Where Musicians Decide the Criteria

The art of sound, music, is neither easy to write nor read about, the irony being that it’s such an intimate and vivid experience for so many, so palpable, that the digital linearity of language, no matter how necessary, forges an instant misfit.

Listeners, understandably, respond most to how a musical sound feels for them, and this is the perspective from which most talk and writing about music comes from. Sound in music is also at the same time linking a whole network of actions and relationships that aren’t even within hearing. This to say that sound takes us places, not just into our personal imagination and feeling, but also into relationships with some aspects of other people, how they think, feel and interact. Music, in this respect, is not just a sound, but a collective and participatory process.

A lot of writing about music tends to talk around this. Biography and social history concern themselves most with the people involved. Critical writing usually listens from a consumer or gatekeeper point of view. These can offer pretty valuable and important insights; but if any listeners get curious about what’s happening before their ears (beyond whether or not they like how it sounds) and want to understand more about the sonic event they’re witnessing, why not consider what musicians, the people who actually do the work, have to say about what they’re doing?

How musicians communicate with each other about what to play when can, from the outside, sound like the empty jargon of shop talk or some kind of secret code. Yet, no matter how imperfect working terms might seem, their applications remain very practical and matter of fact. Like any other deliberate activity, music is shaped out of specific reasons, motives, perceptions, and meanings. It’s these that make one music sound different than another; and it’s the sound that opens windows back into these invisible and inaudible goings on.

Joe Morris has written a book that should be explored by anyone with genuine interest in artistic activity. He’s managed to down step the complex considerations of putting music together into some pretty accessibly lucid and straightforward language; and while the more musically technical sections might not always make immediate or easy sense, how they can still stimulate imagination is well worth a reader’s attention.

The book’s opening 28 pages describes Morris’ own orientations and evolution, a general definition and history of what he means by “free music” and an argument in support of the need for a more inclusive conceptual language in relation to its practice and perception.

This is followed by the two core methodological sections, The Properties of Free Music, which defines terms and parameters, and Example Methodologies, which spells out the configuration of these properties in 4 different contexts, Cecil Taylor’s systematic musical coordination through Unit Structures, Ornette Coleman’s Harmolodics, Anthony Braxton’s Tri-Axiom applications and the presuppositions underlying European Free Improvisation.

The closing section consists of responses from 15 diverse artists (Marylyn Crispell, Charles Downs / Rashid Bakr, Augusti Fernandez, Simon H. Fell, Mary Halvorson, Katt Hernandez, Joe McPhee, Nicole Mitchell, William Parker, Jamie Saft, Matthew Shipp, Ken Vandermark, Alex Ward, Nate Wooley, Jack Wright) to a questionnaire relating to their own processes and aesthetics.

Joe Morris is particularly sympathetic to the position of young musicians in music’s evolution and mentions that he can see that

Addressing where to start contends with how musical information is communicated and passed along. The specifics of any artistic behavior are learned through somehow matching one’s own actions with examples. There are at least two different ways to imitate, either through imitating results, or mimicry, or through imitating how somebody approaches a process, which could be thought of instead as emulation. Both are useful, but they’re not the same.

Mimicry aims to achieve an external resemblance (which is what inspired the pejorative ‘70s term, Clonetrane). Sounding the same as a model doesn’t mean at all that one’s actually doing the same thing as the original. Although flat out imitation, just might, in conjunction with some reverse engineering, research some of the considerations that generated a prototype, mimetic imitation remains a qualitatively different experiment than the initial event it’s following.

Emulation would reenact, perhaps as closely as possible, an original experiment, or ask similar questions, or treat sonic materials with a similar attitude. Emulation might draw from the same well, but wouldn’t sound identical to its prototype and might even sound almost unrecognizably different. There’s an important difference between directly addressing aesthetic problems Coltrane explored on one’s own terms and quoting his vocabulary.

