artists such as Derek Bailey (who once said that the ideal situation to play in would be after you'd just woken up, where you were in a state of consciousness a step below your normal waking state, with all its social/cultural baggage). This is challenging stuff, sometimes moving beyond the levels of feeling I was talking about before (despair, depression, anger, etc) into a strange, colder-seeming realm (Bailey's guitar sound, Webern's miniatures) - but is there feeling there too? By that I mean feeling in the sense that the act of making music is in itself a way of expressing one's own humanity, through creativity, and thus asserting one's place in a totally destablised world where now one knows where they are any more. Music becomes not just a form of entertainment, but a form or asserting one's identity, be it political and ideological (Brotzmann, Shepp), be it philosphical or religious (Sanders, Ayler, Coltrane), be it simply the act of existing (Bailey). I play (or listen), therefore I am. In an age of no absolutes, music could really be, as Ayler put it, "the healing force of the universe."

AFTERWOOD

A PERFECT EXAMPLE -
ALBERT AYLER - FOR JOHN COLTRANE

Absolutely superb music, totally disproves the idea that Ayler was just a free jazz screamer, here he plays with real lyricism and a depth of feeling that is almost unbearable in its soulfulness - 1000 x better than the posturing 'emotion' of so much commercial music. Captures the sense of the time - its despair, its anger, its frustration, its beauty - yet also speaks to/of, something universal in all humans throughout history. Click on the link and marvel (but not at the video, which is pretty shabby).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTrC6IH2w3g&mode=related&search=

R.I.P. Alice Coltrane/Michael Brecker

There are several things buzzing round my head at that moment which I will organise into coherent posts in the next few weeks. Coming up, gig reviews of Wayne Shorter and Evan Parker, thoughts on the state of jazz today, on the blues, and on free improv. But as there are only at an early stage of development so far, a brief post which I didn't want to have to write, but which has been created by circumstances.

It's not official yet, and that gives us hope that's it not actually true, but I've just heard today that Alice Coltrane, widow of John Coltrane and musical experimenter herself, has died at the age of 69. (Source - http://www.metafilter.com/mefi/57735) She leaves a son, Ravi, who, like his father, is a saxophonist, and, like his father, performed with Alice on several occasions. Presumably he will now be in charge of the Coltrane estate, and so, you never know, we might see some more the release of more rare recordings that Alice was sitting on. However, that's not really the point - we should be remembering the recordings Alice made as part of the late John Coltrane groups, on 'Live in Japan', 'Expression', and the like, and under her own name on the Impulse label - 'World Galaxy', 'Journey in Satchidananda', 'Universal Consciousness', etc. Noted for her performances on piano, organ and harp, and her lush yet surprisingly tough string arrangements, influenced in equal measure by Stravinsky and eastern music, she doesn't really sound like anyone else, and, though she never really achieved a high level of fame, she was something of a cult favourite among fans of "out" music.
I must admit that, though I've been listening to quite a bit of her music in recent weeks, I'm still not convinced by a lot of her music, but at least she wasn't afraid to experiment and was certainly an original voice. And she was one of the few widely-known women in jazz who wasn't a singer, which is something.

While in the middle of writing this post, news of another jazz death came onto my radar: this time, saxophonist Michael Brecker, famous for his recordings with brother trumpeter Randy Brecker as 'the Brecker brothers', with Billy Cobham in the fusion band 'Dreams', and for much other esteemed work as leader and sideman in more straightahead jazz fields. The writer of this article from the New York times ( http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/14/nyregion/14brecker.html?_r=1&oref=slogin) puts it better than I could:

His tone was strong and focused, and some of his recognizable language echoed Coltrane’s sound. But having worked in pop, where a solo must be strong and to the point, Mr. Brecker was above all a condenser of exciting devices into short spaces. He could fold the full pitch range of the horn into a short solo, from altissimo to the lowest notes, and connect rarefied ideas to the rich, soulful phrasing of saxophonists like Junior Walker.

I am sure blogs will be buzzing with more news and MP3 samples of these 2 artists as we get more details on the tragic news over the next few days, but for now, I'll just say

R.I.P. Michael and Alice.

Happy Birthday, Godfather!

