Flow, Gesture, and Spaces in Free Jazz

Although many musical signs of change and progressive saturation of the bebop tradition had been around since the the nineteen-fifties, there is one single event, which can be coined the birthday of the social expression of the free jazz movement, namely the so-called “October revolution”, a concert series that took place during one week early October 1964 at the small Cellar Café in New York’s West Ninety-Sixth Street. The series was initiated by trumpeter, jazz pedagogue, art historian, and painter Bill Dixon.

Archie Shepp’s memorable three-hour concert on October 21, 1967, at the famous Donaueschingen Musiktage (released as LP [92], part I: 22:00, part II: 21:45 (figure 2.1) was entitled One for the Trane, referring to ‘the father of them all’ John Coltrane, who had passed away from liver cancer in July. Shepp’s exquisite quintet featured trombonists Roswell Rudd and Grachan Moncur, Jimmy Garrison on bass, and drummer Beaver Harris. Shepp appeared in traditional African dress and provoked a thorough shock not only to the New Music establishment (as stated by the German Jazz expert Joachim Ernst Berendt-see our catchword above), but also to the festival organizer Heinrich Strobel.

Beyond the original politically and culturally encrypted flavor of free jazz, the transition from jazz to free jazz more importantly was a transgression and advancement of new creative frontiers: The political revolution was soon absorbed by a fundamental relocation of the movement in futuristic worlds of romantic infinities. The political struggle for black identity was evidently not the real concern (albeit not a minor one), it was too limited in its historical reach and spiritual power. It must have been evident to the free jazz creators that their message is beyond contemporary struggles about business, exploitation, whitened commercialization and theory.

After having sketched some essential characteristics of free jazz, we want to step over to the role of this form of art and living (recall that the Art Ensemble’s Joseph Jarman and Roscoe Mitchell stress that “music is a life-or- death matter” ) in the emergence of an art-and hopefully later on a science- of collaboration. So what were those characteristics?

The very first question about collaboration is: Where? It is about the space, where collaboration takes place. If one does not consider the common ground that enables such a togetherness, the dynamics of interdependent creation among a group of collaborators will remain shrouded in a sort of metaphysical mystery. Gestures need a space to expand, and the flow must move through a shared topos. So let us get off ground with the pillar of collaborative space.

One of the most profound changes in the making of music in free jazz with respect to the Western tradition of jazz and of so-called classical, popular, and folk music (including the Western avant-garde) is a completely different approach to time. The space of time is traditionally viewed as a line, a one-dimensional space without any further ‘anatomy’. This is the heritage of physics, and of the tyranny of linear time that started in the Middle Ages. Clocks were installed on steeples and later in all places, where the social life had to work like a clockwork: schools, administrative buildings, military complexes, train stations, or industrial plants (see [109] for a cultural history of time).

The second pillar of the art of collaboration, gesture, is the most complex one for two reasons: It is the technical tool of communication and creative flow production, but it is also the point of no return for the transition from the world of facticity to the world of the making. So it is a technical and ontological pivot.

In the last chapter, we offered a geometric definition of gesture and hypergesture; this chapter describes a concretely musical application of the conceptual framework opened up by those definitions. Since the question of creativity in free jazz is a crucial and a difficult one, this application matters. It matters above all because we know of those mumbo-jumbo ‘theories’ about inspiration and transpiration and drugs and meditation and other far-out sorcery of self-destruction. We have been in the free jazz “business” for over forty years and have enjoyed a broad spectrum of creative musicians, and, hélas, of tragic musicians.

The third pillar of the art of collaboration is flow, a phenomenon first described by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi [28]. We shall however not use the original concept, but an extension thereof to group phenomena as proposed by Keith Sawyer [89]. This is a seemingly restricted view on free jazz improvisation since the solo in free jazz is an important genre, in particular with Cecil Taylor’s approach. But the concept of a distributed identity as discussed when presenting Francis Bacon’s reflections, enables us to resolve the ‘group flow in the individual’ problem. The individual is a group of a special type: Its members are the multiple positions within the artist’s extended innervation of the canvas of creation.

We are left with the central problem of free jazz and collaboration in general: What is the measure for quality, what is the added value of good free jazz, when do we know that such an art in the making is being achieved and that we are not just involved a cathartic psychotherapy of only private interest.

It is crucial in free jazz, as in certain other arts, that you do not go onstage as a normal citizen, switch to the artistic state like you would turn on an engine, play your stuff, and then, after the ritual of bows, switch off the machine, take the money and go to dinner like every employee does after work. I once asked Cecil Taylor what free jazz was, and he answered that “it’s when you walk down the street.” This means that you are either always in that music, and it’s within your innards, or never. This is also the point in Pharoah Sanders’ above statement.

At first sight, this chapter’s title provokes smiling astonishment since it sounds like: “Global strategies in dixieland?” It reminds us of those revival efforts, like Nicolas Harnoncourt’s reconstruction of performances of eighteenth century music with historical instruments. But in view of the collaborative context, and of the ontological position where we have located the free jazz phenomenon, such a program looks radically different.

The enormous potential for freely improvised music has only begun to be explored. The conditions for growth will remain vague. One problem might be the very term free jazz. If the term implies a performance practice complete with a priori audience expectations, then the terms itself is problematic. On the other hand, if the term free jazz can be neutralized to mean “freely improvised music,” of any sort, then it still can be used without being a hindrance for future development. There is no “the sound” of free jazz, and the music of the great masters of the past and present only represent a very small fraction of what this music could be. It is not our business to say what free jazz should become, especially in precise terms, but we can certainly learn enough from history to know what it should not become; the strong hands of improvisers are also capable of creating conceptual dams that close down open-ended potential instead of facilitating the flow of ideas. Indeed, there are already many musicians who, with the best intentions, still fall back on the types of sounds developed by the great pioneers of free jazz. Their music conforms to a certain sonic expectation, and becomes stylistically bounded in a very similar way to music based on streamlined bar structures and chord changes. New connections cease to be made, fluidity is covertly replaced by rusty gears and cogs, the music grows stale and loses its vital strength; it is all too easy to excavate an inescapable trench. Can you dig it?