Back in the ‘70s, I used to wonder if a highly challenging musical language, such as the one that Dizzy Gillespie and Bud Powell shared, could ever be dixielandized. It turns out it could. But, when Ellington and Armstrong were still alive, either of them might be playing just down the street from the Mwandishi Band, Charles Mingus or Pharoah Sanders, a possibility that, all by itself, would, at the least out of respect, discourage the younger musicians from settling for quoting their elders, who were already taking care of their own business just fine, thank you.

In the ‘80s, tensions between these two practices of imitation came to a head in public debates between surprisingly young neoconservatives newly ensconced at Lincoln Center and nearly anyone who valued contemporary developments in music. The neocons redefined the ever suspect and controversial word “jazz” as a canonically fixed style within the parameters of the common practice conventions of the first half of the 20th century, one that also happened to icily match music marketers’ pigeonholing of “jazz” as an sonically identifiable “style.” Meanwhile, musicians who interpreted jazz tradition as continual reinvention and innovation, as attitude, not so surprisingly, sounded very different from their antecedents, which is also exactly what their predecessors had actually done within their own contexts.

The accelerating loss of direct interaction with the generation born before 1915 and the complementary emergence of commemorative neoconservatism accompanied an ongoing assimilation of established jazz techniques and procedures by academies. What had long been a predominantly do it yourself, vernacular, lower-working-middle class music was, for some, becoming an “educated” music, more accessible to those who could afford pricey tuition at the same time that the fundamentalist economics of Ronald Reagan’s Mourning in America were trickling down a decimation of music and art programs in public schools all over the country.

Learning was shifting away from the communal trial and error rough and tumble of the jam session toward the very different metalearning environment of the classroom. What’s easiest to codify and teach is what can already be notated in Euroclassical terms: the melody and diatonic harmony found on lead sheets that informs common practice conventions. And, in an academic context oriented to impart specific skills, successful mimicry generally tends to earn more recognition than the more awkward messiness of investigative experimentation.

This reconfigured ambition to regularize jazz behavior was also responding to a real gap that had opened in the late ‘50s, as a critical number of composer/leaders began to invent musical systems that radically stretched or departed from the cyclical harmonized chorus. Previously, a developing musician could interpret any individual player’s peculiarities and innovations in relation to the chorus structure.

However, the not so obvious specifics of Cecil Taylor’s, Sun Ra’s, or Ornette Coleman’s musical systems could only be learned directly from their composers, which complicated the transfer of musical information in a way that encouraged other musicians to bypass imitating sonic results for discovering and inventing their own personal systems, a proliferation of approaches that’s often been called “new thing,” “free jazz” or “avant garde.”

The AACM is still not famous enough for its systematic grassroots response to these opportunities. Joining Muhal Richard Abrams’ initiative, a group of Chicago musicians organized a community of mutual support of each other’s original music in 1965, imposing no limits upon what the styles, procedures or sounds of those musics might become, while pooling research and self organizing performances and learning opportunities for younger musicians.

Cultural patterns continue the way a living body does, with new cells (or contributors) taking over where older ones have left off. Younger artists arrive in an already transformed environment that eclipses the climates that informed their predecessors. For a young artist, music’s history doesn’t necessarily arrive in a linear, dated sequence. The entire “history” of music starts over from scratch with each participant. Everything is new. The “new” may be new, but the “old” can feel just as new and unfamiliar. People can only invent connections within their own still-up-for-grabs present circumstances.

Morris points out that methods for explaining improvisation rooted in conventional diatonic harmony are already “well defined and practical.” Nevertheless, an exclusive pedagogical focus on this single, however significant, compositional element, narrows toward an enforced contention that music constructed around other sonic parameters and considerations is neither relevant nor “correct.” He cites this as an attitude that “disregards some of the most important music in the history of the idiom.” And for Morris,

Where Klee delineated line’s multiple functions as point progression, planar definition, mathematical proportion, optical guide, energy projection and so forth; Morris steps outside of already crystallized styles, forms, genres and habits to look at a composer’s basic working materials in terms of approach, platform, melodic structure, pulse, interaction and form, while outlining the parameters and variations of each in detail. Not only does this backpedal compositional perspective into its least fettered and biased position, it also provides a palette of considerations that any listener might usefully adopt.