Birthday wishes to Stan Tracey, the 'Godfather of British Jazz' who turns 80 this Saturday. His piano style is heavily influenced by (Duke) Ellington and (Thelonious) Monk, but he has built his own unique voice, combining a percussive, hard-edged sound with gruff and even tender lyricism. Working mainly in a fairly straight-ahead idiom, but also moving into free improvisation with Evan Parker and others, his playing is refreshingly free of the flashy excesses so many employ to disguise their lack of ideas. ‘Under Milkwood’, his 1965 recording with Bobby Wellins, inspired by Dylan Thomas’ play, still stands as one of the classics, perhaps THE classic of British jazz, and with tracks like ‘Starless and Bible Black’, is it any wonder that he has such a reputation?

Still playing, and still in top form, he has continued to release albums at a steady rate over the past few years, though they haven’t received the public attention they deserve. A programme was devoted to him on BBC4, though, and he also appeared on the history of British jazz, ‘Jazz Britannia’, on that channel, so maybe he has gained a few new fans. Who knows? Appearing somewhat grumpy and taciturn in person, his sardonic humour livens things up between tunes (one of his records is titled 'Seventysomething', in a sly dig at Jamie Cullum's bestselling 'Twentysomething'), but it’s when he starts playing that things really get going, and you can hear an example of that on Radio 3 today. The programme Jazz Legends (which, incidentally, is being axed next year as part of a dumbing-down – sorry, I meant shake-up – of Radio 3’s jazz coverage) will feature Stan at 4:00 this afternoon, and his concert at the London Jazz Festival back in November, where he shared the bill with legendary American saxophonist Wayne Shorter, will be featured on Jazz at 3 at 11:30 PM. If you can’t get access to a radio at either of those times, then the shows will be available to ‘listen again’ to for seven days on the Radio 3 Jazz website (http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/jazz)

Oh, and there's also an opportunity to sign a petition in honour of Stan here(http//www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/jazz/2006/11/make_stan_a_lord.shtml). A bit out of date now, considering he didn't makie it onto the New Years' Honours List, but maybe next year...We can but hope.

An Introduction to Free Jazz

Well, for my first post on this blog, something on a subject which intrigues, enthralls and irritates me in equal measure: the phenomenon of free jazz. There are days when I think this type of music is a superb vehicle for the expression of emotional and musical ideas that can't be fully expressed in any other form. There are others where it just sounds like a bunch of random loud noises, or "torrents of hate," as the cantankerous jazz critic Jack Masserik once memorably described a John Coltrane track on the BBC Radio 3 show Jazz Line Up.

However, on the whole, I think I'm more often rewarded than intrigued in my listening adventures. And I'd certainly rather listen to the densest, noisiest, most difficult free jazz than the smooth pap churned out by Bill Clinton's favourite Kenny G or his ilk. Why?

Here comes the explanation. Guitarist Sonny Sharrock may have once said “I go out on stage, and my intention is to make the first four rows bleed from their ears,” but there’s more than ear-bleeding involved when listening to free jazz. Let me elaborate. It often seems like facing some sort of chaotic void – the musical equivalent of a black hole. But listen closer, and you’ll hear structure and logic behind the apparently random mess; it’s spontaneous music built on group interaction, with the musicians often displaying quicksilver reflexes to respond to what each other is doing. Some argue that free jazz has more significance as a cultural/political/social stance (it was frequently associated with radical black and left-wing politics) rather than the music itself, but there’s plenty of free jazz out there which is musically compelling enough in its own right to make it worth hearing at least once.

As Thurston Moore writes: “No matter how you listen to it JAZZ is ostensibly about FREEDOM. FREEDOM and the MYSTERY surrounding it.” Before the invention of jazz, improvisation had been pretty much a gimmick – Beethoven may have improvised, but his legacy depends entirely on his written music. But with the advent of recording technology, improvisation could become a lasting thing which could be captured and listened to again, rather than an ephemeral, one-off event. And jazz was the music which has most fully exploited improvisation and the freedom it entails, throughout the century. Louis Armstrong may have been the first musician to freely improvise a solo (within a structural context), in the early 1920s, and ideas of improvisation, live and on recordings, became increasingly more sophisticated throughout the 40’s, 50’s and 60’s. From Lester Youngs’ reedy tones to the modernist cool of be-bop pioneer Charlie Parker, and the hyper-fast flying notes of John Coltrane, jazz seemed to reflect the times, and with the social upheavals of the 60s, came a radical new style – free jazz. Thurston Moore (again!): “To play jazz totally FREE and ORGANIC was a gesture whose time had come in the 60's. It was SOCIAL and POLITICAL for reasons involving relationship, race, fury, rage, peace, war, love and FREEDOM.” Though the music produced by the various free jazz players varied widely, the common feature was a dissatisfaction with the expressive possibilities of existing jazz styles like bebop, hard bop and modal jazz; each in his own way, free jazz musicians attempted to break down or extend the conventions of jazz, often by discarding previously invariable features such as fixed chord changes or tempos.

