Flow, Gesture, and Spaces in Free Jazz

Let’s try to play the music and not the background. Ornette Coleman, liner notes of the LP “Free Jazz” [20] WhenIbegantocreateacourseonfreejazz,theriskofsuchanenterprise was immediately apparent: I knew that Cecil Taylor had failed to teach such a matter, and that for other, more academic instructors, the topic was still a sort of outlandish adventure. To be clear, we are not talking about tea- ing improvisation here—a di?erent, and also problematic, matter—rather, we wish to create a scholarly discourse about free jazz as a cultural achievement, and follow its genealogy from the American jazz tradition through its various outbranchings,suchastheEuropeanandJapanesejazzconceptionsandint- pretations. We also wish to discuss some of the underlying mechanisms that are extant in free improvisation, things that could be called technical aspects. Such a discourse bears the ?avor of a contradicto in adjecto:Teachingthe unteachable, the very negation of rules, above all those posited by white jazz theorists, and talking about the making of sounds without aiming at so-called factual results and all those intellectual sedimentations: is this not a suicidal topic? My own endeavors as a free jazz pianist have informed and advanced my conviction that this art has never been theorized in a satisfactory way, not even by Ekkehard Jost in his unequaled, phenomenologically precise p- neering book “Free Jazz” [57].