For me, however, the most profound element of this book is Morris’ adept articulation of the formal, ethical and political meanings of “free music.” Free, a word whose etymology traces back to “friend, lover, relative” and all the way to “love,” is a flexible, complicated, often confusing and ambiguous term. “Free to” isn’t the same as “free from” or “set free,” “free for,” “free up,” “free of charge” or the privatized “free to lose” of laissez faire, neoliberal economics.

A story I was originally told as a joke based on a sort of witty play on words turns out to have been related to an actual costly experience of this word, “free.” I recently came across an interview where Steve Lacy told of having been asked to substitute for Eric Dolphy in Ornette Coleman’s double quartet for a performance in Pennsylvania. The musicians arrived, already broke, to meet a near riot of patrons who refused to pay admission because of the advertising of a concert of “free jazz.” The performance was cancelled, and they drove back to New York without having played or having been paid.

As a musical directive, “free” usually indicates making it all up as one goes along, and in some instances may even mean that absolutely anything goes. “Anything goes” could mean that it doesn’t matter what one plays or that skill, care, listening, intention and connection don’t really matter. And in the listener’s marketplace, “free” can loom as an even more frightening and poisonous snake than “jazz” already seems: a space of chaos, disorder, incompetence, musical self indulgence and endlessly demanding boredom. None of this is what Morris means by “free music.”

Morris’ adoption of the unavoidably ambiguous term “free music” responds to a number of conditions. One is the seemingly terminal usurpation of the word “jazz” by both music marketers and primarily mimetic, retro or neoconservative musicians. Another might be the ambivalence many African American musicians have always shown toward the word, whether as insult or cultural straightjacket. The third is that what Morris calls free music “has now become a global phenomenon” practiced by many people far removed, both sonically and dispositionally, from African American experience and vision, while Morris reminds us that, regardless, “free music as it exists in the 21st century has its origins in African American music.”

Morris’s structural emphasis on methodology rather than style also implicitly addresses some of the stylistic biases occasionally enforced within some self defined free improvising communities, for example that “free” music must by necessity exclude “structure” or African and African American components such as metrical polyrhythm or blues sound. Within Morris’ formulation, a music as formally exacting and demanding as bebop, one technically pretty far from “free form,” such as Steve Coleman’s, would also be appropriately understood as free music. “Free” doesn’t necessarily mean having to organize around a lowest common denominator.

But even deeper than that, Morris’ articulations advocate an overall redefinition and realigned perception of just what and where music, any music, is for everybody, away from an excessive attachment to specific arrangements of sounds toward what those sounds participate in, toward the actions and values of the people playing with them, musicians and listeners alike.

Generally, people still aren’t used to thinking about musical sound that way, as something conditional and mobile in relation to intelligence and feeling rather than as monument or ornament, but given the commercially marginal, but continuing global spread of free music, it’s obvious that this voluntarily adopted idea is answering to something real going on, even if we still don’t know where that leads.

Free music asserts a political position, not necessarily one of electoral politics, power blocs or market forces, but one concerning the nature of human experience and relations among people. Something’s dangerous about this. The concept that musicians, not critics, not institutions, neither social conventions nor market forces should determine the criteria and content of their own work challenges not only the subjection of the artist, but, by extension, the oppression of any person, whether by fear, dogma, stubbornly closed preconceptions or any other strategy of coercion — which is why this can also often be at least economically perilous for musicians themselves and the people closest to them. The prospect of living rather than surviving, of people who consciously act out of their own volition, still poses complications and challenges for the evolving systems we live with.