Right, that's the introduction bit over. To give these ramblings a kind of structure, I came up with a list of the most important free jazz artists and some of their recordings. If you're into this kind of thing, this will probably all be familiar territory for you and you can tear my flimsy generalisations to pieces. If you're not, then you won't spot the innaccuracies and mistakes, and you might even be encouraged to check some of this stuff out (I hope).

1) First up is John Coltrane (drumroll please).

He was one of the first jazz artists I heard, and he remains a favourite: his combination of immense power, speed and stamina with a lovely lyrical touch is pretty much unparalleled, and the furious searching quality of his music, which can lead to what seems like noise and chaos, seems to me to be his attempt to express the inexpressible. His music is a quest for truth, testing the boundaries of accepted musical practice just as he was testing the boundaries of knowledge about spiritual and scientific issues through his vast range of reading. Thus, even when attempting to deal with some of the weightiest spiritual themes possible, his music always has a profoundly human emotion and drama at its centre which is by turns inspiring, frightening and intensely moving.

Regarded by many as a genius, even a saint (there is an African Orthodox church of St John Coltrane in NY), Coltrane has also been dismissed as a noise merchant. Even those who appreciate the astounding technical virtuosity and spellbinding lyricism of early efforts such as ‘Giant Steps’ are often put off by the intense, lengthy, and challenging free jazz he produced towards the end of his life, as he emphasized a religious dimension and an experimental sound, with titles like ‘Ascension,’ ‘Meditations’, ‘Interstellar Space’, ‘Sun Ship,’ and ‘Om.’ (For more on this, check out Simon Weil’s excellent article ‘Circling Om: An Exploration of John Coltrane’s Later Works’, which you can find at allaboutjazz.com.)

Late recordings like ‘Expression’ and ‘Stellar Regions’ are well worth checking out, but the ultimate examples are the mammoth “big-band” freakout ‘Ascension’ and ‘Meditations’, which also features ear-shredding saxophonist Pharoah Sanders and two drummers, and alternates between frenzied ferocity and passages of great lyrical beauty.

2) Albert Ayler is perhaps the second biggest free jazz figure after Coltrane, and, like Coltrane, he made much of the spiritual content of his music, with titles like ‘Spirits Rejoice’, ‘Holy Family’, ‘Angels’, and ‘Music is the Healing Force of the Universe.’ His music tends to proceed from simple, almost child-like themes to raw, screeching solos, but throughout all of this, what remains the same is his huge, vibrato-heavy and intensely expressive tone. ‘Spirits Rejoice’, a live album with his brother Donald, is perhaps as good a place to start as any, and features the haunting track ‘Angels’, where a harpsichord adds a really bizarre, otherworldy aspect. If you’re really keen, there’s an excellent 9 CD deluxe box set called ‘Holy Ghost’ – you can download it from emusic (http://www.emusic.com/ album/10921/10921136.html) if you don’t fancy shelling out £50 plus.

3) Pharoah Sanders was the third player in the so-called ‘holy trinity’ of free jazz saxophonists, along with Coltrane and Ayler. According to musicians’ legend, he can leave a saxophone shrieking for minutes after he’s finished playing it! And, though his early playing with Coltrane on ‘Meditations’, ‘Live in Japan’, and others, was often hard to listen to, he mellowed out quite a lot as the years have passed, delivering classics like ‘The Creator Has A Master Plan’, which combined his trademark banshee cries with laidback, percussion-heavy grooves and lyrical melodies. A recently-released 2CD anthology, named after his track ‘You’ve Got to Have Freedom’, provides a broad selection, and is pretty much a perfect introduction, although some of the long tracks have had to be edited down (which could be a good thing)…

