Kwami Coleman

<i>Free Jazz</i> and the “New Thing”

Journal of Musicology · 2021 · 17 citations

Ornette Coleman’s Free Jazz was at the center of controversy in early 1960s music journalism. Released in 1961, the album contains a single thirty-seven-minute performance that is abstract and opaque. Its presumed cacophony and lack of order made Free Jazz emblematic of the “new thing,” the moniker journalists used to describe jazz’s emergent avant-garde, and links were drawn between the album’s sound and the supposed anti-traditionalism and radical (racial) politics of its artists and their sup…

Appendix

2025-07-14

Change

2025-07-08

Abstract Change: The “New Thing” and Modern Jazz is the first aesthetic and cultural history of jazz’s midcentury avant-garde that foregrounds the artists’ creative ideas and work, contextualizing the inner world of the music with its external social and political forces. It traces the emergence of jazz’s avant-garde in the United States as the new music began to shake the conceptual and sonic foundation of modern jazz. Change intervenes upon the standard free jazz narrative that positions the n…

Opening: “Free” Jazz

2025-07-14

Abstract This introductory chapter establishes the complicated and somewhat troubled context of the new thing in the early 1960s, starting with the failed first “free jazz” concert by Ornette Coleman in 1961. It explains how the book grapples with the controversy stoked by jazz’s new thing in the early 1960s and how it does so by vacillating between three levels of discourse: the new thing’s coverage in the consumer print media of the era; first-person accounts by artists of their own creative p…

Anti Jazz, Anti Music

2025-07-14

Abstract Chapter 5, “Anti Jazz, Anti Music,” locates techniques of free improvisation diffused in the works of more established black improvising musicians. Their desire to experiment with new sounds and more abstract and immediate collectivized approaches to improvisation provoked them to change, aesthetically and creatively, and to forge new improvisatory terrain. The chapter discusses the recorded work of Sonny Rollins, Miles Davis (through the younger experimentalist drummer Tony Williams),…