4) Archie Shepp (another Coltrane disciple) has always been something of a sheep in wolf’s clothing; though often lumped together with other noisemakers of the 1960s ‘New Thing’ such as Pharoah Sanders, in fact, there was a lot more lyricism and melodic invention than many would give him credit for. His breathy, gruff sound owed much to Ben Webster, perhaps the most revolutionary aspect of his work is the ideas informing it rather than the music itself. And this is by no means to imply that he is meek and mild – his playing is rough-honed, and, on, for example, ‘New Thing at Newport’, the album he shared with John Coltrane, very ferocious and intense. In the 1970s he released several albums which showed a far more mainstream approach, employing strings, brass and choir, and mixing soul with jazz. Opportunities for free playing in this context were somewhat limited, but these are maybe the best introduction to his work: ‘The Cry of My People’, though sometimes melodramatic, contains a couple of cracking tunes featuring the sonorous vocals of the underrated Joe Lee Wilson, and ‘Attica Blues’ is pretty hot too.

On the freer side, his debut album ‘Four for Trane’ is often described as his best, and I’d also recommend ‘Fire Music’ and ‘There’s a Trumpet in My Soul.’

Though his music may not always cohere or convince, his awareness of the cultural, social and historical contexts that informed the development of jazz and black music, both past and present, and his articulate thoughts about freedom and oppression lift him above a lot of other artists. And it is almost this more than the actual music that ensure he is a free jazz legend.

5) Sax player Ornette Coleman is next; he's just released a brilliant live album called ‘Sound Grammar’, probably the best jazz CD of 2006 (IMHO). His playing is emotive and earthy (Thurston Moore describes it as “at once beautiful and harsh”), and almost always seems to retain a spellbinding joyousness about it which is hard to dislike. Obviously, as I’m recommending free jazz albums, I should put in a plug for his recording ‘Free Jazz’ (like a milder version of Coltrane’s ‘Ascension’) but some of his best stuff is actually found on ‘The Shape of Jazz To Come’, where it sounds like he’s in more traditional form, but is actually experimenting with harmony in a very advanced way (which is somewhat beyond me, I have to confess) – still, it sounds great, and his sublime, mournful ballad ‘Lonely Woman’ is unsurpassed.

6) Peter Brötzmann. No guide to free jazz would be complete without mentioning this maverick beardy German, whose music probably goes as "far out" as any ever created. ‘Machine Gun’ is the one everyone talks about; ‘Nipples’ and ‘F*ck de Boere’ (which includes a live version of ‘Machine Gun’) are also pretty mind-blowing. It’s definitely not to everyone’s taste, and my appreciation of it varies, but, if you’re in the right mood, this is some really hot stuff.

Plus, I’d better get in a mention for amazing multi-instrumentalist Eric Dolphy, who played with Coltrane and Charles Mingus, and released some superb records of his own, including ‘Out to Lunch’, maybe the best free jazz record ever made. And I shouldn’t forget virtuoso pianist Cecil Taylor either…I could go on and on, but I won’t.

Oh, and finally…If you want to find out more about free jazz from some people who really know their stuff, check out Thurston’s Moore’s ‘Top 10 from the Free Jazz Underground’ (http://www.geocities.com/%20jahsonic/FreeJazz.html) and the MP3 blog ‘Destination…Out’ (http://destination-out.com), where they post a couple of tracks a week, along with a little commentary. You can come across some weird and wonderful (and really obscure) stuff, and the range of music they cover is huge – one moment some traditional-sounding, laid back jazz, the next furious free thunder.

TOP 10 FREE JAZZ ALBUMS

Albert Ayler, Spirits Rejoice (ESP, 1965)
Peter Brötzmann, Machine Gun (1968, FMP Records)
Ornette Coleman, The Shape of Jazz to Come (1959, Atlantic Records)
John Coltrane, Ascension (1965, Impulse Records)
John Coltrane, Meditations (1966, Impulse Records)
Eric Dolphy, Out to Lunch (1964, Blue Note Records)
Pharoah Sanders, Karma (1969, Impulse Records)
Archie Shepp, Four for Trane (1964, Impulse Records)
Cecil Taylor, Conquistador (1966, Blue Note Records)
Sun Ra, Space is the Place (1972, Impulse Records)


And a couple which could come under the heading ‘free rock’!

Larry Young, Love Cry Want (1972, Newjazz.com)
Last Exit, Last Exit (1986)

That's it, I'm gone. Until next time...